An evil, anti-human ideology

President Trump declared the first week of November “Anti-Communism Week.” His proclamation, channeling Ronald Reagan, called for “honoring the victims of oppression by keeping their cause alive and by ensuring that communism … [ends up] once and for all on the ash heap of history.”

President Trump’s proclamation came on Nov. 7, which many U.S. states and countries abroad recognize as the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Communism. The proclamation rightly observes that “communism brings nothing but ruin. … It is a story written in blood and sorrow, a grim reminder that communism is nothing more than another word for servitude.”

The historical record is clear. According to scholarly reports such as The Black Book of Communism, published by Harvard University Press, more than 100 million men and women have been murdered by communist regimes. Twenty million Russians, Ukrainians, and others in the former Soviet Union. Sixty million Chinese tortured, executed, or starved by their own leaders in communist China. Another 20 million under communist regimes such as Cambodia’s Pol Pot and Cuba’s Castro. Human life snuffed out from Afghanistan to Nicaragua, from Ethiopia to Vietnam, and from East Germany to Laos to Angola.

Unfortunately, as the proclamation recounts, the scourge of communism remains with us today in two forms. The first is that there remain communist and communist legacy regimes that terrorize their own people and, in many cases, bully their neighbors. China, North Korea, and Cuba are prime examples of this. Elsewhere, there are thugs and bullies who learned the tools of totalitarianism and use them to this day, such as those who learned their trade from the old Soviet security apparatus: former KGB operative Vladimir Putin is a case in point, as are rogue regimes in Eritrea, Venezuela, and elsewhere.

The second way that communism is alive today is when it is “cloaked in the language of social justice and democratic socialism.” But as the proclamation goes on to argue, “the message of these new voices repeating old lies remains the same: ‘Give up your freedom, place your trust in the power of the government and trade the promise of prosperity for the empty comfort of control.’”

President Trump is right: “We as Americans, reject this evil doctrine.” The proclamation continues: “We remain a nation founded on the eternal truth that liberty and opportunity are the birth rights of every person.”

This is what has made America a light on the hill, because that “eternal truth of liberty and opportunity” is for men and women everywhere, not just in the United States and not just in the West. That is why we’ve seen the gritty yearning of pro-democracy movements for liberty, despite repression and attacks. This happened at Tiananmen Square and in the old Soviet Union. It continues to be the challenge of freedom-loving people and dissident movements in today’s Hong Kong, among Tibetan Buddhists and Muslim Uyghurs, and among people of faith across East Asia.

It is simply a fact of the human spirit that “no ideology can extinguish the search for truth and for opportunity.” It is natural for men and women to seek truth. It is natural for parents to seek opportunity for their children. Communism is always anti-human because it seeks to thwart these natural impulses.

This proclamation is a service to the millions of people still held captive today by regimes that embrace some form of Marxism or practice any form of totalitarianism. Let us pray that we’ll see an end to those regimes that “violate the God given rights and dignity of the oppressed.”

This article was originally published by WORLD.