Teaching the virtues of resistance to communism

Indeed, communism is the deadliest ideology, by far, that has ever plagued the planet. Its practitioners have killed more than 100 million people worldwide through unproved war, mass executions, intentional famines, and other diabolical methods. Those numbers come not from some right-wing outfit but from The Black Book of Communism, co-authored by six leftist French intellectuals and published by Harvard University Press in 1999.

Soviet Union founder Vladimir Lenin oversaw the deaths of between 3 million and 5 million people. Josef Stalin executed, often by torture, or otherwise deliberately caused the deaths of up to 20 million. (Between 3.3 million and 7.5 million of them were Ukrainians, by the way, through famines caused not by “acts of God” but by intentional confiscation of grain and other government policies.) Leading historians blame China’s Mao Zedong for up to 77 million deaths. The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia killed 2 million. Cuba, the North Vietnamese, the Eastern-bloc nations under the Soviet umbrella, and others killed hundreds of thousands more.

Again, most of this was by design. Karl Marx himself called for “a revolution that cares as little about the human lives it destroys as an earthquake cares about the houses it ravages.” He and Friedrich Engels wrote that “the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified, and concentrated [only through] revolutionary terror.”

Lenin, Stalin, and their minions took Marx to heart. As noted by Winston Groom in The Allies, the Bolsheviks put to death untold numbers in “a carnival of perversion so breathtaking as to be unbelievable, except for the many files that recorded it. Condemned men, women, and children were incinerated in furnaces or flayed alive, their skin made into clothing. … Another [mode of execution] was to seal naked prisoners into barrels studded with inward-pointing nails that would then be rolled around for sport until the victims died from shock or loss of blood.” And so horrifically on.

Despite all this, leading American cultural institutions (academia, the establishment media, the entertainment industry) have spent a full century downplaying the evils of communism, as if it is a noble dream that was never practiced correctly, rather than a conception that was nightmarish from the start. As historian Robert Conquest lamented in the 1993 Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities, with intentional understatement, “some people in the West were simply not up to facing the reality of the Soviet past.”

It is because so many Western cultural “leaders” refuse to face that reality that the Victims of Communism Museum, located at McPherson Square in Washington, D.C., is necessary. It comes 15 years and one day after its foundation (created by an act of Congress) unveiled the Victims of Communism Memorial statue about a mile away. The point of both is not merely to mourn the dead, but to celebrate the heroes who stood tall against the communist scourge.

As foundation co-founder Lee Edwards, long a scholar at the Heritage Foundation, said then, the idea is to honor real leaders: “People like Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa, Harry Truman, Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, Solzhenitsyn: The list can go on and on. … [They knew that] you must stand up to tyranny with purpose and with conviction and with dispatch.”

In that way, Edwards now says, the museum will “serve as both a memorial to those who died from [communism] and a beacon of hope for those who resist it.”

The resistance and the hope are the touchstones. May this new museum ever keep both alive.