The communist symbols of tyranny and mass murder were proudly on display at a Friday night football game last week, and no, this didn’t happen in one of those progressive outposts like San Francisco or Cambridge, Mass. To the contrary. The hammer and sickle of the communist Russian revolution were proudly strutting their stuff in a super sleepy suburban backwater nestled next to the Gettysburg Civil War National Park.
The New Oxford High School Marching Band entertained the home crowd during halftime by offering up a medley of music produced under the banner of St. Petersburg 1917, performed with the flair and flounce of military fatigues, red flags, and giant hammers and sickles. The adult educators in this hairy little hamlet apparently thought how sweet it would be to have the kids celebrate a quaint historical event from the 20th century, hailing as heroic a movement that ultimately murdered millions of people.
And even after all the parental complaints, the dosey dork who serves as the Superintendent of the Conewago School District, still can’t see what all the hubbub is about.
Rebecca Harbaugh, the superintendent for the Conewago Valley School District, told Fox News that the band’s performance was “not an endorsement of communism at all.”
“It’s a representation of the time period in history called St. Petersburg 1917,” she said. “If anything is being celebrated it’s the music,” she said. “It is what it is. I understand people look at something and choose how to interpret that and I’m just very sorry that it wasn’t looked at as just a history lesson.”
I think this is a by-product of the revisionist history our schools are teaching these days, where all our former enemies have become the good guys and we have become the bad guys. Ms. Harbaugh could do with a meeting with a few survivors of the Soviet gulags for a history lesson. Or maybe someone just needs to send her a copy of one of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s works to read (i.e. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Gulag Archipelago, etc).
Yes, our educators need a remedial education.