Op-ed views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author.

In the mid to late 1800’s a new philosophy swept through European Universities on its way to becoming popular on the Ivy League campuses of America. The philosophy was Frederich Hegel’s “Ideal State” theory. Karl Marx utilized Hegel’s philosophy as the foundation of The Communist Manifesto and Das Capital. On those philosophical underpinnings were formed the Communism of the Bolsheviks, the Socialism of Benito Mussolini and the Fascism of Adolf Hitler. Ideal State theory demands the sacrifice of individual rights that are then absorbed into the higher rights of the “Ideal State.”

In America, our own 28th president, Woodrow Wilson, was a devotee of the philosophy and used it as the pattern for his creation of our Administrative State. During the 1920’s, America’s intelligentsia were fascinated by two events: the Russian Revolution of the Bolsheviks and the consolidation of power in Italy, under Benito Mussolini. The enthusiasm in America led to the creation of periodicals such as the Nation and the New Republic. Acclaimed writers like Lincoln Steffens were traveling to Russia and returning to write things such as “I have been over to the future, and it works…I would like to spend the evening of my life watching the morning of the new world.” New York Times writer Walter Duranty wrote glowing reviews of the Russian Revolution, while Benito Mussolini graced the cover of Time Magazine.

On college campuses, like Columbia University, professors such as George Counts started denouncing the ideals of a free enterprise system in favor of new models of collectivism to create a new society. This enthusiasm for the “Ideal States” of Russia, Italy and Germany continued on college campuses and among the intelligentsia through the 1930’s, until professors, writers and artists like themselves started disappearing all over Europe, never to be seen or heard from again.  And another population began disappearing in Germany: the Jews were being herded by the millions into concentration camps to be butchered. The U.S. intelligentsia could not have been more wrong about whom to admire.

During World War II, the United States suffered 500,622 casualties to right what was wrong with Ideal State socialism – in Europe alone.

The survivors of Germany’s concentration camps and exiles of Socialist Russia’s “Anti-Cosmopolitan campaign,” (a policy to exile all the Jews out of Russia) joined with indigenous Jews already living in Palestine, to form the state of Israel in 1948, in hopes of finding peace. Instead, they had to fight and survive another war, the Arab-Israeli War of 1948-1949.

After this victory of Israel in its infancy, hundreds of thousands of Jews were exiled from their homes in surrounding Arab states and had literally nowhere else to go than Israel, where they too began to live. Since that time, the Jews, who did not perish, but were survivors and exiles of Europe’s “Ideal States” have been surrounded by the Middle East’s “Ideal Faith.”

The Ideal States of Europe and the Ideal Faith of Islam have some things in common.

In an Ideal State, a subject has to choose which is the first thing one serves, one’s faith or the state. The Jews in Germany were hated because they held God, and God’s presence on earth in the form of His law, above the Ideal State of Germany and the Fuhrer. The Jews refused to abandon God in order to be Nazi Party members, so they were imprisoned and butchered. Under Socialism, the state is god. Socialist States, like that of Bolshevik Russia, do not allow dissensions of thought or faith. Socialist states are always at war with those who do not sacrifice their faith to the State.

Under the Ideal Faith of Islam there are two realms in this world, “dar al Islam,” the realm of peace or “dar al Harb,” the realm of war. If you do not sacrifice your faith for Islam, Islam is “at war” with you, until you convert or die. Any dissension in thought or act from the ideal faith is wrong and punishable with death. This is why we hear Islamic extremists chant “death to Israel” and why extremist Muslim leaders promise to “rid the world of Israel.”

In America, our Constitution ordains that individual rights are supreme over the state or any single faith: therefore, we have the right to think, to speak, to pray, and to associate as we want. Therefore, the state cannot demand our faith or obedience.

Yet, since the 1960’s, socialism has become fashionable on college campuses again: many universities that were enamored of socialism in the 1930’s have fallen in love with it all over again! And university professors denounce our founding American principles in favor of an ideal state…of socialism.  And there are professors today, in spite of every historical fact that pleads the contrary, demand that Israel is an oppressor of Arabs?

The professorial class in our country has proven itself unwise: socialism has proven it is a tyrannical, lethal system of governance, and it always is. Wrong again, professors, Israel is not the oppressor, they are the oppressed and have been for centuries: they are persecuted and butchered for adoring God above the state and will not sacrifice their faith. And again, professors – America’s founding principles based on individual rights, not rights of the state, hold the best hope for peace, as always.

I profess America to be wrong too: Americans employ people to teach, who never learn.

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Richard Lyons

Richard C. Lyons, author of The DNA of Democracy: Volume I and Shadows of the Acropolis: Volume II is a third generation printer, whose early career centered on religious and special education publishing. Lyons has since engaged in literary pursuits as a poet, essayist, screenwriter and indie publisher.

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