Ed Feulner: Anti-Communism Started Young

Dr. Edwin “Ed” J. Feulner (1941-2025) served as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and was honored as Chairman Emeritus of the Foundation. He also served as the organization’s CEO during a short but challenging time of executive transition. In 2006, his steadfast commitment to defending freedom and opposing communism was recognized with the Foundation’s lifetime achievement award, the Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom.

How did Ed Feulner come to understand that communism was a fatal lie, a destructive system, and a threat to his beloved country?

It began in a family kitchen in 1951.*

A teenager was visiting the Feulner home in Elmhurst, Illinois. He was from Austria—the part that remained under Soviet control at the time. When he entered the house, the guest was captivated by the fresh fruit on the kitchen table: an apple, a banana, and an orange. He pulled out his camera and took photographs because he had never seen such fresh fruit. That stuck with 10-year-old Eddie.

A few years later, 15-year-old Eddie heard about the Hungarian Revolution against the Communists and learned about Cardinal József Mindszenty, the great anti-totalitarian Roman Catholic Prelate of Hungary. Cardinal Mindszenty stood up against the Nazis and then the Communists. He was tortured and imprisoned. When the 1956 Hungarian Revolution was crushed by Soviet tanks, he was forced to flee to the U.S. Embassy in Budapest, where he lived in internal exile for many years.

On a summer college trip touring Europe, Ed anticipated celebrating his 20th birthday, August 12, 1961, in Berlin. The overnight construction of the Berlin Wall upended his plan. In Ed’s words: 

I had the opportunity to see communism up close on my 20th birthday in 1961 on the night the Berlin Wall started to go up. Later, I had the opportunity to travel through every country of Central Europe. I had the opportunity, when I worked for former late Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird to travel with him to Vietnam (1974) to see what was going on in Southeast Asia. 

In a letter to his wife Linda during the Vietnam trip, Ed noted the desire of the people of South Vietnam to hold on to their freedom as they attempted to resist the depredations of the Communists. In his opinion, they needed help to do it.

He went on to recall: 

I later had the opportunity to visit the People’s Republic of China, to visit with friends in Taiwan, friends in South Korea, and to hear from people like my uncle, who was actually a military chaplain in the Korean War, to see up close what the battle between freedom and communism was all about. 

From a young age, then, Ed Feulner witnessed first-hand the lived reality of communism as a tyrannical political system and a failed economic system. Marxism, socialism, communism, and their variants—all are anti-faith, anti-family, and anti-human. Ed was ever comparing the lives of the subjects of Communist regimes with the aspirations and opportunities of those living in democratic, free market societies. 

During his graduate school days, he met Dr. Lev Dobriansky, the Georgetown University economics professor who influenced Ed’s views on fighting communism and the spiritual and cultural resources latent among the “captive nations” subdued by Soviet communism, particularly the Poles, Ukrainians, Hungarians, and the Baltic nations. Dobriansky went on to co-found the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation with another of Ed’s friends, Dr. Lee Edwards.

When Ed talked about the crimes of communism, he emphasized that we have to tell the full story, from the over 100 million people murdered by communism down to the individual level:

It’s not just a case of the numbers, it’s a case of individual human beings who are striving for the integrity of their family, for freedom for themselves and for equal treatment under the law… To live in, say, a country of Central Europe and hear a knock on the door in the middle of the night [in your apartment building] and not to know who the guards were coming after that night … was the kind of terror that communism conspire could inspire down to the individual level. 

Ed often related personal stories, such as that of his friend Jimmy Lai, the Hong Kong publisher, who has been imprisoned by Chinese Communists for years. His word for people who refuse to countenance the lies of communism was “heroes”:

To live in a communist state, and to speak out, is an incredible form of heroism. To be in the military, to be on the front lines, and know that your life might be snuffed out by a bullet is one thing. But to have the intellectual capability to come out and talk about what is wrong with the system you’re living under, and not know if this will create problems for your family, if this will result in your arrest and removal? This is very hard. 

Ed went on to discuss the unpredictability of living in the Communist surveillance state, as well as the punishment endured by those who “live not by lies”:

It is the ‘unknowns’ of living in these kinds of circumstances where you do not have freedom. No one has the predictability of maintaining a stable family and looking to the future because you don’t know what the future is, or how long there will be a future for your family.[I knew of] a professor of economics in Czechoslovakia who quoted Frederick Hayek in the classroom. Hayek was the great conservative, libertarian rule-of-law economist. The professor was reported to the higher-ups, deprived of his seat as a professor of economics, and was given another job inside the university. It was the job of cleaning out the latrines in the men’s washroom. These kinds of stories are individual humans who I have had the honor of knowing and admiring for so many years, and they are what represents the fight for freedom in my own mind. 

On many occasions, Ed spoke passionately in favor of freedom and against what he called the “horror stories” of Cuba, Venezuela, Russian aggression against Ukraine, the Uyghur genocide in China, and other Communist atrocities.

Looking at America today, and the mission of the Victims of Communism Foundation, he argued: 

Lack of knowledge is a problem. We have to educate future generations of Americans that all of this is not just some historical artifact, that it is very real. It’s continuing, and it’s something that has to concern us today and future generations…the delusions of socialism.

Ed Feulner emphasized that education is important, such as teaching students about how free markets are much more effective in terms of allocating resources because of the rule of law that undergirds the system and the positive outcomes of transactions where each party “wins.” He would often contrast the importance of innovation, private property, and individual choices—such as the interaction between the grocery store owner and customers—with what he called the “great tragedy of communism” where “everyone is impoverished, except a small elite.” And so, for him:

The Victims of Communism Museum’s role is not just to display the horrors of the past, but rather it’s a reminder to the people who’ve come here that it’s incumbent on each of us to act: to be involved, to promote freedom, to promote opportunity, to promote the rule of law, to promote those private institutions of civil society that are the alternatives to government, so that we’re not dependent on big government, wherever that might be. 

Despite the victories of 1989, there remain officially Communist and Communist-legacy regimes today. When asked, “How can we break the cycle of communism,” Ed responded:

Number one: our ideas, the ideas of freedom and opportunity, are better than their ideas. We believe in the aspiration of every human being to do more, to do better, and to give more to his children and to his grandchildren. We believe that people want the opportunity to see their children do better and be better off than they were. That’s what’s so different from communism, and that’s why I’m fundamentally optimistic that, like the past Communist states that have fallen, freedom will win in the end, even in places where it seems like there’s not been a lot of hope. 

Ed always called us to action: 

There are no permanent defeats in the battle for liberty, but there are no permanent victories either. So we have to fight every day and move in the right direction, and that’s why we have founded the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and its Museum, to remember the crimes of communism are not just a number. It has terribly affected individual human beings and individual families around the world. We will tell their stories with an eye towards freedom for everyone, everywhere in the future.

At the age of ten, Ed Feulner was touched by an Austrian student who was shocked by the abundance of the average American household’s kitchen. He saw first-hand how Communists build walls and fences around their own citizens, and how their systems of surveillance, religious oppression, and Gulags crush the human soul. Yet, because he was a believer in liberty, Ed was optimistic about the future and a great admirer of the heroes who stood against communism:

But I’m encouraged when I remember the heroes, the heroes of Budapest in 1956, the heroes of the Prague Spring in 1968, the heroes of Tiananmen Square in 1989, and many, many others across the Communist world. There are so many heroes that people tend to forget. That’s why the Victims of Communism Museum is important. We tell their stories. 

-Dr. Elizabeth Edwards Spalding and Dr. Eric Patterson

*Much of the material for this essay is drawn directly from a previously unreleased video interview with Dr. Ed Feulner at the Victims of Communism Museum in 2022.

Dr. Elizabeth Edwards Spalding is Chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC) and Founding Director of the Victims of Communism Museum. Dr. Eric Patterson is President and CEO of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.