Survivors of Communism Speak at George Mason University

Speakers Nahm Lam, Slavko Martyniuk, and
Agustin Blazquez

“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”  - Winston Churchill

The Ronald Reagan lecture series introduced three distinguished speakers, two survivors of communism from Cuba and Ukraine, and the American child of a Vietnamese family who fled communism, to the student body at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, on October 3, 2016 with the idea to warn the audience about the dangers of socialism and communism. The event was hosted by the College Republicans of which less than five were present. Four more GMU students attended “out of curiosity” and the rest of the audience was composed of older adults from the local community.

I could guess the audience would be sparse as soon as I saw the statue of George Mason in front of the Johnson Center. He was bedecked in a carnival mask, green ribbons tied in bows around his ankles, green and yellow balloons in his hands, and various signs were attached to his body announcing a job fair. The center was full of students milling about, drinking coffee, having dinner, and chatting enthusiastically as any young person would.

The basement was quiet; a small sign in front of the theater announced the topic, “Is Socialism the Answer for America?” Apparently the students had better things to do that day or already know from their vast life experience that socialism is good for America because it sounds so socially just in theory. Not one professor, not even a history professor, showed up for the event which was advertised in advance and had to be approved by the administration.

The first at the microphone was Agustin Blazquez, born and raised in Cuba, having left Cuba in his twenties, coming to the U.S. in 1967. He produced over 200 films and documentaries. He had escaped with his family after the fall of Battista and the rise of Fidel Castro.

Agustin lived through the step by step “fundamental transformation” of Cuba from capitalism to socialism, eventually to a totalitarian communist government. After Castro took over Cuba in 1959, even though warnings were coming from China and the Soviet Union, Cubans chose to believe that nothing bad would happen because someone else was in the control and he was implementing socialism correctly. But the techniques of repression and population control were exactly the same everywhere – they used the same manual of coercion.

What emerged was a two-class system, the powerful elites and those supporting them. The equality they promised resulted in an equality of poverty and misery for which they paid a heavy price. Poor centralized planning, low salaries, low morale, no work ethic, and low production eventually cause the economy to collapse. The working class (proletariat) spent their days hoping to get food while the elites got everything they wanted and fattened their bank accounts. Rationing of food and confiscation of private property resulted in more poverty. The workers were crammed in low-income, hastily build apartments while the elites occupied the best houses. Regulations and executive orders left most of the people destitute, at the whims of the socialist government agitators. Rationing of everything was forced on the masses, electricity, water, heat, food, clothing, medicines, medical care, and everything else like toilet paper.

Agustin brought out a roll of toilet paper, a rare commodity under the central planning of socialism/communism. I still have a few strips of toilet paper I brought with me from Romania in 1985 as show and tell to my college students. The paper is pink and has splinters in it. Imagine having to use splinters on your behind! Yet we felt lucky to have it because we were so deprived!

“Progressives kept the people preoccupied with survival from one day to the next, keeping them busy, with no energy to protest against the government,” said Agustine. No freedom of association was allowed, no freedom of speech, guns were confiscated, thus making it impossible to remove Marxists from power.

A powerful military and secret police protected the elites from the people, but the people were told that they were there to protect the people from “evil” capitalism, the enemy of Marxism, a bold face lie.

Venezuela is a more recent example of the disastrous socialist policies of Hugo Chavez. An oil rich country, Venezuela has now devolved into such a poor country that people must stand hours in line each day in order to survive. The military and the police were brought in to distribute food and to keep violence at bay. The oil revenues continue to pour in but they line up the pockets of the elites in control. The bamboozled low information working class keeps voting for these lying socialists thus perpetuating their own poverty.

Venezuelans tried to revolt but, without guns to defend themselves, they were repressed back into submission by the powerful police and the military.

“Cubans always blamed their poverty on the U.S. embargo but there never was any embargo against Venezuela,” argued Agustin.

There are no human rights under communism. The government dictates where you can live, where you can work, where you can move, where you can study, what you can study, what you eat, and the meager salary you earn for the rest of your life. “Communists paint a rosy picture of free education, free college, and free medical care in order to gain votes.”

Nobody trusts anybody, not even your own family. Agustin was afraid to even say good bye to his family members for fear of being reported that he was planning to escape. “The people of today in Cuba are different from me, they have learned to lie and steal to survive, and they have no work ethic.” That is why, when they come to the U.S. now, they commit crimes because that is what they are used to doing in Cuba in order to survive, said Agustin.

Agustin was surprised how entrenched Marxism is now in our capitalist society, thanks to the openly Marxist main stream media, Hollywood, and academia. Colleges are no longer places to debate the free flow of ideas, they are places of brainwashing and indoctrination where snow-flakes Marxist students need their “safe spaces” to protect them from the “micro-aggression” of rational thoughts of non-Marxist students.

“Marxism is the enemy of America,” said Agustin. “These Marxists are subverting your American way of thinking, the very foundation of this country.” They will eventually erase all your freedoms, real or imagined, with the help of Hollywood, leading to an inescapable oppression.

The benign-sounding words, “white privilege, social justice, equality, environmental justice, racial justice,” are a ruse that will lead to the same disastrous result. Liberals no longer believe in freedom, they believe in government control usher in the same Marxist totalitarian rule. They are not progressives, they want to regress society to a failed and foreign ideology.

The gradual control of everyday life was incremental and slow. Long-standing problems could suddenly only be solved by government intervention; and the solution was always emotionally presented, preventing people from actually thinking clearly and rationally and realizing that the solution would never work. Those who resisted, were treated with scare tactics, disappearance, and jail time.

 “You don’t want these people to hack into your phone, why do you want to let these people hack into your life,” concluded Agustin. “Send them to the trash bin of history this November.”

Jaroslaw (Slavko) Martyniuk of Ukraine came to the U.S. when his family made a narrow escape from communism at the end of World War II, legally immigrating to Chicago. A retired energy economist and sociologist, Martyniuk has conducted “intelligence work and undercover public opinion polling with visitors from the Soviet Union on behalf of Radio Liberty.”

His extended family did not fare so well, they were sent to gulags, “the largest killing machine in history,” where most perished from torture, malnutrition, exposure, and overwork behind barbed wire. Martyniuk described the 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 gulags were the “the ultimate legacy of the communist experiment.” The worst of the re-education camps in the Arctic region was Kolyma, the place with two seasons, “12 months of winter and summer,” the Arctic death camps which served as a model for Hitler’s concentration camps.

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.

Martyniuk explained that socialist ideas continue to live on in America because:

-          “institutions of higher learning promote socialist thinking”

-          “communism has never been fully discredited,”

-          “revisionist historians avoid black deeds of communism,”

-          Marxist professors continue to say that “the idea was noble”

Martyniuk identified disturbing trends in our society that are similar to those that led to communism and tyranny in the former Soviet Union:

-          Gradual loss of free speech

-          Restrictions on the right to bear arms

-          Expansion of the police state

-          Promotion of collectivist thinking

-          Disparaging individualism

-          Denigration of liberty and religion

-          Authoritarian method of governance through expansion of centralized bureaucracy, “governing wars,” inciting class warfare, denigrating free markets, i.e., “Free markets have never worked”

-          Centralization of government

-          Loss of faith in free-market capitalism due to crony capitalism

-          Redistribution of wealth and promotion of “class warfare” based on race and ethnicity

Martyniuk spoke of authoritarian regimes that first remove weapons from the hands of the people and how important it is to guard our Second Amendment. He gave examples of the 1932-1933 Ukrainian famine-genocide called Holomodor, and Germany and Austria’s gun confiscations in the 1930s.

He pointed out that the most egregious was the restriction of First Amendment free speech through the doctrine of political correctness, a type of Orwellian “1984 thought control.” PC guidelines are now everywhere in universities and colleges around the country. “European speech codes led to arrests and persecutions of high-profile individuals.” Noted were Leonid Plyushch (The Case of Leonid Plyushch) and Juan Williams in the U.S., both of whom were deemed as two men in “need of psychiatric help for speaking the truth.” https://www.amazon.com/Leonid-Plyushch-Tatiana-Sergeevna-Khodorovich/dp/0891586008

Nhan Lam’s parents fled Vietnam before he was born, surviving navigational errors and being robbed by pirates six times. When they made safe shore, they were sponsored by a Lutheran church in the U.S., and his family arrived in Buffalo in 1979 where his educated father worked part-time as a janitor. Even though his family was very poor at first, they eventually prospered through hard work.

Nhan Lam became an aerospace engineer and reached his American Dream through untiring effort and entrepreneurship. He now runs several real estate companies. He admits being a liberal in his teens but later becoming a conservative once reality hit him. He never forgot the lessons about Vietnam from his father. “Never settle with being good, when your potential is to be great. Never settle for another’s opinion, when you have the ability to think for yourself.”

One hundred million victims of communism, including my Dad, 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. They bitterly complained about the lack of food, heat, water, proper medical care, medications, and a decent treatment as human beings.

Will young Americans today who are turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to reality eventually repeat the fate of millions who fell for the “pie in the sky” promise of communist utopia?

 

What Is the Price of War?

Several years ago Mike, a Vietnam veteran, took my Macro and Microeconomics classes. He always came on time, hopping on his crutches with speed, expertly avoiding anything that might trip him. You could tell he was in pain – he winced occasionally and sweated profusely from the effort to stay upright. He was missing his right leg above the knee.

Mike came back from Vietnam physically whole. He lost his leg in a car accident caused by a drunk driver. The mental scars, he said, were impossible to heal. He understood that his country drafted him to fight the spread of communism but he also knew that the industrial military complex had to stay in business profitably.

He described the stifling air in the jungle, so humid that it was hard to breathe and uniforms never dried, crawling on red dirt covered with ants and snakes, digging underground for cover, bitten by snakes and creepy insects the size of a man’s palm, being shot at and not knowing where the enemy was hiding, the Vietnamese watching them and tracking them by their shaving cream.   

Seeing your best friends blown to bits or die in your arms from stray bullets was something Mike could never erase from his mind. When he came home, he was spat at by liberals who were unhappy with the war. They took their hatred and disdain out on the returning countrymen who were drafted to fight a war liberals vehemently opposed from the luxury of their cozy homes and freedoms protected by the very soldiers they were maligning and abusing. Mike was bitter that the faceless bureaucrats who sent them to war were never harmed or blamed. He resented Hollywood and Hanoi Jane (Fonda) for comforting the enemy.

Mike took my classes not because he was hoping to get a better job. Who was going to hire this broken man, he said? He had a thirst for knowledge, he wanted to learn, to continue his schooling that was abruptly interrupted by the draft. He did not have the luxury of refusing the draft or hiding behind a powerful daddy or go to medical school in order to skip the draft.

Being a veteran, Mike had to drive four hours many times each month to seek medical help in the nearest VA hospital. I thought it odd at the time that this man, who served his country in Vietnam and was promised stellar medical care for the rest of his life, could not be seen at the nearest local hospital, ultra-modern, and equipped to handle any health needs Mike might have had. His VA hospital appointments dragged on for months and years before he got his first prosthesis for his missing leg.

Judging by the recent VA scandal, things are a lot worse than Mike had described years ago. Citizens should be outraged that so many veterans died while on the waiting list to be treated at VA hospitals.

Americans should ask the question why are our veterans receiving third world medical care when they have earned and were promised the best of care for the rest of their lives while we give free stellar health care to illegal aliens in California and elsewhere, medical care they are not entitled to and have not earned?

Rationing health care to our heroes is the wrong way to trim the budget and the out of control spending. What happened to the Hippocratic Oath that doctors take when graduating from medical school? Are performance bonuses for rationing care to our needy veterans more important than the oath to do no harm?

A Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll reported that only 8 percent of veterans believe Veteran Affairs is doing an excellent job. Six in ten troops who served in Iraq and Afghanistan believe VA is doing a “less-than-good job of meeting the needs of veterans.”

(Gregg Jaffe, The Washington Post, May 21, 2014)

According to Stars and Stripes, “nearly half of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are filling” disability claims, “a flood of claims that has overwhelmed the VA and generated a backlog of 300,000 cases stuck in processing for more than 125 days. Some have languished for more than a year.” Last year there were 611,000 claims.

“We’re not where we need to be, but we’re making progress,” said our President. It is an understatement to call this debacle a “national embarrassment” and “a mess” when so many lives were lost, the appointment books cooked, and the backlog is huge.

The scars, the constant pain, the missing limbs, the headaches, depression, the numerous surgeries to fix indescribable physical and mental damage to the bodies of those who survived, the frustration, the changed lives, brought out the question posed by doctors in Afghanistan who “had debated whether they should even be saving these troops” who previously, without the advances in combat medicine, would have bled out on the battle field only a few years earlier” – “What kind of lives could they lead?”

Army Staff Sgt. Sam Shockley, who suffered multiple debilitating wounds and 40 surgeries so far after stepping on a buried bomb that blew his legs off, had a simple answer, “I always think that it could be worse.” “I would say I came out of this with my head on my shoulders.” http://www.stripes.com/1.284278

What is the price of war? As Stars and Stripes wrote, “VA calculates war’s true cost, one disabled veteran at a time.” It is hard to account for the actual cost of the war machine and the cost in human lives lost and families destroyed. Pricing a human life, the loss of body parts, of mental acuity, and of lifelong pain and suffering are highly arbitrary.  For a surviving veteran, a lost foot or hand cost $101.50, two missing legs cost $1,000-$1,300, and missing arms cost $1,600-$1,800 a month in disability payments. Those vets who need help around the clock are paid $8,179 a month. Vets would give anything to get their corporal and mental integrity back.

 

District of Columbia, The Seat of Power and Corruption

Washington, D.C. and its surrounding suburbs are interesting places to visit. Populated by over two hundred different nationalities, legal and illegal, it is a hodge-podge of humanity stuck in bumper to bumper traffic on most days and nights.

One of the most densely policed places in the world, it is easy to lose yourself in the many purposefully narrowed streets to make them difficult to vehicular traffic, the roads with double names, one name before it crosses a major highway and another name on the other side, the barricaded buildings, the check points, and the unmarked police cars and menacingly-looking plain-clothed police armed for urban assault.

On the best of days, the District of Columbia is a lovely place to visit if you are a museum lover, an admirer of the many monuments and memorials on the National Mall, the Reflecting Pool, the botanical gardens, the art galleries of the Smithsonian, the green parks with creative and intricate statues, the Natural History Museum, the Spy Museum, Madam Tussauds Wax Museum, and the Ford Theatre where President Lincoln was assassinated.

On the worst of recent days, D.C. was a dangerous place for an unarmed young mother with a toddler in the back seat of her car who got so lost and frightened, trying to escape from so many men and women pointing guns at her, she did not stop in time and was shot. Did she deserve to die? Should they have shot her tires first or used road spikes? Life used to be precious to our Western culture, not death.

On the worst of days in September, a crazed gunman with employment credentials and revenge on his clouded mind shot a lot of innocent people in the office building in which he had easy access and clearance to enter.

On the best of days of spring, D.C. is a fragrant symphony in pink cherry blossoms, surrounding the Tidal Basin and dotting the landscape of the surrounding buildings. The 1912 gift of 3,000 cherry trees from Mayor Yukio Ozaki of Tokyo becomes a joy every year during the month of April, snowing flowers everywhere.

On the worst of government shutdown days, overzealous and petulant D.C. bureaucrats who claimed to serve the people turned away WWII veterans from their own memorial for which they’ve paid dearly in blood and treasure. Politicians wanted to make life as miserable as possible for American citizens during the unnecessary government shutdown. The government was too broke, they said, to stay open but found money to hire armed police and personnel to man barricades in an open-air monument that otherwise does not require much maintenance or guarding.

On the worst of days this week in D.C., the vets, who were arrested for crossing over the barricades at the Vietnam Memorial, were shocked when illegal aliens who broke our laws and crossed our borders illegally were allowed to rally on the National Mall, demanding amnesty. The illegal aliens and their progressive activists and lobbyists have more power and rights under this administration than American citizens do.

Breitbart News reported that an elaborate set of “four Jumbotrons, port-a-potties, special event fencing, tents, and raised and lighted stages” were set up across the National Mall for illegal aliens who invaded the U.S. in violation of our law.  Meanwhile, veterans who fought in Normandy, Europe, Iowa Jima, North Africa, and freed Europe of the scourge of Nazism were told by gun-carrying park police to back off and move along from the monuments they paid for with their blood and treasure.

On the best of days, D.C. witnessed millions of peaceful tea party marchers who were taxed enough already, yet most of the MSM ignored them and wrote them off as a few thousand radical right wingers with extreme views, an “AstroTurf movement” as Nancy Pelosi so derisively called them.

On the worst of days, D.C. is a place to fear and the seat of power, corruption, and pettiness. Big rigs drivers understood that. Unlike the past when truckers caused gridlock in Washington with their demonstrations, few American truckers showed up this time to protest their bloated government that does not seem willing to stop spending, taxing its citizens, and devaluing the American dollar. Truckers were afraid – the implied threat of the National Guard was promoted on Social websites and many retreated in fear of their government. Those who did show up and had to obey the closed roads signs spent upwards of $1,500 one way in fuel alone to make a stand against the tyrannical government.

The District of Columbia is the seat of government for the select few, the globalists with money, the lawyers, progressive education policy deciders, and the powerful lobbies that determine the fate of 307 million Americans and indirectly the economic fate of the rest of the world.

Washington, D.C. is our nation’s capital but it appears more like the capital of everyone-who-hates America and its culture, where deals are made secretively in the dead of night, where the American stellar health care enjoyed by generations has been destroyed in the name of progressive Marxist fairness, social justice, and community organizing, replaced by rationing and death panels.

D.C. is now a place where extreme leftists reign, undermining the rule of law. Michael Reagan said, the “law is applied through a filter of how the application affects a group, instead of being applied impartially regardless of the group or individual circumstances.” (reaganreports.com)

On a cloudy day, when the District of Columbia was cloaked in a gray mantle of drizzling rain, I went to the mall to walk. One of the chain store windows displayed 3 oversized, bright red signs with the unfortunate words, “SALE! Thank Congress; Thank Mr. Obama, Government Shut Down SALE!!! Extra 20% off, up to 70% off.”

Commerce is good for the country, we are a consumer-oriented economy, and two-thirds of our GDP is consumption. Some might even say there is too much conspicuous consumption.

Should we thank Congress for not doing its job and passing a budget in four years? Should we thank Mr. Obama and Congress for passing the unaffordable Affordable Care Act in the middle of the night with only Democrat votes? Should we thank Nancy Pelosi for telling us that we must pass the bill in order to find out what’s in it? We did find out, Rep. Pelosi, and we don’t like it one bit.

Should we thank our president for taking a wrecking ball to our stellar healthcare? Health insurance did need revamping, several  million Americans did not have insurance, could not afford it or were dropped because of preexisting conditions, but why replace it with one-payer government-run ineptitude which turns out to be much more expensive? How are those exchanges that cost taxpayers over $693 million working out so far? After all, they were quite pricier than originally quoted ($93 million).

On sunny days D.C. is a place of green parks, paved streets, and heavily shuttered and protected glass and concrete buildings occupied by faceless bureaucrats in grey suits, carrying heavy briefcases stuffed with new regulations, rules, laws, and taxes that the American proletariat must follow and obey.

 

 

 

 

 

The Survivors of Communism Summit

 “Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”  - Winston Churchill

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.