The Alexandria Tea Party
sponsored “The Survivors of Communism Summit” on September 10, 2013. The theme
was “100 Million Corpses in 100 Years – We Must Never Forget.” The packed
Lyceum in Old Town Alexandria was spellbound by the stories of the luminaries who
attended the event.
If you question the need
for such a summit, consider the romanticized version of communism taught in
American public schools and the recent fake petition drive to support Karl Marx
for President in 2016 as the candidate for the Democrat Party. It was shocking
to see how many people signed up after they were told that “President Obama had
endorsed him.”
http://conservativevideos.com/2013/09/obama-supporters-sign-fake-petition-supporting-karl-marx-president-2016/
Congressman Jim
Bridenstine of the First District in Oklahoma told the story of his first
encounter with communism as a Navy pilot in South Korea, when taken to the
demilitarized zone (DMZ) for a visit. He could see a beautiful city in the
North and wondered why people said North Koreans were starving to death. The
translator explained that the buildings were not real, they were built with no
windows and doors, no inhabitants, just a propaganda display.
Ambassador H. E. Gyorgy
Szapary of Hungary, spoke from his personal memory, recounting his experience
with communism and stressing humanity’s “Legacy of Freedom.”
The keynote speaker was
Dr. Lee Edwards, Chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation,
addressing the topic, “Is Communism Dead?” Dr. Edwards dedicated the Victims of
Communism Memorial in 2007 and launched the online Global Museum on Communism
in 2009.
Klara Sever, born in
former Czechoslovakia, described “The Real Life of Julia,” her life under
communism as a sculptor-restorer of baroque castles and editor and broadcaster
at Slovak Radio, while taking part in the underground broadcasting during the
Soviet occupation. The Life of Julia was the Democrat Party’s propaganda about a
false narrative of the fictitious American woman, Julia, who could not have
achieved anything without the help of government programs.
Klara said, “Realizing the
hopelessness of life” under the communist occupiers, her family left for
Austria and Paris where they obtained a visa for the U.S. The moment they
landed in New York City in March 1969, they were free.
The most moving testimony
of the evening came from Dr. Doan Viet Hoat, the recipient of the Victims of
Communism Memorial Foundation Freedom Award in 2000. A prisoner of conscience,
Dr. Doan Viet Hoat was arrested and imprisoned in 1976 without charges.
Released 12 years later, he was rearrested in 1990 and sentenced to twenty more
years of prison for publishing, writing, and editing ideas contrary to the
communist ideology in Vietnam. On appeal, his sentence was reduced to 15
years. Having spent 27 years in various
jails around Vietnam, Dr. Doan Viet Hoat
never stopped writing and disseminating his work to the outside world with the
help of other inmates who were sympathetic to the cause of freedom. Even in the
direst of circumstances in jails in northern Vietnam, he was able to get help
from hard-core criminals who made sure his work was distributed to the free
world. During his brief freedom between the two jailings, 1988-1990, Dr. Doan
Viet Hoat edited and published in Saigon an underground magazine, Freedom
Forum, “to promote and exchange opinions on human rights and democracy.”
Andrew Eiva, born in a
refugee camp in Bonn in 1948, recounted the life and stories of the Lithuanian
resistance. His parents escaped Lithuania and fled to the U.S. in 1949. His
grandfather, Gen. Kazimieras Ladyga, was not so lucky. He fought Russian
revolutionaries at the end of World War I. He was chief of staff of the
independent Lithuania from 1925-1927.
The revolutionaries eventually won, arrested him, sent him to Siberia
where he was tortured and died.
Specializing in guerrilla
warfare support while in the U.S. Army in Germany with Special Forces, Eiva
“dedicated himself to overthrowing the Soviet empire.”
“At the 1984 Republican
Convention, Eiva was responsible for having language inserted into the party
platform calling for support of the Afghan Mujahedin in their fight against the
Soviets.”
Jaroslaw (Slavko)
Martyniuk, the last speaker of the evening, a retired sociologist and self-described
“public intellectual,” was born in the Ukraine. His family fled communism at
the end of WWII and eventually moved to Chicago, Illinois. He described gulags
in Siberia, the Soviet concentration camps for hard labor that were not really
meant for re-education but for extermination.
The political dissidents
sent there who worked underground in the gold mines had a survival rate of 2-4
weeks. He described the horrific and constant cold, the back-breaking labor on
two rations of bread per day, the size of a person’s fist, and watery soup. The
bitter cold, the unsafe working conditions, and the hard labor killed so many
that the estimate of those buried in the permafrost is at least 3 million.
Nobody could keep accurate count, he said, because records were constantly
scrubbed. The worst of the re-education camps in the Arctic region was Kolyma,
the place with two seasons, “12 months of winter and summer.”
Fluent in Ukrainian,
French, Polish, Russian, and Belarusian, Martyniuk expressed his disappointment
that Americans know so very little about gulags and the mass killings that
occurred during the Bolshevik and Soviet purges. How could 25,000 Bolsheviks
control 25 million people? They confiscated their guns first.
The Summit brochure
mentioned the Laogai Museum which documents China’s prison camps, human rights
violations such as executions, harvesting of organs from executed prisoners,
the coercive “one child only” population control policy, internet censorship
and surveillance, and all other atrocities committed by China’s communist
regime.
Mentioned in the brochure is
the anti-communist protest of the Damas de Blanco. The opposition movement in
Cuba of the Ladies in White was formed two weeks after the arrest during the
Black Spring of 2003 of 75 individuals charged with “acts against the
independence or the territorial integrity of the state.” Ladies dressed in
white, relatives of those arrested, gather on Sundays at St. Rita’s Church in
Havana to pray for their husbands, brothers, uncles, cousins, nephews, and
fathers. After each mass, the Ladies in White walk from the church to a nearby
park. Each lady wears a lapel button with the photograph of the arrested loved
one. In 2005, Palm Sunday, the communist government sent the Federation of
Cuban Women to counter protest the Damas de Blanco. Occasionally insulted and
assaulted, they’ve been left alone since Cardinal Jaime Lucas Ortega y Alamino
intervened on their behalf in 2010 and are allowed to protest outside of his
church. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladies-in-White
Canada will honor the
victims of communism through a memorial which will be built near Parliament
Hill. The group behind the project, Tribute to Liberty, will receive up to $1.5
million from the Canadian government to build a memorial on the lawn between
the Library and Archives Building and the Supreme Court by 2014. http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2013/08/23/poi-cp-memorial-victims-communism.html
I stand with the millions
of victims of communism, including my Dad, who disagreed with the communist
party Marxist ideology and protested the confiscation of their homes, land,
guns, personal possessions, and the loss of their God-given freedom. The
victims objected to the lack of food, heat, water, proper medical care,
medications, and a decent treatment as human beings.
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