UH Young Communist Group Causing A Stir With Recruitment Flier On Campus

HOUSTON, TX — A piece of paper pinned to a bulletin board on the campus at the University of Houston has invigorated one group of people while completely aggravating another. The flier is a recruiting tool to gain more membership for the school’s Young Communist League (YCL), and their aim is to counter what they call “Trump’s fascist regime” and “terrorist hate groups.”

The Communist group was one of the first organizations last week to urge the Houston City Council to remove the “Spirit of Confederacy” monument at Sam Houston Park. Last Saturday hundreds of people marched at the park in favor of the order. The protest was led by Houston’s Black Lives Matter.

The flier posted on campus says “Fascists are getting” organized, “Are You?” However, many of the opening comments posted on social media poke fun of the spell check gaffe in which the word was spelled “oragnized.”

The verbiage of the flier casts a wide net over President Donald Trump and his supporters, calling them Nazis, terrorists and racists, with no basis of their assumption, and it goes on to say people of “all ethnic backgrounds” needs to have a safe space on campus.

The flier, which comes equipped with Russia’s infamous sickle and hammer symbol, states: “We must stand united against Trump’s fascist regime and its Nazi henchmen, affirming that our university is a safe place for people of all ethnic backgrounds and is not safe for racist, terrorist hate groups.”

A UH history student named Michael Leone is the chairman of YCL. According to the group’s Facebook page, Leone will attend the World Festival of Youth and Students this October in Sochi, Russia.

Fifty years ago it would seem far-fetched to have Nazis against Communists in the United States, considering the Americans and Communists worked together to eliminate Nazi Germany in World War II, and then subsequently the United States endured the long-time Cold War with a Communist Russia and its Soviet states, and the Eastern Block of Europe, and America has continued to stand at odds with other Communist regimes like China, Cuba, North Korea and various other places around the world.

Some of the comments on social media include, but aren’t limited to, the following:

• “I fled socialist Venezuela to deal with shit like this in the US /S
• I didn't leave everything behind and spend 5 years with a visa and 5 more years with a green card to deal with this idiocracy.”
• “I guess we're just going to ignore the giant elephant in the room that is Antifa and all the large amount of assaults on citizens and police officers over the past 8 or 9 months?”
• “if you wanna throw out numbers, millions of more people have died under communism that's fascism.”
• “This group of alarmists make it seem like bigots and terrorists are at people's doorstep and actively trying to take over or dismanlte the constitution. Any UH students care to weigh in? Isn't the campus already "safe" for people of different cultures? If they really want to preserve democracy, they should do something about the Texas legislators. I really hope no one is to shook enough to join this group.”

More comments for and against YCL can be found here — beware of vulgar language.

Caption: Young radicals carry flags of the National Bolshevik party as they march during a demonstration in Moscow in 2005. About 1,000 young radicals carrying red flags with the communist hammer and sickle marched through central Moscow in an anti-capitalist protest Saturday under the eyes of an approximately equal number of riot police officers.

AP Photo/Misha Japaridze