Last week I suggested the presence of socialist-communist attitudes and practices in our daily lives. Such a statement ought to be supported by examples. The reason native-born Americans would not recognize them, while people of my ilk do, is that growing up in Hungary we had no choice in the matter. At school, we were required year after year to be trained in Marxism-Leninism. It was considered everyone's major, taking precedence over one's real major - in my case, piano.

Americans, people of exceptional goodwill, have been persuaded that Marxist-Leninist ideas and practices are congruous with basic American principles and do, in fact, fulfill the Founders' intentions. Even a cursory comparison of the reality of socialist-communist societies with that of America ought to convince anyone that such notions are preposterous. And now the examples.

Christmas is an appropriate beginning because it is the season, and because those who labor to eliminate it bit by bit cite the U.S. Constitution as their basis. While that excuse crumbles the minute one actually reads the Constitution, or the intent of the Founding Fathers, history teaches us that Marx, Lenin, Hitler and Stalin all endeavored to do away with tradition, especially the Christian kind. Significantly, those who battle Christmas take no issue with Kwanzaa, Hanukkah or Ramadan.

Fascism is a word we use when we mean Naziism. During the 1930s, it was Stalin who instructed communists around the world to do so. Since Hitler's party was called "National Socialist German Workers' Party," simply another version of socialism, the association proved increasingly inconvenient.

Capitalism is how too many of us describe our economy. Capitalism was invented and defined by Karl Marx. It requires a rigid class society in which the proletariat owns nothing, now or ever. America never had such a system. Ours is a free-market society with unlimited opportunity. By calling it "capitalist," it gets infused with all negative connotations of the word.

Reactionary and Progressive have long been the classic communist designations of enemies and friends of the ideology.

Politically correct is a term forged by Lenin (Hitler preferred the version "socially correct"), extensively used in the works of Makarenko, Lenin's education guru.

Preference Quotas were introduced in Hungary within weeks of the communist takeover, prescribing specific percentages of workers and farmers, as the previously disadvantaged. Thus origin, as opposed to ability, determined university or job placement, leading to increasing inefficiency. Affirmative Action gradually turned into a new name for that old practice.

Working Americans is successor to "workers," as in people who work - distinct from those who don't. This Marxist-Leninist division of society implies that those who don't work had acquired their possessions illegitimately. Communists apply this to class, Nazis applied it mostly to the Jews. Since in America everyone works, the designation is pointless, except to create artificial divisions.

Sensitivity Training is the precise equivalent of engaging in public self-criticism and submitting to party education, the standard communist punishment meted out to those who had strayed outside the party line.

Hate crime and hate speech are pseudonyms for political crime - far more vigorously pursued in any totalitarian state than ordinary crime. Until recently, the concept of political crime would have been unthinkable in America.

Native American or visually challenged are examples of constantly changing designations, serving a number of purposes. They instill the habit of not calling things what they are, keeping people off balance, and increasing thought control all the time. "Native American" also downgrades most who live here, whereas "undocumented immigrant" upgrades illegal aliens. In the Soviet realm, one simply scoured the official party newspaper to find out what things needed to be called that day or week.

The Month of This, That and the Other - these annual celebrations began with the "Month of Soviet-Hungarian Friendship" that gave the Russians the framework to guarantee trips abroad and engagements to their lesser artists.

Monday Holidays. A case can be made for long weekends and efficiency at industrial plants, but moving historically significant celebrations to Monday began in the Soviet realm to separate the rest day from its reason, replacing historic tradition with gray uniformity.

There is more, of course, but this should suffice to persuade Americans that so much of what is said and done with good intentions comes, in fact, from a most detestable source. Everything in socialist-communist thought and practice - legal, moral, economic - is the opposite of the principles upon which America was founded and with which Americans have succeeded.

There is no way the opposite of "good" can also be good.