Visitors to the Victims of Communism Museum are learning about systems that are propped up by lies and the brave individuals who have told the truth.
Looming large on a gallery wall of the Victims of Communism Museum in Washington, D.C. — which this June marks its first anniversary — is this striking quote from Czech dissident Václav Havel: “If the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living the truth.”
The lie is that communism is merely an academic theory about socialist economics that is innocent of the various failed national experiments carried out in its name. Communism awaits, so it goes, its genuine achievement and complete vindication.
The truth is that communism is the deadliest ideology the world has ever seen. Since Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, nearly 40 nations have suffered under communist rule. Marx’s “theory” of communist revolution meant Lenin’s Red Terror and Stalin’s Gulags, as well as Mao’s forced famine and Pol Pot’s Killing Fields. All told, over 100 million people — more than died because of the evils of the transatlantic slave trade or all the Nazi and fascist war crimes during World War II — have been killed at the hands of communist dictators. Some theory, some experiment.
And this does not include those untold millions who lived only to die under communist totalitarianism — oppressed and voiceless, often starving and impoverished, and imprisoned in body, if not always in mind and spirit. Today, over 30 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, one in five people around the world still lives under communist regimes. In Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, North Korea, and China, more than 1.5 billion souls find themselves behind the modern-day Iron Curtains of closed states.
The oppression of the Chinese Communist Party is abundantly evident right now in their treatment of the Uyghur people, an ethnic religious minority native to northwest China. Nur Abdureshid, like millions of other Uyghurs, faced the horrifying realization that her own family had fallen victim to the CCP’s crimes when she called home one day, as she did every day, but there was no answer. Years later, following the release of the Xinjiang Police Files by the Victims of Communism Museum, Nur finally received confirmed documentation about the fates of her mother, father, and two brothers who have been arbitrarily imprisoned in camps for the past five and a half years. Watch Nur tell her story here.
Since opening, the Victims of Communism Museum has welcomed guests of all ages from around the world to learn the truth about this totalitarian ideology. Many have been deeply connected to the events, ideas, and heroes remembered inside its galleries. Over the last year, the Victims of Communism Museum hosted the first lady of Ukraine and held its annual Captive Nations Summit and National Seminar for Middle and High School Educators. A temporary exhibit on the Tiananmen Square Massacre was the only one of its kind in the world; it was followed by the Cuban Communist Prison exhibit and now a special exhibit about Havel. The kickoff event for the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party was at the museum, as was the pre-premiere movie screening of The Pilecki Report. In numerous panels and conferences, experts have shared ideas, asked and answered important questions, and remembered the victims of the most brutal ideology known to mankind. (READ MORE: The Day of Infamy: Remembering the Tiananmen Square Massacre)
Museums keep memories alive and entreat us not to repeat the mistakes of the past. They are physical reminders of humanity’s sins as well as its triumphs. The Victims of Communism Museum memorializes the victims and condemns those who brought such death and despair upon the world. It seeks to educate through teaching history. It also works to remember those who opposed and ultimately defeated communism in many countries around the world. It educates this and future generations to live not by lies.
As Václav Havel foretold, the collapse of communism in Europe was led by those brave enough to live truthfully, regardless of the consequences. Havel endured imprisonment on four separate occasions and brutal torture on his path toward the truth, but he did not back down, eventually leading his country into a new democratic era through the overthrow of Czechoslovakia’s communist regime in the Velvet Revolution of 1989. In 1993, Prisoner No. 80-9658 became the newly formed Czech Republic’s first president.
Communism has a dark past and maintains an expanding presence. It remains the responsibility of the free world to live the truth, support the dissidents, and push back against communism’s dehumanizing oppression. Visit the Victims of Communism Museum to learn the real history of the past and the stories of those like Havel who rejected the lies of communism, as well as those who continue the fight for freedom around the world today.
Elizabeth Edwards Spalding, PhD, is Senior Fellow at the Pepperdine University School of Public Policy, Chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, and a frequent speaker and writer on the American presidency, the Cold War, and communism.
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