Pravda gets a lot of attention from American conservatives when they publish pieces that are pro-freedom and capitalism, or criticizing the US march toward socialism. So, is Pravda turning into a great freedom loving publication? Not exactly, as The People’s Cube explains. (But they are still better than much of the US media.)

First, let’s just say that the hard copy version is not the same as its digital namesake. The original newspaper had been started by Lenin in 1912 and shut down by Yeltsin in 1991.

It was later restarted, changed several owners, including some foreign millionaires, and in 1997 became the official organ of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation.

At some point during these troubled times, the online edition split from the paper version and left to seek its own destiny. It is now shamelessly whoring for Internet traffic around the world, in an effort to maximize advertising revenues.

Even a cursory glance at the English and Russian digital editions (they have different content, tailored to their respective audiences) reveals a radically apolitical tabloid with a wild mix of real news, conspiracy theories, hoaxes, and contradictory opinions, topped with headlines whose main function is to attract search engine traffic. The other two foreign-language versions — Portuguese and Italian — probably follow the same pattern.

To use the Marxist vernacular of the erstwhile Party Organ, its glorious ideological monogamy has all but withered away, to be replaced by the historically inevitable capitalist promiscuity.

While the old Pravda’s homogenized, truth-free purism made it a respectable but neutered organ with the word “truth” in its title, the new “hands-off” approach allows sporadic diamonds of actual truth to shine through the dirt — a mind-boggling change from what I remember reading on its pages when I still lived in the USSR.

The post later delves into President Obama’s old pal Bill Ayers helped to bring the Soviet model into the American mainstream.

Perhaps the most ironic historical mind-bender of all is found in the United States, where history was much kinder to communist rebels. In the 1960s, the leader of the KGB-supported communist terrorist group Weather Underground, Bill Ayers, repeated Zinoviev’s idea of annihilating ten percent of the population — 25 million Americans — so as to advance the revolution in the United States.

Ayers summed up the ideology of his movement as follows: “Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents.” Unlike his Soviet role models, however, this communist didn’t have to leave the country or suffer any discomfort. Supported by the left-dominated academic establishment, Ayers became a prominent member of and later vice president for curriculum studies at the American Educational Research Association (AERA), exerting great influence over what is taught in America’s teacher-training colleges and, through indoctrination of a generation of teachers, its public schools.

According to this must-read article by Daren Jonescu, Ayers simply altered his strategy, replacing annihilation with re-education — or, rather, pre-education, thus reducing the number of potential targets. Since then, “the educational establishment has progressed so far that the KGB-supported communist revolutionaries, who received training and funds from Cuba’s DGI, have been welcomed, first as honored guests (in lieu of a prison sentence), and finally as leading members of the establishment.”

Be sure to read the whole thing, especially the last two paragraphs.