Vaclav Havel was a great champion of liberty whose rhetorical blows shattered the Iron Curtain and brought about the collapse of communism in Eastern and Central Europe.
As a founder of Charter 77, as the leader of Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution in 1989, and as the first president of that once hard-line communist satellite, Havel demonstrated over and over again the power of words to bring down seemingly invincible foes.
Public distrust of unchecked centralized government is a very good thing.
Consider the legacy of communism, a system that uses unbridled centralized state power in order to maintain its grip. The more than 100 million victims of communism provide ample evidence of this fact.
Among communism's chief tools is a penal system for those who resist conformity with its prescription for utopia.
by The Editors of Veterans of Foreign Wars USA
The Cold War has been lost to history, only a dim memory to all but a few.
According to a citizenship test administered by Newsweek and reported in the March 28 & April 4, 2011, edition, a whopping 73% of Americans could not identify communism as the ideology America opposed during the Cold War.
As Fred Kempe recently wrote in his book, Berlin 1961, "The Cold War is still the least understood and worst reported of our three world wars." Judging from the Newsweek revelation, this is apparently so.
The presidential proclamations commemorating National Captive Nations Week—the third week of every July–are a revealing reflection of U.S. foreign policy over the past 50 years and America’s sometimes hard, sometimes soft attitude toward those who suppress the basic human rights of peoples and nations.
On the Occasion of Rally In Support Of Liu Xiaobo
Washington, D.C. December 10, 2010
Dear Dr. Edwards, Chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation,
I write this letter on the occasion of the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to
Liu Xiaobo and the demonstration you are holding on his behalf in Washington
DC.
Less than a month ago, we saw the release of Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma. She had
spent most of past 21 years under house arrest. She was awarded the Nobel Peace
On the Occasion of Rally In Support Of Liu Xiaobo
Washington, D.C. December 10, 2010
Dear Dr. Edwards, Chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation,
I write this letter on the occasion of the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to
Liu Xiaobo and the demonstration you are holding on his behalf in Washington
DC.
Less than a month ago, we saw the release of Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma. She had
spent most of past 21 years under house arrest. She was awarded the Nobel Peace
The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation strongly condemns the persecutions of the Con Dau parishioners by the Vietnamese communist regime, which resulted in the death of Nam Nguyen from the beatings that he received at the hands of the police on July 1st, 2010.
This latest incident is part of the intensified repression of the Con Dau Parish since early this year. The local authorities announced their plan to relocate the residents of this 135 year old Parish, as well as its cemetery, to build a tourist resort.
Washington, D.C. – The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation will commemorate the 3rd anniversary of the Victims of Communism Memorial with a wreath laying ceremony on Thursday, June 10th, at 10 a.m. The ceremony will take place on Capitol Hill at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. and New Jersey, N.W.
At least 12 foreign embassies plus nearly 20 ethnic organizations will lay wreaths in honor of the more than 100 million victims of communism.
A specter is haunting the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia—
a $50,000 bust of the Soviet dictator and mass murderer Joseph Stalin.
Clearly, the National D-Day Memorial Foundation knows it made a monumental mistake by including Stalin in its Memorial. It tried to justify its action by adding a plaque citing the tyrant’s “tens of millions of victims” and then to minimize it by privately installing the bust five days before the formal dedication of the D-Day Memorial on June 6.
Lee Edwards, Ph.D.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, statues of Joseph Stalin have been torn down all over Europe and even in the former Soviet Union itself. The world is closer than ever before to a consensus on the evils of communism and Stalin's primary role in the worst crimes of the last century. And yet a statue of Stalin is included in the National D-Day Memorial, to be dedicated in Bedford, Virginia, this Sunday, June 6.
