Back in those quaint days when KGB-supported communist subversives planning to overthrow a republic had to meet in secret to discuss their operations, William Ayers and his chums reportedly opined that during the post-revolutionary period of normalization, approximately twenty-five million Americans (ten percent) would have to be executed. Today, however, I have good news: that number may now be reassessed at as low as ten million, which, when one factors in the increase in the overall American population since the original estimate was made, suggests as much as a seventy percent savings in the government’s stockpile of ammunition. There’s a spending reduction we can all applaud.

To refresh your memory, Mr. Ayers – now Dr. Ayers, of course – while a leader of the youth outreach program known as the Weather Underground, was asked by one of his cohorts, FBI informant Larry Grathwohl, about the contingencies of power should the group actually succeed in its revolutionary activities. Specifically, Grathwohl asked what might be done with that minority of the adult population that would continue to resist communism even after it had been so eloquently justified through the violent seizure of power.

The young Renaissance man – author of the brilliantly-reasoned dope fantasy Prairie Fire, and later of some prominent works on teaching social justice to toddlers, a comic book, and one Harvard Law graduate’s autobiography – deigned to answer Grathwohl’s question earnestly. “For those who continue to cling to their Bibles and their guns,” he said – oh, wait a minute, that was the Harvard Law graduate. What actually happened, according to Grathwohl, was this:

They also believed that their immediate responsibility would be to protect against what they called the counter-revolution, and they felt that this counter-revolution could best be guarded against by creating and establishing re-education centers in the southwest, where we would take all the people who needed to be re-educated into the new way of thinking….

I asked, “Well what is going to happen to those people that we can’t re-educate, that are diehard capitalists?” And the reply was that they’d have to be eliminated; and when I pursued this further they estimated that they would have to eliminate twenty-five million people in these re-education centers – and when I say “eliminate,” I mean kill; twenty-five million people…. And they were dead serious.

Well* of course* they were serious. They were young, naive, and idealistic. Communist revolutionaries must always eliminate people whose constitutions reject re-education. What else is one to do with them? After all, communists have no desire to play along with some multiparty democratic masquerade; theirs is not one view among many. Communism, to have any hope of surviving – given its inability to feed people – must become one contiguous plant, growing from firm roots. Needless to say, when one is trying to enforce universal moral conformity within a society, alternative voices must not be permitted. One dissenter makes for a fun afternoon’s hunting; twenty-five million, however, are a counter-revolutionary force. Elimination is unavoidable.

Now that those halcyon days of incognito living, clumsy bomb-making ventures, training junkets to Cuba and orgies in the back of a van have been left behind, a man such as Dr. Ayers is free to host campaign events for future presidents, to be named Chicago’s Citizen of the Year, and to be a professor of education at a distinguished university. And one does not grow up from idealistic advocate of mass extermination to respected professor – declared a “model scholar” by his colleagues – without having an epiphany or two.

Look again at Grathwohl’s account of that Weather Underground board meeting. For all the immediate appeal of wiping out the NRA membership or climate deniers, that exciting talk about “eliminating” millions of American citizens tends to obscure the Weatherpersons’ more fundamentally interesting idea, namely the establishment of re-education centers. Mass murder is quick and simple; mass indoctrination slow and complex. It is easy to see why the latter lacks the glamor of the former, and why both the prospective executioners and their intended victims are likely to become mesmerized by words like “eliminate” and “kill,” rather than focusing on the hundreds of millions who will not have to be killed, because they have been successfully re-educated.

So let’s play “Ginger or Mary Ann” for a moment, and ask ourselves whether, in the course of what the SDS radicals called “fundamentally transforming America” – oops, that was the Harvard Law graduate again – it is ultimately better to murder those capitalists who refuse to give up their property, Mao-style, or to indoctrinate them so effectively that they will give it up without resistance. Immediately, we see that these options are not purely contradictory. They are merely thesis and antithesis. All that is needed is a synthesis to resolve the apparent contradiction.

Since the goals of these two courses of action are essentially the same – namely, the eradication of private property and the universal acceptance of the governing authority’s right to control and distribute all material resources (including human resources) as it sees fit – it is clear that the mass killings are necessary merely in order to ensure universal acceptance by eliminating the failures of the re-education system.

At once, Ayers’ synthesizing epiphany arises. The traditional, time-honored pattern of leftist revolution – overthrow the regime, establish a re-education program, kill the bitter clingers – is a recipe for trouble and frustration. Much preferable would be a reordering of events to reduce the uncertainties of political overthrow and the wasteful inconveniences of mass murder. Re-educate first – “pre-educate,” if you will. Done well, this makes overthrow unnecessary, as the majority of the population will eventually hand you the reins of power when you ask for them; when your “social justice” rhetoric seems as American as apple pie, you will know the population is baked to progressive perfection.

Thus, the new formula: establish re-education centers first; wait until they have successfully reduced the number of potential “diehard capitalists”; then simply ask the re-educated to appoint and protect the communist rulers of their own accord, when they are all-too-willing to comply.

Did William Ayers choose to become a professor of education because he thinks children are so cute? Because he wants to get America’s standards in core subjects back up to Asian levels? Because he hopes to keep America at the forefront of the modern global economy? Because he hopes to revive the study of the classics in America’s schools?

No; he is a professor of education – a teacher of teachers – because with maturity he realized, like the greatest of all progressive educators, John Dewey, that well begun is half done, i.e., that Occupy Kindergarten is the surest path to Occupy Washington.

And this brings us back to those twenty-five million diehard capitalists. The Weather Underground leadership made its calculations in the early 1970s. Three complete K-12 generations of progressive public schooling have passed 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.

Now think hard, and honestly. Do you believe there are twenty-five million adults left in the United States today who are truly, intransigently committed to individual liberty on principle? And do not answer by citing voter turnout for Mitt Romney; people who want lower taxes, who believe the economy is handled better by Republicans, who disapprove of abortion or gay marriage, or who worry about over-regulation, all voted for Romney – but none of those views indicate a person who necessarily rejects the entire progressive worldview, let alone one who would actually die for something as antiquated and petty as individual freedom.

Let us look at it another way: the vast majority of those Romney voters have willingly sent their children to the Dewey-Ayers pre-education centers for years. These people tell themselves the system just needs better teacher training, more school prayer, or a tougher stance on bad behavior.

That “twenty-five million” figure is only really disturbing to people who suspect that they would be a part of it – that Bill Ayers, and the guys from his neighborhood, want to kill them.

These people should be happy to welcome reforms to the Marxist model that reduce the number of necessary victims. If I am correct, and public education has by now secured a much higher percentage of the U.S. population as the kind of well-adjusted, ultimately accommodating worker-units the revolution requires, then in all likelihood there are no more than, say, ten million American adults who truly care enough about life, liberty, or property to resist whatever confiscations, restrictions, or redistributions are judged appropriate by the most “forward”-looking Chicago/Washington experts and planners.

Those who continue to live on the Russian Roulette principle with regard to progressives and their recent proposals – “oh come on, surely they don’t mean it literally” – can take heart: your odds of survival are getting better, thanks to the effective strategy of pre-education camps. Progressives are only likely to have to eliminate one thirtieth of the population, rather than the one tenth they had previously thought.

So all you “conservatives”: keep your children in the public schools, by all means. It’s the least you can do to repay a system that, in exchange for your children’s souls, may deem it fit to spare your bodies.

At a pep rally back in the early days, Ayers’ comrade Jerry Rubin, of Youth International, told a group of students that “The first part of the Yippie program is to kill your parents. And I mean that quite literally, because until you’re ready to kill your parents, you’re not ready to change this country.”

Naturally, he meant it “quite literally” for everyone but himself. Be that as it may, the sentiment was quite progressive – indeed, literal or not, it sums up the essence of progressive social psychology in one pithy phrase. Being “ready to kill your parents” means hating the past, rejecting historical continuity, forsaking emotional attachments to pre-revolutionary ideas and habits, and boldly asserting your discovery of the ultimate answer, which is that all human history prior to us, “the ones we’ve been waiting for,” has been one big, racist, sexist, oppressive lie that deserves to be crushed, shot, torn apart, and mocked as it dies.

That sentiment is “literally” the primary thrust and intent of the public education establishment which has finally dismantled Western morality and insinuated itself into the highest reaches of Western politics. A society truly “ready to kill its parents” will no longer need to kill very many of them.

Thus it is that public education, the gift that keeps on giving, has helped to save or create fifteen million rounds of ammunition which, in spite of previous estimates, may no longer need to be used.

(This article originally appeared at American Thinker.)