A new Washington, D.C.-based museum honoring the 100 million plus victims of global communism opens later this month.

Originally slated to open in 2021, the Victims of Communism Museum will welcome visitors starting June 13th, 2022. It’s managed by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation—an organization established in 1993 by a “unanimous Act of Congress signed as Public Law 103-199 by President William J. Clinton on December 17, 1993.”

This museum will educate visitors about the atrocities committed under communist regimes and discuss its global reach under totalitarian governments today. //

Our final stop on the media tour was meeting participants of Victims of Communism’s Witness Project, the organization’s award-winning video series, in the adjacent conference room.

There I met Merita McCormack, originally from communist Albania, who is grateful to VOC for keeping her and her family’s stories alive.

“There's many folds of importance here,” she told me. “First of all, you tell the story— tell a true story— which is not been even told in our own countries. Second, it's healing. It's very therapeutic for those who have gone into seeing that somebody cares and tells the stories. And the third is, I think most important, and this is kind of got me into getting involved with this, is that our children that are Americans know what happens. And it [communism] doesn't happen here.”

“In order for the future to be safe of certain dangers, we have to tell the stories of what happened. We don't want that repeated,” she added.

Reagan didn’t put the Soviet Union on the ash heap of history by launching wars of aggression or by mimicking Soviet central planning. He did it by helping America get back to being what it was always meant to be: prosperous, powerful, peaceful.

I watched Reagan help turn this country around. I delighted watching him do it with that good humor and sunny disposition that drove the Left nuts. I still do.

Long story short — too late, right? — Reagan fought communism with capitalism.

So of course, it worked.

Communism can only win by default when its victims are too brutalized or too uncaring or sometimes just too ignorant to resist. //

Our country over the last two decades or so has taken a dark turn into what we might call “soft Communism.”

No walls, no barbed wire, no minefields keeping us locked in, but something even more insidious.

Wokeness, cancel culture, domestic spying, and social-credit-type controls from Big Tech and even the banking system …

… these things are the communism of my adulthood, just like the military might and propaganda efforts of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact were the communism of my formative years. //

But you can’t fight communism, whatever form it takes, with nothing but good wishes and some personal perseverance. You’ve got to fight communism with capitalism, just like Reagan taught me all those years ago — and that means first and foremost having a sustainable business model.

While many have accused the Biden administration of creeping toward socialism, Joe Biden’s nomination of Saule Omarova to comptroller of the currency demonstrates a sprint. The administration announced it would withdraw her nomination Tuesday, but that it was made at all indicates the administration’s priorities. Omarova expressed a desire to seize for the federal government sweeping powers over banking, including the politicized denial of services.

“Saule would have brought invaluable insight and perspective to our important work on behalf of the American people,” Biden said Tuesday in a statement about withdrawing her nomination. “But unfortunately, from the very beginning of her nomination, Saule was subjected to inappropriate personal attacks that were far beyond the pale.” That’s just plain false, and it’s frightening Biden would nominate and praise a woman with her record. //

Omarova, currently a law professor at Cornell University, is a native of Kazakhstan while it fell under the control of the Soviet Union. There, she was a member of the Communist Party.

“Omarova has promoted radical – ‘radical’ is her description — nationalizing the banking system, imposing government price controls, espousing the idea that money is a public, not a private good, curtailing economic innovation, dramatically limiting economic freedom and choice, having the government seize seats on corporate boards,” noted Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pennsylvania in her hearing. //

Omarova earned her B.A. at Moscow State University, graduating in 1989 on the Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship prior to immigrating to the United States in 1991. Once in the United States, Omarova earned both her M.A. and Pd.D. at the University of Wisconsin, and her J.D. from the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law.

While at Moscow State, Omarova wrote her thesis entitled, “Karl Marx’s Economic Analysis and the Theory of Revolution in ‘The Capital.’” When questioned about her thesis, she claimed to have forgotten about it, and testified she is unable to locate the document, even though it remained on her resume through 2017.

How Bulgaria tried—and failed—to save communism by computerizing the 1980s generation. //

http://web.archive.org/web/20210929131440/https://logicmag.io/kids/socialist-cyborgs/

Far-leftists have despised America for decades. Members of Congress who call themselves progressives decry the ills of American society like police brutality, poverty, and all kinds of injustice. Activists march and protest in the streets and on college campuses for equity. However, despite governing most of the areas in which the afflicted masses reside, they have done little to nothing to affect significant change.

In light of this reality, it is appropriate to ask: What exactly do these people want? What has to happen before the adherents of wokeism finally develop at least a modicum of respect and – dare I say it – love for the United States?

Leftists who rail against America are conspicuously quiet when it comes to laying out specific objectives. Take racism, for example; since racial bias can never truly be wholly extinguished, how much will it need to be decreased before these people acknowledge that the country is worthy of respect? Furthermore, if they care so much about racial disparities due to racism, why have they not pursued real solutions? Finally, why have they not encouraged productive conversations on these matters instead of just lazily accusing everyone with whom they disagree of being slobbering bigots? //

The hard left will never love America – at least not in its current incarnation. The America these people would love is one in which the government has the most control and influence over our lives. Affection for the U.S. can only come after their pipe dreams of a western utopia are realized.

To put it another way, those on the hard left will not be satisfied until they have destroyed America and then, from the rubble, rebuild it in their own image. Marxism must rule the day if America is to be worthy of respect. //

It is important to remember this when watching how the hard left moves. Their objective is not to improve America, it is to remake America. They will not stop until they finish what President Barack Obama started when he declared they would “fundamentally transform America.”

Coca-Cola, Apple, Nike, Disney – they are interested in principles when those principles don’t disrupt the supply chain. Multinational companies are fine with chained labor if the supply chain remains unbroken.

“White nationalism didn’t drown 250,000 Vietnamese in the South China Sea,” Nguyen exclaimed. “The Communists did. White Nationalism didn’t execute 86,000 South Vietnamese at the fall of Saigon. The Communists did. White Nationalists didn’t put me here. Communism did.

“So don’t take it lightly,” Nguyen said to Hernandez and the other representatives. “Don’t mock me. Don’t mock what I go through in life. It’s rough. I lost most of my cousins and family members due to Communism. If we don’t stand up to teaching Communism to our children, we’ll lose this country.” “So sir,” he said to Hernandez again. “Don’t mock me.” //

There’s far more to fear in this country from Communism than there is from white nationalism for a few very simple reasons.

First, there are few white nationalists and everyone in power condemns them.

Meanwhile, socialist and Communist ideas are being taught and embraced in colleges and in many other schools across the country. Unfortunately because of the failure of education that Nguyen referenced our young people no longer understand the bad things about Communism. They don’t know the millions of killings, some of which he referenced. They don’t understand how the ideology has oppressed people across the world, how so many fled it to come here, and what a horror it is for those folks, like Nguyen, who see it making inroads in his adopted country.

In an interview in 2018, the economist Thomas Sowell had a concise answer when podcaster and commentator Dave Rubin asked what awakened him to the failures of Marxism, an ideology he had espoused in his youth.

“Facts!” Sowell replied.

In his decadeslong career, Sowell’s commitment to the facts at the expense of popular approval and, sometimes, career advancement has captured audiences young and old, black and white, rich and poor.

But Sowell isn’t much concerned with his fame, even if it is an encouraging indicator of how well his ideas have been received. //

To be a conservative who is black is to expose oneself to undue amounts of absurd criticism, and Sowell’s experience was no exception.

Riley writes that Sowell and the late economist Walter Williams, a protegee and friend of Sowell’s, used to joke that “they never flew together, because if the plane went down there would be no black conservatives left.”

But Sowell had “felt the pain and humiliation of racism firsthand throughout his life,” and “needed no lectures from anyone on the evils of Jim Crow,” Riley writes.

For instance, many claimed that Sowell’s book “Ethnic America: A History” argued that discrimination against blacks did not exist. But Sowell actually was arguing that “discrimination alone was an insufficient explanation of social inequality.”

Sowell, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution since 1980, certainly was not a pawn of white economists, even the ones he admired and learned from.

Milton Friedman, a friend and mentor, said that Sowell “has a mind of his own, insists on making it up for himself, and on getting the evidence necessary to form a valid judgment.” In fact, Sowell saw his views on racial matters as entirely in line with that of black civil rights leaders of the past.

“If anything,” Riley writes, “Sowell’s analyses are in the tradition of his fellow black forebearers, not his white contemporaries.” Black leaders of the past such as Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, he writes, “shared Sowell’s deep skepticism of government benevolence and the lowering of standards to facilitate black advancement.”

DeSantis’ over-arching point is that such claims of systemic racism are used as a political catch-all, whereby literally everything someone on the left doesn’t like is relegated to some form of systemic racism. That then gives them license to destroy the system instead of just dealing with whatever bad apples may emerge. Thus, the comparison to Marxism is profound and relevant, especially considering that many of those same people self-identify as Marxists.

The real goal of Black Lives Matter and the myriad of other social justice activists out there is not to stop supposed examples of racism (note that even Derek Chauvin was never found to have had racist intentions). Rather, by their own admission, it’s to tear down the system as it exists and rebuild it in a more “equitable” fashion. But forcing equity via the heavy hand of government is, in and of itself, discrimination, because it throws out individual choices and performance in favor of defining people by their immutable characteristics. That’s racism. //

Arcturus77
17 hours ago edited
Bonchie,

I think a more succinct way of explaining the Marxist underpinnings of Critical Race Theory is to note that like "traditional" economic class-based Marxism, CRT posits a zero-sum struggle between groups of people, in its case, based upon racial or other biomarker identities (e.g., gender / sex). Individuals do not exist except insofar as they are members of a group -- and that group is either oppressed or oppressor. CRT is simply a Cultural Marxism.

Unlike other Marxism ideologies and movements that were economic power-based but included a cultural element -- most famously, the Maoist Cultural Revolution and, even more extreme, the Khmer Rouge -- CRT is a uniquely American Marxism. That's because it sidesteps the actual issue of excessive concentration of wealth and power by the overclass (except insofar as the overclass is white) and focuses on culture and racism -- via the "systemic racism" struggle between groups.

This is how multimillionaire Blacks such as the Obamas, LeBron James, and Oprah are, ipso facto, oppressed and a working class white living in a trailer park in Appalachia is the oppressor.

It is getting extra traction in America because corporate oligarchy has discovered the usefulness (at least short-to-medium term) of CRT because, as a Cultural Marxism, it really doesn't upset the highly imbalanced economic system but keeps it in place by keeping the population at war with itself.

It is a profoundly immoral and, operationally, a violent philosophy, but that's the inherent nature of Marxism in whatever form the "struggle" takes.

Facts, truth, reality itself are all subservient to the ideology and its zero-sum struggle. Needless to say, it is a profoundly illiberal philosophy. But young people with no real prospects in society and addicted to social media love it because of its all-embracing explanation of reality and good-versus-evil struggle it posits. Every Marxist movement has been like that.

The tragedy of the Obama presidency was rather than healing America's traditional racial divide, Obama made it acceptable for anyone who had one drop of "BIPOC" blood in them to claim the mantle of oppressed victimhood no matter their actual station or situation in life. //

skeptic62 Arcturus77
15 hours ago edited
Marxism is not about creating a more equitable system; far from it.

Each of us is bestowed with different skill sets. In Capitalism, the best in each field rise to the top, with the rest taking spots on the lower rungs.

For some though, their best if not only skill is the ability to take. Most are just common criminals, but under Marxism the “best” rise to the top by inflaming passions and pitting several groups against one. Until there is only one.

Marxists can’t compete in The Marketplace of Ideas, but they can surely surf the wave of revolution. THIS is why the Marxist Revolution never ends. //

timcooper62 Arcturus77
17 hours ago
I like what you wrote. They don't want to acknowledge the individual because then they may have to acknowledge individual rights. These schemes are the antithesis of individual rights. The individual has no rights under these schemes. Its totally un American and really as you say immoral. Its evil on its face. When people fail, instead of looking inward and making changes to improve, they can claim victim status and blame some oppressor. //

ConservatarianGirl
18 hours ago
For Republicans to be brave, they're going to have to care more about being right than about being liked. //

IrishMailey ConservatarianGirl
15 hours ago
And they need to say over and over: Rep. Lincoln freed the slaves and made them full citizens under the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, Rep. Eisenhower sent NG to desegregate Southern schools, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act comes from a 1957 Eisenhower bill that was defeated by sens. JFK, Johnson, and Al Gore's dad.

A group that exists to “reform LA jails” doesn’t need $600 a night hotel stays to “meet” about how they plan to do that.

But this shows the kind of grift that Black Lives Matter and other activist outfits are perpetrating on people. I certainly wouldn’t give money to these people, but there are a lot of otherwise well-meaning individuals who have and do. They should probably reconsider that choice immediately. Behind every Marxist is a raging capitalist who wants the lavish lifestyle to stop with them. Cullors fits that bill to the letter.

In a more sane media environment that wasn’t so completely in the tank for BLM, there would be serious investigative reporting going on to expose this. As it stands, that job is left to smaller, right-wing outfits like The Daily Caller. It shouldn’t be that way, but here we are.

From the start, the CCP’s history was written in blood — from purges and power struggles to policies that inflicted immense suffering on China's people. //

In July, the Chinese Communist Party will celebrate its centenary. The birthday presents it gave itself included re-written party history and a hotline for Chinese people to snitch on fellow citizens who dare to raise any questions about the newly revised party history. Such behaviors remind everyone the CCP cannot be considered a trustworthy partner in addressing international affairs, such as finding the true origin of the coronavirus. //

The CCP’s attempt to re-write history and turn Chinese people into government informants will cause anger and frustration among the Chinese people, further damage the CCP’s international reputation, and reinforce the belief that the CCP is not a trustworthy partner. After celebrating its centenary, the CCP will begin its new century on very shaky ground.

One of the most highly regarded books of the 20th century was Ernest Becker’s “The Denial of Death.” Winner of the 1974 Pulitzer Prize, the book is regarded as a classic for its analysis of how human beings deny their mortality.

But there is something people deny more than mortality: evil. Someone should write a book on the denial of evil; that would be much more important because while we cannot prevent death, we can prevent evil.

The most glaring example of the denial of evil is communism, an ideology that, within a period of only 60 years, created modern totalitarianism and deprived of human rights, tortured, starved, and killed more people than any other ideology in history. //

Why is it important that everyone know what communism did?

Here are three reasons:

First, we have a moral obligation to the victims not to forget them. Just as Americans have a moral obligation to remember the victims of American slavery, we have the same obligation to the billion victims of communism, especially the 100 million who were murdered.

Second, the best way to prevent an evil from reoccurring is to confront it in all its horror.

The fact that many people today, especially young people, believe communism is a viable—even morally superior—option for modern societies proves they know nothing about communism’s moral record. Therefore, they do not properly fear communism—which means this evil could happen again.

And why could it happen again?

That brings us to reason No. 3. The leaders of communist regimes and the vast number of people who helped those leaders torture, enslave, and murder—plus the many more people who reported on their neighbors for saying something objectionable to the communists—were nearly all normal people. Of course, some were psychopaths, but most were not. Which proves that any society—including free ones—can devolve into communism or some analogous evil. //

If you don’t hate communism, you don’t care about, much less love, people.

Critical race theory is the idea that there are irreconsilable differences between races due to inequalities that exist in our society. Unsurprisingly, there’s only one way to fix it, and you can probably guess what that is.

The idea of critical race theory is just a branch of critical theory, and recently National Review authors Lindsey Burke and Mike Gonzolez wrote about its origins:

Simply put, Critical Theory amounts to an unremitting attack on all of America’s norms and traditions. The goal is to replace them with a “counter-narrative” that will introduce a more leftist model of governing. Critical Theory is the main philosophical school in the identity politics of today.

The concept goes back to 1937, when the second director of Germany’s Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer, published the school’s manifesto, “Traditional and Critical Theory.” This group of Marxist academics had started out in Frankfurt, but by 1937, they were safely ensconced at Columbia University, having fled the Third Reich.

Traditional theory, Horkheimer claimed, fetishized knowledge and objectivity. Critical theory, its opposite, held that there were no universal truths and man could not be objective. Instead of truths, there were competing narratives, and it was the job of the Left to impose its own. This relativism in itself was nothing less than an assault on Western civilization.

We see this dynamic in its starkest form in the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which attempts to replace 1776 and the “All Men Are Created Equal” ethos of America with 1619, the year slaves were first brought to what is today the United States. It puts slavery, not the ideal of equality, at the center of our nation’s storyline. //

All critical theory roads lead to Marxist systems, including critical race theory. No matter what the problem is, the answer is Marxism. //

For this election, critical theory, specifically critical race theory, has taken center stage. We’re told that America has a supremely racist past and that all its accomplishments only happened because of the blood, sweat, and tears of slaves brought from Africa.

It’s undeniable that slavery was a part of American history and had some effect on its progression, but to say that it’s the crux of its success is patently absurd. We may as well say that America’s part in beating back the Nazi threat or going to the moon was all thanks to slavery.

Men fought and died to end slavery, and fought the left again in order to give the black population in American equal rights. America worked from day one to make sure slavery would one day meet its end and that all men would be treated equally as America’s founding ideal entailed. //

The unbelievable story that is America is a story of a nation whose contributions to the world far outweigh its sins, but the Marxists who wish to bring the successful system that America bases itself on crashing to the ground so they can implement a more socialistic or communistic one would have you believe that America is nothing but its sins.

One of the tenets of the pseudo-political religious cult that is Marxism is that capitalism is doomed by its own “internal contradictions.”

Why do I call Marxism a religion? If you look at Marxism through the lens of comparative religion, what do you have? A creation myth. A fall from grace. Redemption. End times. Salvation. It has its own sacred texts and sacraments. Tell a Marxist that Marxism is fake and doesn’t work and what will xir tell you?

In the view of Marx, eventually, a tiny number of people would someday own everything, and this will lead to the final uprising by the oppressed and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

It is beginning to look like the peculiar variety of woke Marxism that has held sway in US educational institutions since the late 1960s is also susceptible to its own internal contradictions. Those contradictions are acquiring the velocity of a Himalayan avalanche. //

Higher education is on its own Long March, but this one has no destination. The irony of the institution that is most hostile to the American experiment being devastated by the very thing its Marxist leadership has been hoping happens to our nation is nearly too much to bear without a cigarette.

Marcellus Wiley 🧢
@marcelluswiley
Heard too many people tell me that I was wrong for misinterpreting BLM’s mission statement and I took their words out of context🤦🏿‍♂️

You were saying??? #factsoverfeelings #apologyaccepted😉🤫

http://yahoo.com/news/black-liv…
https://t.co/uuqJdM0BBW?amp=1
https://news.yahoo.com/black-lives-matter-removes-language-185621063.html

The plot thickens... //

You may have heard of the name of Alicia Garza before. She’s one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter. According to one of the other founders, Patrisse Cullors, she and Garza were “trained Marxists.”

Turns out that a new group that Garza is heading up has some very interesting connections, according to the Heritage Foundation.

Garza is heading up something called the Black Futures Lab which says it “works with Black people to transform our communities, building Black political power and changing the way that power operates – locally, statewide and nationally,” according to Fox News.

But on the donation page, the group says it is a “fiscally sponsored project of the Chinese Progressive Association.”

https://www.heritage.org/progressivism/commentary/blm-co-founder-and-pro-communist-china-group-are-partnering-heres-why

Chip and Commie Sue have a discussion on the future of the United States.

Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum pose for photo during the welcoming ceremony of the World Economic Forum on ASEAN at the National Convention Center in Hanoi Wednesday, Sept. 12, 2018.

When President George W. Bush 13 years ago on June 12, 2007, dedicated a U.S. memorial in Washington, D.C., to the more than 100 million victims of communism, both the Chinese communists and the Russian communists immediately attacked the president and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington dismissed the memorial as “an attempt to defame China.” Gennady Zyuganov, the head of the Russian Communist Party, called the memorial “clumsy propaganda” intended to divert the world’s attention “from the true bloody crimes of U.S. imperialism.”

Tellingly, what neither the Chinese communists nor the Russian communist boss tried to do was to deny the bloody crimes of communist imperialism. After stating that “we the living have a solemn obligation to the victims to acknowledge their sacrifice and honor their memory,” Bush listed some of communism’s victims:

They include innocent Ukrainians starved to death in Stalin’s Great Famine or Russians killed in Stalin’s purges; Lithuanians and Latvians and Estonians loaded on cattle cars and deported to Arctic death camps of Soviet communism.

They include Chinese killed in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution; Cambodians slain in Pol Pot’s Killing Fields; East Germans shot attempting to scale the Berlin Wall in order to make it to freedom; Poles massacred in the Katyn Forest and Ethiopians slaughtered in the “Red Terror”; Miskito Indians murdered by Nicaragua’s Sandinista dictatorship; and Cuban balseros who drowned escaping tyranny.