Expert warns: Communism is alive, well and dangerous

Communism is not only not dead, it's alive and well and still very dangerous.

That's the sober warning Lee Edwards, a veteran conservative journalist, scholar and expert on communism, delivered to about 60 people Wednesday at a Duquesne Club lecture sponsored by St. Vincent College's Center for Economic and Policy Education.

The Soviet Union has disappeared and Eastern Europe is free, said Edwards, a distinguished fellow at the Heritage Foundation think tank.

But hardline communist governments still rule with brutal force in China, North Korea and Cuba, and an opinion poll in Russia recently found that a majority of the people there felt that Stalin did more good than bad during his time in power.

Edwards said that China is torturing dissidents and putting Catholics and Christians in labor camps because of religious beliefs. And Castro's Cuba is cracking down hard on dissent and exporting communist-style terrorism to South American countries like Ecuador and Brazil.

Many of the roots of today's terrorism go back to communism, Edwards said.

It was the Soviet Union and its proxy states - Iraq, Syria, Libya, Cuba and North Korea -- that built up the first terrorist networks between 1960 and '80. Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization was initially funded by the Soviets, he said.

A major reason communism is still alive, Edwards said, is that its true nature is only dimly understood by the mass of Americans.

While everything from movies and books to the Holocaust Museum have shown the murderous, evil nature of Nazism, he said, communism's equally brutal nature has not been given the same attention from the creative and cultural community.

"Where are the books and movies about the communist holocaust that took 100 million lives?" he asked.

Edwards is chairman of the Victims of Communism Foundation, which plans to erect a memorial in Washington, D.C., to commemorate the estimated 100 million men, women and children who were killed by communist dictators in China, the Soviet Union and elsewhere during the 20th century.

The $100 million Victims of Communism Memorial, which Edwards says the foundation hopes to open in 2007, also will educate young people about the true nature of communism and serve as a permanent reminder to them to be on guard against its return.

The bipartisan foundation ( victimsofcommunism.org ) includes Zbigniew Brzezinski, Lech Walesa and Jesse Helms on its various advisory boards and has a congressional promise of a site inside the Beltway.