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By: Daniel Nardini
The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation realized that they could not build an actual museum that documented the crimes, atrocities and brutality of the Communist system. Even with what money they could raise, they could not raise anything on the scale to buy choice land in or near Washington, D.C., secure contractors to build a huge new facility or renovate a building that may still be there, pay for the exhibits, install all the utilities necessary, and hire staff. In short, it would have been a gargantuan task that required way more money than could possibly be raised for such a museum. Besides, the Victims of Communism Foundation has to use what money it has to research, document and fund other projects related to the study of the Communist system and what the Communist movement and Communist regimes have done over the decades. The Victims of Communism Foundation also has to gather the physical evidence of Communism's crimes and atrocities---not an easy thing since current and former Communist nations still want to keep the past under lock and key.
So the answer is the establishment of an online virtual museum on Communism. In short, a stroke of brilliance. To open in January of 2009, the online museum on Communism, officially called the Global Museum on Communism, will document what the Communist system is, in what countries the Communist system functioned in, and most of all how the Communist system slaughtered tens of millions of people through executions, the slave labor camps, mock show trials, wars of aggression, and genocide. No other system has such a bloody record like Communism---not even Nazism and Fascism. In the end it is estimated that 100 million people were exterminated by the Communist regimes in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America. The figure might in fact be even higher. The new online museum will document all of this, and how such a system was able to spread throughout a fourth of the whole world at one time.
Tens of millions of lives have been forever scarred by this system, yet ironically most people in the world today have never lived under Communism and hence will never know what the system is like. More than that, they will never have lived under a system where no one individual can be neutral. From birth, an individual must conform to a strict, regimated pattern of behavior and norms. They cannot just go along and the system will leave them alone---the Communist system made sure that every individual participated "enthusiastically" in all events, activities and political meetings to make sure that the individual was engaged and was molded into an "acceptable comrade." Those who could not meet the standard were "not good Communists." Worse, if someone "questioned" the wisdom of the Party, they were put in jail and tortured until they again "conformed." And if an individual started to actually dissent, that person faced torture, slow starvation in a slave labor camp, intense political meetings and sleep deprivation, bone-breaking physical slave labor, and physical isolation.
This could go on for years, and since the Communist parties in all Communist countries controlled the judiciary, no individual could escape "punishment." In the end 99 percent of all individuals were broken and were returned to society. Those who still resisted were executed or more frequently were slowly starved to death. It was a very effective and cruel system that left very few people standing indeed. In 99 percent of the cases, the only way an individual could live to tell the tale was by escaping. But the Communist authorities had already considered this possibility, and so crossing the borders of even other Communist states was hazardous for any individual, let alone to the non-Communist world. So only a tiny minority have survived to describe the full horrors of the Communist system in whatever country they originated from. But even then the fact that even a minority have been able to survive, not be broken by the system and somehow escape is a true triumph of the human spirit. What is also no small miracle is that eventually whole groups of people and even nations rose up against their Communist oppressors and got rid of their Communist overlords. This occurred in Europe, Africa and eventually the birthplace of the Communist system itself the former Soviet Union.
There is no other force that has killed so many people, destroyed so many parts of our world, committed genocide in so many places, and brought so much tragedy and misery to humanity in such a short time as the Communist system. Unlike Nazism and Fascism, Communism's atrocities and evils are not as well known nor as publicized although much progress in the study of Communism has taken place in the past 20 years. And unlike Fascism, the Communist system is still very much around to haunt the world. China is the largest and most powerful Communist regime today. Then there are Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba. North Korea is a throw-back to the worst barbarities of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin's rule in the former Soviet Union. And in the early 21st Century, we are seeing Communism making a come-back in countries in Latin America such as Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua. So the monster is far from dead, and so it is more important than ever to have a museum on the evils of Communism---even if it is simply an online one. For more information on the coming online Global Museum on Communism, go to the website www.victimsofcommunism.org.
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