Communist Propaganda and Revisionist History

The communist propaganda has intensified at a fever pitch. It’s not just the supine main stream media that constantly bombard us with scripted and highly subjective chats/gossip pretending to be “news,” canned and distributed by the same progressive owners of the mass media who order their minions to read the latest socialist Democrat talking points. The objective is to use irrational mob mentality in order to stir hatred towards our President and of anything remotely conservative or pro-America.

It is Hollywood that makes a living in capitalist America by reading their movie lines written by someone else, and acting on celluloid as they are told, influencing Millennials with brains full of runny grits, telling us in front of microphones that they are experts because of a movie role they’ve played. Their educational “expertise” is contradicted by their high school dropout status.  

It is the vaunted halls of academia indoctrinating millions of young Americans, useful idiots, who have lost touch with reality, if they’ve ever had any contact with it, dumbed down by participation trophies and parents telling them how special they are, threatening teachers and principals, excusing moronic or bullying behavior, and lack of work ethic.

It is liberal arts colleges who give high tuition payers worthless diplomas. These “scholars,” trained in puppetry, social justice, non-existent “white privilege,” and racism stoked by the left, wonder why they cannot find jobs in their fields, blaming capitalism for their lack of employability and embracing communism’s purported equality and wealth confiscation of the “rich,” stretching the idea of rich to the breaking point.

Communism is now the new ideology of the left that the young and some old Americans have embraced with fervor, having no idea what it is, or any sympathy for the 100 million of humans who died as victims of communism.

Young Americans are totally blind and deaf to history and cover their ears and eyes and reject those who survived communism and have taken great pains and paid high prices to escape communist totalitarian societies. Most, like me, fleeing communist oppression, have left everything they’ve ever known and loved behind and came to America legally.

Why would anyone leave if communism is so great? How many Americans are clamoring to move to a communist country, giving up their American citizenship? Why would Cubans take great chances and die at sea in rickety contraptions on their voyage to America if Castro’s communism is so great? Why were so many innocent people shot and killed before 1989, trying to escalate the Berlin Wall from the communist German side to the free German western side if communism is so wonderful? Why would communists have to build barbed wire and cement walls to keep people prisoners in their own communist “paradise?”

You cannot, of course, ask logical questions of liberals lest be told that you are judgmental. I make decisions by using sound judgment and logic, not feelings and emotions like liberals do.

Real journalists, historians, and teachers must tell the truth about communism. The ideology is pure evil and has spawned a Marxist empire. History should teach and dissect very carefully for future generations what communism had done to citizens around the world during decades of totalitarian regimes’ rule of terror.

Vladimir Bukovsky took great risks when he and his friend Pavel photocopied archival documents in the early 1990s in Russia and from the Gorbachev Foundation archives in Moscow. These were brought to England by Pavel Stroilov. Bukovsky has published some of the documents and the links in his upcoming book in the English version, Judgment in Moscow, Soviet Crimes and Western Complicity. (May 2019) https://bukovsky-archive.com/

Bukovsky obtained thousands of documents over a period of a year. Had he not succeeded, he said, “it is highly likely that they would have lain secret for many more years, if not forever,” lost to history. While offering these documents for free to the western press, most have ignored him with “So what? Who cares?” The typical media tends to marginalize the anti-communism messenger with claims of “McCarthyism.”

Bukovsky wrote in Chapter 6, “The Revolution That Never Was,” that Gorbachev, with help from his most trusted aids, upon leaving Kremlin, copied top secret documents and stored them in the Gorbachev Foundation for “friendly researchers.” In 2003, Gorbachev was told to black out the documents. In the interim, however, Bukovsky’s friend, Pavel, copied a huge cache of documents on a daily basis and sent them to Bukovsky.

According to Bukovsky, the change that happened in 1989 in the communist world, the so-called fall, was too soft, too velvety as in the Velvet Revolution, to have happened by chance. There was no struggle, no terrible bloodshed, save for a few who had died in the Romanian December 1989 Revolution. The western world believed it as a chain of “accidents and coincidences.”

Bukovsky explains in his book that “these changes occurred due to a decision by Moscow and under certain pressure from the Kremlin: as we recall, Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for conducting this operation.”  All the “liberalization” happened with Moscow’s blessing, said Bukovsky.

Among many examples, Bukovsky wrote about the Czech security that orchestrated their “revolution” during which it was revealed that a “killed student” was actually a very much alive and breathing employee of the Czechoslovak state security. The “revolution” failed to bring a “liberal” communist to power, instead bringing Havel.

Bukovsky provides documentary proof in his book that “the Velvet Revolution of 1989 was a Soviet operation” and that “the communist brethren all over the world continued to be trained, supplied with arms and technical means.” The Soviets had no intention of giving up their power and influence in the world.

Twenty-nine years have passed since the “fall” of communism yet its influence has grown globally by leaps and bounds, promoted constantly by various non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with deep pockets, calling themselves non-profits, affiliated with the U.N., and promoting the 17 goals of the communist globalist Agenda of 2030.

New generations have been brainwashed into collectivism by Common Core standards of education, using Mother Earth environmentalism and global warming/climate change as Armageddon. These educational standards have been introduced concurrently around the world by the same billionaires and their foundations. They are determined to shape humanity into their view of the world. And they found politicians like Ocasio-Cortez who is telling her young acolytes that, in order to save the world from extinction, people must rethink having babies.

It is evident that, to free the world from the murderous legacy of communism, one must “use history to discredit the ideas on which communism was based.” But real history is no longer taught in public schools, replaced by progressives’ revisionist history.

Bukovsky asks very important questions, “Why were the horrific crimes of the Soviet Union – among them concentration camps, torture, starvation, and even genocide – so often misunderstood and ignored by Western politicians, academics, and the media? After the regime’s fall, why did the world’s democracies, who less than 50 years before had been rigorous in punishing Nazism atrocities, stand by as the moment passed to put the communist perpetrators on trial?”

Bukovsky was able to prove through archival documents Moscow’s influence “over Western political parties, governments, media, and prominent individuals.”

 

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?

 

The Memorial to the Victims of Communism and Sighet Museum

I was digging furiously through my book shelves, looking for one special volume which I had brought with me from Romania when I immigrated to the United States. After half an hour I found my May 1977 first edition of Romulus Rusan’s book, “Greyhound’s America,” published in Romanian during the brutal communist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu.

I never understood how such a book that told the truth about life in the west escaped his publishing censoring goons. I was going to finally find out as I was going to meet Romulus Rusan and his equally famous and lovely wife, the poet Ana Blandiana.

Romulus Rusan told me that his editor revealed to him that, of the 100,000 plus copies of his first edition book that were sold in Ceausescu’s Romania, probably half of the readers immigrated to the U.S. He could not understand why Rusan was not arrested by the communist regime. His wife joked that they must have labored under a lucky star, under divine protection.

Romanian Ambassador at Washington
Romulus Rusan and Ana Blandiana
(Photo: Ileana Johnson, June 3, 2015)

I met Ana Blandiana and Romulus Rusan at a Romanian Embassy serata honoring their literary work and their untiring efforts to bring to light the horrors of communism in the First Memorial to the Victims of Communism at Sighet, Romania. A true labor of love, their work began in 1993 with the acquisition of the Sighet Prison, a condemned ruin.

The former prison built in 1897 to incarcerate common criminals, was used during First and Second World Wars for political inmates, priests, Polish revolutionaries, and Romanian deserters. During the period of 1948 to 1950, resistance fighters from Maramures, peasants and students, were imprisoned here.

Between May 1950 and July 1955, it served as a maximum-security facility, holding ministers, members of Parliament, journalists, officers, priests, and other religious leaders. During this time, 54 of those held died while in custody and were buried in unmarked graves. In 1955 the prison became again a jail for common criminals with more creature “comforts.” Because of a decree in 1975 which ruled that prison sentences had to be served in the workplace, the prison was closed and abandoned.

Ana Blandiana and Romulus Rusan petitioned the Council of Europe to open a museum in the former prison which had become, as they described it, an “insalubrious ruin.”

Sighet Museum
(photo: Wikipedia)

With funds from the Civic Academy Foundation, the International Centre for Studies of Communism, and the untiring efforts of Ana Blandiana and Romulus Rusan, the former prison became the first museum of its kind in the world, dedicated to the victims of communism in Romania and in all former communist countries of the Iron Curtain.

Each cell became a separately-themed room with its own chronology of death and destruction of the human body and spirit caused by the most oppressive form of dictatorship in history – communism.

After the Civic Academy Foundation was established to create the museum at Sighet, the 175 founding members chose Ana Blandiana to be President.

The exterior of the building was repaired with help from Hanns Seidel Foundation and from private donations. The actual repair work commenced on July 1, 1996 and the Memorial was inaugurated on June 20, 1997.

Former political prisoners, Orthodox priest Constantin Voiculescu and Graeco-Catholic priest Eugen Popa, held the religious service to consecrate the Space for Recollection and Prayer.

I was amazed that a husband and wife team was able to bring to life such a significant memorial with limited resources and a gargantuan effort, yet the west is still struggling to raise funds to build a similar museum.

In addition to the Civic Academy which is attended by students and professors from Europe, the International Center for Studies into Communism, the Memorial to the Victims of Communism and to the Resistance, the Sighet Museum has been visited to date by more than one million people.

The Cortege of the Sacrificial Victims by Aurel I. Vlad

(Photo: Widipedia)

 

The symbolic statuary entitled “The Cortege of the Sacrificial Victims” by Aurel Vlad depicts humans walking in various stances of resignation, heads bowed down or raised to the sky, some with hands up, begging, imploring, appealing to a higher power, and wondering why. When it rains, the rivulets make the statues appear as if the victims are crying.

Sighet prison cells

(Photo: Wikipedia)

Dozens and dozens of rooms in the museum tell the horrible stories of the most oppressive period in Romania’s modern history:

-          More than 10,000 trials were held according to the Communist Party template – accusations of  ‘treason,’ ‘plotting against the social order,’ ‘espionage,’ ‘sabotage,’ ‘diversion,’ ‘inimical attitude,’ ‘public instigation,’ ‘fraudulent crossing of the border,’ ‘omitting to make a denunciation,’ and ‘dissemination of forbidden publications;’ they were always followed by hard prison time and sometimes death.

-          More than 2 million people were persecuted politically using “coercive methods,” with hundreds of thousands arrested administratively, without trial, some up to ten years.

-          600,000 Romanians were arrested and sentenced to prison between 1945-1989

-          200,000 Romanians were deported to forced labor camps.

-          Destruction of traditional parties, National Peasant Party, National Liberal and Social Democrat Party, and installation of one party, the Communist Party, replacing a multi-party democratic regime with a one-party state.

-          Repression against the Romanian Orthodox Church, Graeco-Catholic Church, Protestant and Evangelical churches.

-          Installation of the dreaded Securitate by decree in August 1948, following the infiltration by communists of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1944.

-          Use of political detainees in hard labor camps for various building projects.

-          How individual farmers were forced into collectivization, the peasants’ resistance, and their swift repressions.

-          The sovietization of the population, forced submission into communism by purging, beatings, and confiscation of personal property.

-          Orchestrated by communist organizers like Emil Bodnaras, Ana Pauker, and other Moscow agents, the army, the police, and the justice system were forcefully transformed into communist arms of the police-state.

-          Firing and assignment to manual jobs or labor camps of any teachers opposed to the communist regime; those remaining and the new teachers had to become the “new man” through violent ideological and propaganda subjects, becoming tools of the Marxist-Leninist education based on Soviet-style textbooks.

-          Ethnic repression, accusations of “Zionism” and the maltreatment of gypsies.

-          Deportation of 44,000 people to the Baragan steppe; 1,700 of the deportees died; the oldest person was deported at the age of 95 and lasted until he turned 100.

-          Anti-communist resistance in the Fagaras Mountains and Western Carpathians.

-          Women who gave birth in prison and their children were removed and sent to orphanages; 4,200 women, mothers, wives, or daughters of political prisoners were also imprisoned as “dangers to the social order.”

-          The famous historian Gheorghe I. Bratianu was imprisoned at Sighet for twenty-four months and died there in April 1953; on August 6, 1953, the Interior Ministry decided to increase the prison sentence of a dead man by 60 months.

-          High school students were deported and served time in communist prisons for either running into the mountains to join the partisans or defacing/tearing up official posters and portraits, telling jokes, writing epigrams, and drawing cartoons.

-          Doctors and medical students were imprisoned for refusing to adopt communist jargon and for not rejecting “all that was western.”

-          Room 9 is the cell where the famous Iuliu Maniu died in 1953 (1873-1953); his cell was left untouched, with thick bars and the broken bed with wires sticking out from the dirty mattress; Maniu, the architect of the unification of Transylvania with Romania in 1918, the former Romanian Prime Minister, leader of the National Peasant Party and of the National Romanian Party, former Parliament member in Bucharest and Budapest, attorney for the Graeco-Catholic Church, landowner  and leader of the Democratic opposition, a man who dedicated his entire life to public service, died alone in his frigid cell, without a candle or the presence of another human being.

-          Those who died in prison at Sighet from 1952 on were buried secretly at night on the banks of the River Tisa at the border with the former USSR. (Romulus Rusan, Museum Archives and Guide, 1993-2014)

Horrible details about the prison life had emerged slowly from those who survived, from guards, and from those forced to clean and sweep the hallways and the prison courtyard. They would sometimes exchange a few words with political prisoners who were stronger and able to stand up and speak. Those who became very ill were usually isolated and deprived of medical treatment until it was too late to assimilate extra food such as potatoes, and they expired.

The food served was inadequate for survival. The communist guards hoped the prisoners would die quickly of malnutrition and starvation. Cardinal Iuliu Hossu of the Cluj Graeco-Catholic Church wrote in his memoirs that the “soup was water with a piece of vegetable floating in it.” It was considered a delicacy to find a “hard piece of a cow’s hairy lip” bobbing in this watery soup. http://www.romanialibera.ro/aldine/history/cum-a-murit-iuliu-maniu-la-sighet-215636

The inmates received no medical assistance. Knowing that dying men and women were unable to metabolize the extra calories, the guards would give them extra food. And if the lack of proper nutrition and medical care did not kill the political prisoners, the bitter cold of northern Romania exacerbated by the thick walls most certainly caused hypothermia and death.

The Sighet Museum is a living monument to the cruelty of communism and to the inhumane treatment that millions of innocent citizens were subjected to by tyrants and their failed ideology, an ideology concocted by a dangerous man named Karl Marx whose theories ultimately destroyed the human spirit, imprisoned free men, and killed over 100 million worldwide in the name of collectivism, equality, and social justice. http://www.memorialsighet.ro/index.php?lang=en

 

 

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.