Recommitting Ourselves to the Freedom of Captive Nations

VOC’s President and CEO, Dr. Eric Patterson, writes for Providence Magazine on the importance of striving for freedom for those still living in communist countries.

As Dr. Patterson writes, “since 1959, Congress has designated the third week of July as Captive Nations Week.  This commemoration, marked annually by a presidential proclamation, is a remembrance that too few Americans are aware of. Indeed, at first hearing, the expression ‘captive nations’ may seem melodramatic.  But, when one considers the tens of millions of human beings who are literally in captivity under brutal governments – Cubans, Chinese Uyghurs, Venezuelans, Belarussians, and others – the term captive is clear and apt.

Captive Nations Week calls us to take action on behalf of the rights of citizens around the world.  When Congress originated the idea in 1953, Communism was marching forward to enslave more people, from the deaths of four million people due to North Korea’s invasion of South Korea (1950-1953), to Soviet gulags and Chinese concentration camps, to the vicious crackdown on East Germans in June 1953.   A joint action of Congress (Public Law 86-90, July 17, 1959) asserted the natural sympathy that freedom-loving Americans had for those enslaved by Communist imperialism:

The Act called upon the president to issue an annual proclamation championing the rights of the oppressed. President Dwight D. Eisenhower and each of his successors have obliged.  The first such proclamation in 1959 rightly asserted that Soviet communism was ‘imperialistic and aggressive,’ depriving many of their ‘national independence and their civil liberties.”’ Eisenhower went on to declare solidarity with the captives: 

Whereas the greatness of the United States is in large part attributable to its having been able, through the democratic process, to achieve a harmonious national unity of its people… 

Whereas this harmonious unification of the diverse elements of our free society has led the people of the United States to possess a warm understanding and sympathy for the aspirations of peoples everywhere and to recognize the natural interdependency of the peoples and nations of the world; 

Whereas the enslavement of a substantial part of the world’s population by Communist imperialism makes a mockery of the idea of peaceful coexistence between nations and constitutes a detriment to the natural bonds of understanding between the people of the United States and other peoples…

President Biden’s 2023 proclamation recognized that despite the fall of the Soviet Union a generation ago, we still live in an era of captive nations.

But the battle against oppression did not end with the Cold War.  The forces of autocracy continue to reassert themselves.  In Iran, Belarus, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the People’s Republic of China, and elsewhere, we are seeing an all too familiar contempt for the rule of law, for democracy, for human rights, and even for the truth itself.  This is all too evident in Russia’s brutal aggression against its neighbor Ukraine and in the Ukrainian people’s courageous defense of their sovereignty, freedom, land, and lives. 

Read the full article in Providence Magazine.

Dr. Eric Patterson is President and CEO of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.