In the state I teach in, our textbooks make communism out as the greatest failure and evil in the world. A token “6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust” is given, but the history of most of the world goes into more detail about how many millions the alleged idiocy of Mao or the apparent power hungry brutality of Stalin caused. Which is really telling because they take every opportunity to mention when communism allegedly did something bad or failed in a region, but never go into as much depth or detail about any other similar events in history. It’s only junior high level geography, but the main focus of all the world history seems to be on how bad socialism is. Every other economic system, war, and historical event is briefly covered in a whitewashed way, but socialism and communism are repeatedly paraded around as evil. This is all the world history they’ll get until high school, which will likely have a similar focus.

I’ve noticed that from when I was in school to now, a decade later, that they’ve really pushed a “communists were the worse evil all along” narrative. My students, who know very little about the world, know to hate and fear Russia, China, and North Korea, but have never heard of fascism and barely know about Nazis except as edgy jokes.