Standing Against Socialism

We applaud another safe and peaceful election in the United States this week. Yet, we must speak out when political platforms spew Marxist propaganda. 

At the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, our purpose is to remember the more than 100 million people murdered by communist regimes and to be a voice for those still held captive by totalitarian regimes today. The bipartisan legislation signed into law by President Bill Clinton that authorized our founding specifically warns against allowing “so evil a tyranny to terrorize the world” in the future. 

That is why the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation will continue to vigilantly call out efforts to transform the American system of ordered liberty into a socialist regime of any type. The American Dream is alive and well today, and it is rooted in our fundamental freedoms: freedom of religion, freedom of the press and information, freedom of conscience, the right of people to assemble, the opportunity for political action, including dissent, and the importance of private property and personal initiative. All of this has led to the freest and most innovative culture in world history. 

Americans should be concerned when candidates or politicians talk in terms of confiscating, or taxing out of existence, personal initiative and private property. Americans should be concerned when class warfare rhetoric pits our society against each other. We should all be concerned when pledges to change the social contract threaten centralized, authoritarian redistribution; when policies are based on failed socialist economic theories; and when bureaucrats determine winners and losers instead of innovation, creativity, and hard work in the free market. 

What we heard last night in New York City, that “there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about,” echoes past utopian visions of communist dictators. As an educational institution, we will continue to point out that socialists and communists never stay in power through the popular vote because they fail in office: in Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba, and elsewhere. No socialist, Marxist, or communist regime has ever succeeded in creating the purported vision of liberty, equality, and fraternity they profess. Instead, they always deliver misery, poverty, and servitude.