American Thought Leaders - Venezuela’s Flawed Elections and Latin America’s ‘Axis of Evil’: Eric Patterson

Episode Date: August 27, 2024

Sponsor special: Up to $2,500 of FREE silver AND a FREE safe on qualifying orders - Call 855-862-3377 or text “AMERICAN” to 6-5-5-3-2“The promises of the American experiment and liberty are still what people want, and they are most in tune with what does it mean to be an authentic human being. Communism, on the other hand—it only works by force. It keeps its own people locked away in countries that are essentially gulags. It doesn’t value the human person—the fundamental dignity of men and women as they are.”In this episode, I sit down with Eric Patterson, the president of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, to learn about their research on Venezuela and China.“You could go [to China] for such and such a price and get a new lung or a new liver or something on 24 hours notice. Now, what kind of organ industry can advertise that you can shop around, and on a very, very short notice to get a vitally needed organ?” asks Patterson.We also explore a key flaw in American foreign policy.“We misunderstood how to deal with the Taliban, we misunderstood how to deal with the Iraqis, and so many other places, when we didn’t take seriously the religious milieu in which they live, in which they make decisions,” says Patterson. “And this is also true of secular states like China ... There is a ruling ideology that’s been expressed by President Xi.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

The promises of the American experiment in ordered liberty are most in tune with what does it mean to be an authentic human being. Communism, on the other hand, it only works by force. It keeps its own people locked away in countries that are essentially gulags. Today I sit down with Eric Patterson, the president of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, DOC. In this episode, we look at DOC's work on Venezuela and China and explore a key flaw in American foreign policy. We misunderstood how to deal with the Taliban. We misunderstood how to deal with the Iraqis and so many other places when we didn't take seriously the religious milieu in which they live, in which they make decisions. This is also true of secular states like China. There is a ruling ideology that's been expressed by President Xi,

and we need to understand that if we're going to have a smart U.S. foreign policy. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Before we start, I'd like to take a moment to thank the sponsor of our podcast, American Hartford Gold. As you all know, inflation is getting worse. The Fed raised rates for the fifth time this year. And Fed Chairman Jerome Powell is telling Americans to brace themselves for potentially more pain ahead. But there is one way to hedge against inflation.

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Call 855-862-3377. That's 855-862-3377. Or text AMERICAN to 65532. Again, that's 855-862-3377 or text American to 65532. Again, that's 855-862-3377 or text American to 65532. Eric Patterson, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you for having me on. So victims of communism has been doing a lot of, I guess, making a bit of noise around the whole situation in Venezuela recently. Tell me about where things are on the ground right now.

So Venezuela had a national election on July 28th. This is a big election year in the Western Hemisphere, Mexico, the United States and others, Argentina early in the year. And there's really, it's really a moment of reckoning. We started the year with 13 of the 19 governments in Latin America with socialists in control. And then one fell off, that's Argentina. Venezuela has, we've known for a long time as it would be a contested election because of the heavy-handed authoritarian socialist regime of Nicolas Maduro. And there were a lot of people throughout the region trying to raise the profile, including that's what we did at the Victims of Communism Museum. Op-eds, public testimony, public witness. We couldn't really stand another corrupt election in Venezuela. I have to say, if you think about what the month of July was like

in U.S. politics, you had the NATO summit, you had the assassination attempt on President Trump, the naming of his vice presidential affiliate, J.D. Vance, then the calls for Biden to step down, and the enunciation, in a sense, of a new candidacy in Kamala Harris. July was busy. And then the Olympics. So people were not paying attention to the fact that one of the most important countries in the entire Western Hemisphere was on the verge of an election with a vastly popular opposition set of candidates who were barred from running in the election, and then really a corrupt election on July 28th that the Maduro regime says that they won, but that all the evidence points to the opposition winning. Why is Venezuela one of the most important in the Western Hemisphere?

Yeah, so Venezuela is a country that at one point was a top 10, by some measures a top four economy in the world a generation ago. It has vast petroleum reserves, and it has the longest tradition of really robust democracy in the post-war era of any Latin American country. Now, all of that fell apart when the country was taken over by a socialist political campaign in the late 1990s by Hugo Chavez, who then essentially threw the Constitution and the rule of law out the window. And his party has ruled pretty much unopposed because they've taken over the judiciary, the police, the military, etc. for the past 25 years. So Venezuela is important because it could be a very wealthy country, because it has a strong democratic past. It has a highly educated citizenry,

and they're really a leader in Latin America until the past 20 years. Now they have to import oil. They don't have enough because of corruption and just a terrible infrastructure. They bully their neighbors. They're a center for narco activity. Little Guyana next door discovered vast oil reserves off the coast. Venezuela has created a new federal state over the ocean to get to Guiana's oil. They have a history of being important in all the good ways. They have a recent legacy of being important in all the bad ways. If we look at kind of a miniature axis of evil in Latin America, there are three really terrible points. The first, of course, is this lingering communist regime in Cuba that for

half a century has preyed on its own people. The second is Nicaragua. Nicaragua is another one of these cases where the left did win elections in the 1980s. There was a transition, the Sandinistas, which are Marxist-inspired, but they couldn't win another election through the 1990s. They ultimately came to power about 20 years ago, and they have ferociously enriched themselves, denuded the country, but kept themselves in power. And you may have seen over the last two years, journalists, members of the Catholic Church, evangelical pastors, and even the archbishop stripped of their citizenship, surveilled, kicked out of the country and things. It's a really terrible situation in Nicaragua. Venezuela, I think we've had something

like 400,000 refugees flee the country because of the heavy handedness in the last year. There's some huge number, like 6 million perhaps, if I've got the number right, people have had to leave Venezuela who are living abroad. By the way, only about 1% or 2% of them were allowed to vote in exile in this most recent election on July 28th. So those three countries are destabilizing. They cause refugee flows. They typically look the other way or work with the narco traffickers. Okay, yeah. I mean, before we talk more about kind of the international context, people may wonder, why does Maduro have elections at all? Now, political scientists say there's two kinds of elections. One type is truly representative, where people vote and their viewpoints happen.

They're manifested in who's elected in policy. The other type of election is an instrumental election. In other words, that the process of voting, the regime sees that as reaffirming its hold on power. So it's a symbolic duty, but they don't really plan to have a competitive election. For most of the 20th century, Mexico was like that. The Congress Party in India was like that for many years. Come and vote and rubber-stamp us being in power. And of course, socialist regimes operate that way. Maduro has been under a lot of pressure to stay in a regular election cycle of every six years of having elections. And so that's a part of the civic culture of the country.

But you can have those elections and then rig the results to justify staying in power. And that's really what's happened in this instance. And this is what happened six years ago in another set of flawed presidential elections, Venezuela. And it happened at an unusual time as part of a negotiation that he had with the U.S., as I understand it. Well, there's a lot of pressure within the society to hold elections, but then a demagogue like Maduro just rigs them. And the way that that's happened in this very specific case, the way that we's happened in this very specific case,

the way that we have evidence that this was a bad election, is that Venezuela people go in and they vote with a piece of paper and they put it in the machine and then they leave with a piece of paper that tallies their ballot. So the regime has a set of records, a hard copy records that they will not release, that they've been called on since the very beginning of release. But the opposition through exit polling has that receipt in a sense where people say, this is the way that I voted. And so on the one hand, the regime says, we won, trust us. The people who walked out of the poll said, the other side won. By the way, here's my paper to prove that I voted for the opposition. And so that's what's given a lot of confidence to Venezuelan expats and to the Organization of

American States and the United States and other government agencies to say, wow, this is a flawed election. There's actual evidence to prove it. I had Joe Humeyra on a little while ago about the election, and he was expecting that as time goes, the regime would kind of take the time to provide some fabricated numbers that would go against what the opposition has collected, has tabulated on this special website. And so has any of this happened? Has any of this come out? This isn't the way the regime has been operating. Instead, they just continue to declare that they won.

And then what they're doing is they're doing targeted attacks on people throughout the country. And it's not that they're going after the top leaders of the opposition. They're hitting the poll watcher in this neighborhood. The organizer, three neighborhoods over. It's a kind of state terroristic activity to cow the opposition. The UN is saying that about two dozen people have been killed, but as many as 2,400 have been thrown in jail since the election,

illegitimately by the Maduro regime. So what exactly is the victims of communism's role in South America? I mean, I'm very familiar with some of your work related to China, especially, of course, some of the historical work. There's, of course, the Victims of Communism Museum, now a couple of years old, here in Washington, D.C. So how are you involved in that? Well, so our work is largely in the education space, whether it's school education, university education,

active research, or policy-relevant research, whether it's on China or Taiwan, you know, two very, very different cases, right? Or post-communist legacy, such as in Russia, or in Marxist-inspired regimes and totalitarian regimes, say, in Latin America, whether it's Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, or elsewhere. So in the specific case of Venezuela and Latin America, we have a Latin American team, and they do a variety of things. For instance, in the last month, they have issued a report on torture in Venezuela and a report on the elections in

Venezuela. We have a set of speakers in the Spe and a report on the elections in Venezuela. We have a set of speakers in the Speakers Bureau to inform people on these issues. We've had teams on the ground doing forensic research, in a sense, about these issues, a network of people who are experts on the election. We've set up, for those who are interested, what we call a Venezuela Rising Tracker that started with the election with daily reports from people on the ground. This is what we're seeing. This is what's happening. A very simple Google search of Venezuela Rising Tracker will show that. So what we're trying to do is to be a bridge to provide real information of what's happening from on the ground to news bureaus in Washington

and around the world to the expat community some of which is here in Washington and to link up the the critical information about what's really happening in Venezuela knows I've been thinking a lot recently about I guess the lack of what you would might call public diplomacy among, frankly, a lot of Western nations, U.S. and Canada, my nation as well. And, of course, what you're doing isn't exactly public diplomacy, but it's sort of in that realm, it seems to me anyway. Yeah, you might call it track two diplomacy or just a public awareness campaign. We're a nonprofit and a research institution. We don't lobby.

But what we do do is try to put the facts out there so that governments and the media and other entities can say, oh, this is what international law says about human rights. These are the facts on the ground, whether it's the Uyghur genocide or it's the stolen election of Venezuela, because we see ourselves really as champions for freedom for everybody. We love the Chinese people. We would like for them to be able to make choices for themselves. We love the people of Venezuela, even if we don't have a side in what political parties empower. We just like for them to not be repressed, thrown in jail, lack religious freedom, lack oppressed freedom. So we see ourselves as really on the side of peace and democracy and the common person in these societies.

Yeah. You know, we share a common deep interest in religious freedom. As I've been getting to know you. I've realized that. So just tell me a little bit about your background. You know, first of all, welcome to your role as the newest president of U.S.C., relatively new. You seem to be fitting in very well, but tell me a little bit about where you come from.

Sure, well, I'm really, in a sense, a foreign policy academic, and so I have a background in understanding what is the relationship of religion and culture with how we think about national security affairs and foreign policy. That's a deep interest to me. In my last role, I served for five years in the leadership of the Religious Freedom Institute right here in Washington, and they do a lot of the same great work. And one of the things that was so attractive in my time in VOC is that there

really is a competition between worldviews, that there's a set of ideas that have consequences in foreign policy that are deeply rooted in a sense of what it means to be a nation, what does it mean to be a society, what is our ethnic or religious or cultural identity? And kind of this clash of ideas, particularly ideas that come from the ideologies of socialism and Marxism and communism, on the one hand, and ones that are in the great Judeo-Christian classical heritage of the West. Canada, the USA, a very, what you would call, secularist foreign policies. Almost like you know just don't talk about religion or faith or in a way you know worldview even right because that's obviously that's fundamental and that that creates some restrictions and what you're able to see

potentially. I want to expand on that a little bit. Yeah, this has really been a flaw for U.S. foreign policy. Madeleine Albright, it's hard to believe, but now it's been 25 years since in her autobiography called The Mighty and the Almighty, she criticizes U.S. foreign policy. She says, diplomats of my generation were trained that religion was fire. We shouldn't touch it. You didn't talk about religion. But what she learned when she became Secretary of State and she was dealing with places like Bosnia and Croatia, religious identity was very important there. Religious identity is important in Sudan or in the Middle East. You can't understand what was going on in these conflicts unless you understood the full range of what motivated people, right? I mean, smart diplomacy is a diplomat saying,

well, if it matters to you, I ought to know about it. It ought to matter to me. It doesn't mean I embrace it, but I ought to know about it. One of the struggles we've had in the Middle East for the past 40 years is we haven't taken seriously the religious orientation of groups like the leadership in Iran. And we need to understand that if we're going to have a smart U.S. foreign policy. You mean like bringing that fully into the

foreign policy space or into foreign policy discussions? That's exactly right. And someone could be a secular atheist as a diplomat. It doesn't mean that they have to be a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim. But they would say, you know, it really, really matters to people in North Africa the way that they express their Muslim identity in their politics. I better learn about that. You know, we misunderstood how to deal with the Taliban. We misunderstood how to deal with the Iraqis and so many other places when we didn't take seriously the religious milieu in which they live, in which they make decisions. And, you know, this is also true of

secular states like China. China is not only about trade. There is a ruling ideology that's been expressed by President Xi. And it's very much worth understanding the way that he sees the Chinese in a sense as a socialist nation, that it has a civilizational force to play. It's important to understand this about how President Putin sees the Russian mirror and his role in Russia. The best way to have foreign policy is to have an informed one that takes economics and geography and religion and culture and political history. You want to have a holistic approach. Something just occurred to me, which we haven't talked about before, which is, do you see communism as kind of a quasi-religious ideology?

I do. Now, there are people who say, well, it doesn't meet kind of the classical definition of what a religion is, which is the belief and behavior around the supernatural, the transcendent, a faith or philosophical leader, etc. And then the different parts of what a religion is. But communism is a holistic ideology that says that it has an answer and direction for its adherence in every part of life. Communism has a theory of economics and politics and human anthropology, etc. It is an all-embracing, it's a total atheistic worldview. And it takes on all the practical trappings of religion in the sense that it does have its higher castes. It does have its high priests in a sense. It has its books, its sacred books, like Mao's Red Book. So true believers, of which there

have been many throughout history, true Marxist believers, they operate just like it's a religious faith. I'm thinking of Deng Xiaoping's famous maxim that kind of changed the course of Chinese history after Mao's horrible, horrible economic and, frankly, quasi-genocidal policies, to get rich is glorious. And so since that, a lot of people have said, well, it's not communism anymore. They embraced capitalism. But it's like people forgot all these other dimensions that you just mentioned, right?

That you can imagine a communist system which realizes that in the economic dimension, it fails every time. And so they, you know, kind of unleash some of the local, you know, ingenuity and interest. And so I'm curious if you have thoughts on this. Yeah. And I think both China and post-Soviet Russia are two good expressions of this, because it is true that they do not have a formally communist economy in the sense of the evolution that Marx and Lenin and others said. And they haven't tried to go back to year zero in the way that early Castro, but especially Pol Pot or Mao did. But all that being said, if you look at both what we have in Moscow today and especially in China, in practice, much of the economy is under the control of a small group. So the means of production, to use Marxist terminology, in other words, the economy, is largely controlled, for instance, in Russia by an oligarchy of people with direct ties to Vladimir Putin.

And he can very quickly weigh in on any part of the economic sphere. That centralization, even if it's not quite the same way as Stalinist bureaucrats in 1949 and 1950, that is still the fruit. It's a post-communist society with this element still there. And in the case of China, sure, they did a little bit of opening, but think about how they've done it, not through innovation, but by stealing state secrets and industrial espionage against the West. They have not lived under the rule of law. They copy anything that they can, and then they'll reproduce it. Well, then they have industrial policy to demand that you deliver your IP if you're going to work here. That's right. So that's all, I mean, that's communism 101 in a sense. The economy in a 21st century era is largely managed or controlled or can be

directly intervened in by the CCP. That's not capitalism. It's not real competition in a sense. And then you add on that the slave labor and a variety of things. This is a semi-market economy at a low level, but it's under the control largely of the Chinese Communist Party. That's just a new form of totalitarianism. Yeah, you recently gave a statement to a press event I was at just a few days ago, and so what I'm thinking about here specifically is this billion-dollar Chinese organ industry, or forced organ harvesting for prisoners of conscience. This practice that has been going on for several decades that is very close to me because I've been covering it

basically since 2006. I'm going to quote a section from the statement here. This case highlights the urgent need to address medical atrocities carried out by the Chinese Communist Party. So what the press event was about was something astonishing to me, that there is actually a survivor of this forced organ harvesting practice, which I never expected would ever appear in a million years because of the nature of how this whole organ industry works over there.

So just tell me a little bit about your VOC's response to this. Yeah, so we've had cutting edge research over the past several years, from the Xinjiang police files to peer reviewed work on organ harvesting and things, really focused in, again, on not against the Chinese people, but we're trying to report on how the citizens of China are taken advantage of by their own government, how they're seen as simply a commodity. This has been religious practitioners like Falun Gong.

It has been ethno-religious minorities like Uyghurs and others. Up until 2016, the evidence was right in front of us, at least if you spoke Chinese or could read Chinese, because hospitals were advertising in kind of a, again, a terrible rendition of a market economy, that you could go there for such and such a price and get a new lung or a new liver or something on 24 hours notice. Now, what kind of organ industry can advertise that you can shop around and on a very, very short notice get a vitally needed organ? That can only happen if you have a sort of supermarket Walmart approach where organs are right there, ready on demand. And how was that? And here's how the way evidence works. It's important for people to realize that hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of

people, if they were taken into police custody, would then be blood typed. And there's not really other countries around the world who you're taken into jail and not just fingerprinted or something, but your blood type is checked. And then there was massive disappearances or long-term incarcerations of members of Falun Gong, of Christians, of Uyghurs, of other groups. And the evidence is very compelling that what was happening is that the purpose of the blood typing was to match a donor organ with a person who could pay for it, a party member, an industrialist or something like that. And so you had a terrible system of Chinese or even some apparently tourists coming in, medical, in a sense, and taking advantage of their fellow men and women. Those things came down in 2016, but it appears that that continued beyond 2016. And so that's our reporting, Economist reporting, BBC reporting, university reporting. There's been lots of reports about this. Having watched this for almost two decades,

right, it's very difficult to report on this in a way because there isn't sort of a, there isn't an easy way to tell the story. It's a collection of evidence that provides the evidence, like no one piece of evidence tells the whole story. However, here, incredibly, there's a guy who, you know, you do x-rays on him and you can see that a big substantial chunk of his liver and lung were taken. Multiple medical experts attest to this. Do you have a sense of why these types of issues are not covered as much as one might want to see? Well, they are very disturbing. They happen far away.

And is America even able to be a force for good anymore anyways? It didn't go all that well in the back end of Afghanistan. And we tried so hard. We invested so much money. We really did want to help women and children, average people. And then it didn't go well in the end. Did we make Iraq a better place? And so what I'm hearing from people who are 16, 18, 20, 22 is America spent a lot of lives and treasures trying to help people and it didn't really go all that well. Maybe we just, we don't have a lot of, to use a fancy word, efficacy. In other words, maybe it's just really impossible to affect change so far away in a flawed world. Maybe you ought to stop worrying about it.

Well, that can put us into a very dangerous sense of complacency, a non-love-your-neighbor type of mentality. the world, but we have a role to play to uncover these things, to be witnesses for them, to be champions for citizens around the world who are under the thumb of their own government. You know, there's a lot to fix back home, right? So does it even make sense to be looking outside? Right. How do you react? I'm sure people have told you this, right? Yeah. Well, we can't do everything all the time, but what's an amazing thing is particularly the United States, but also some of our neighbors, are incredibly generous. So through private giving, through churches and charitable organizations, there really is a spirit in the United States, and I think it's still there, of wanting to try to help others. And you see this

across a whole set of what you might call justice initiatives that are out there for young people that they care about. And they don't only care about what's right in their own backyard. There is a sense of having a sense of kind of global responsibility. But all that being said, particularly when you're thinking about a very powerful government like China, or you think about a ruthless dictator who plays by his own rules like Maduro in Venezuela, it is easy to think, well, you know, what can be done? Is there some way to change all this? And the answer is yes. It doesn't mean they have to go to all-out war, but you do what you can do. We have to be telling

the truth about what's happening because we're on the side of humanity. A second thing is we want to be calling on our government officials to be using the levers of statecraft to not prop up these types of governments. We need a much stronger statement by the U.S. and other governments. This should not stand. We're not going to recognize this government. This is wrong. In the case of the organ harvesting or whatever it is, the Uyghurs, et cetera, in the case of China, the United States needs to have a holistic approach to statecraft that says, we've spent way too much time propping the Chinese economy while they steal from us. This isn't populism or nationalism. It's not right or left. This is a just hard-headed realism about a foreign policy that says, you know, China's a competitor. One of the ways that they're a

competitor is they use slave labor to keep prices down. We ought to be thinking really strategically about challenging China, about investing in markets in the Western Hemisphere rather than more in China. It's that type of approach that is going to help people and is going to be in our own national interest. You know, in your statement, I noticed that you endorsed this recently introduced in the Senate Falun Gong Protection Act, which is really an organ harvesting accountability legislation. How does something simple like that help, a small bill? Well, the way that this bill is designed to operate is if it were to pass in the U.S. government, that it would allow U.S. government agencies really to target centers of illicit activity as they understood them. So if they understood that there was a specific individual, a political leader or scientific leader or a business leader that was

directly implicated and that there was evidence, as I understand it, of their participation, that then there could be sanctions, targeted sanctions there against those entities. And that's been a strategy that's worked in other contexts, such as going after terrorists. And so, again, we see ourselves as being on the side of the Chinese people and them not being plucked off the street, detained extrajudiciously, or maybe they make a minor infraction. They have a traffic infraction. Why be blood typed and then perhaps lose their organs for that? Well, or they just believe something that the regime decides is not

allowed, right? Which is really what most of them, for most of them, is the case. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right. You discussed the local reality in Venezuela and some of the countries around there and Cuba's influence, but I'm aware that there's an international influence as well. Maybe you can kind of lay that out a little bit. Yeah, well, a nefarious influence in Latin America is the role of the CCP. And this manifests itself in many ways over the past, really, 20 years. Things such as very, very low interest loans to try to pull some of these poor countries into the Chinese orbit. The willingness of the Chinese government to look the other way on, say, human rights violations in cutting business deals, whereas in the United States, for instance,

with the Leahy Act and other things, we have a set of restrictions on, for instance, government funding of certain things in foreign countries if the leadership of those countries are presumed to have human rights violations in their background. For instance, this has been a sticky point with us and our Colombian allies actually in the past. And most recently what we've seen is a quiet but very persistent bullying on those countries that have recognized Taiwan. So a case from just the summer, just from July 30th, and you can find this in Reuters, you can find it in The Guardian and elsewhere, is reports by congressional delegations, legislators from around the world who went to the

Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, IPAC, their annual meeting. And this year was held in Taiwan. And these are legislators from 23 different countries, in some years it's more, who are very, very worried about China's role in the world. And what was reported by multiple delegations from Latin America, I think a delegate from Slovakia, if I remember right, one from North Macedonia, was that they were being harassed in their official capacity for standing up for Taiwan and for participating in a conference that was seen as anti-Chinese because of China's deplorable record on democracy. And just imagine for a second, on the one hand, it's kind of diplomatic bullying,

but how would you feel to get a personal message on your cell phone arguing that you should not go to this conference that came from Beijing? Or how would you feel to be pulled aside at a diplomatic meeting by a representative of the Chinese government pressing on you, you know, you really should think twice about doing this. You really should think twice before going to Taiwan. You really should think twice about saying anything that's pro-democracy or against the Chinese government. So that type of bullying happens in Geneva. It happens in other places, and it's happened most recently in this IPAC case.

The way this foreign influence works from the Chinese regime, I had a former president of Micronesia, Panouello, on the show a little while ago. And he talked about how when he was at international meetings, for example, of these small states in the region, there was a Chinese diplomat, Chinese ambassador there that would be walking right beside him, whispering into his ear what he should say, what he's allowed to say and what he's not. And of course, he found this outrageous, right? But you can see kind of the level of brazenness, I guess, of some of these

diplomats, especially when they think they have a lot of power in this situation, which obviously here they do. You might ask yourself the question, have I ever heard of one of the Muslim majority countries, places like Indonesia or Saudi Arabia, coming out very, very strongly against China's treatment of its Muslim Uighur population? There hasn't been very much in recent years. In fact, some countries like Turkey have actually returned Uighurs and others to the Chinese regime, even though the people haven't broken any laws. They've been outside the country calling attention to Chinese terrible behavior. What's going on?

And again, it seems to be a mix of very, very urgent, serious, somber talks between Chinese government officials and the officials of these other countries on matters of trade, opening a new port, investment, low-cost loans. China's been very, very good at this. Given that you've been a bit of a student of the realities of communism over the years, maybe more from the religious freedom side, what is the allure of communism? You always hear this, you know, it's never been tried properly. So I'm always flummoxed that anyone could possibly think that the Marxist theories, whether it's the intermediate stage of socialism or of full-fledged communism, that there's anything there that's attractive. And I think it's very, very young people or very, very idealistic people who say, well, the world should be more egalitarian. It should be more equal. And then they just stopped. But they never think through the ramifications for policy

of what are the concrete, actionable steps you take to make the world a better place. But it is a lie to say that communism has never been tried because the Soviets, Lenin and then Stalin, had total power, the demigod-like status. The North Koreans, the Kim family, actually have created a mystical aura around themselves as if they're divine beings. The dictators of Albania during the Cold War shot documentary films saying that the rest of the world was starving and that people in Europe's poorest country, Albania, had it much better than anyone else. The rest of the world was in a great depression. And then they had 30 years to try the experiment of communism. China's been doing communism since 1949. And you have to ask

yourself, is a country today where there's one to two million people have been through the concentration camps, where if you were just to express your faith in public, you could be thrown in jail. In a country with a one-child policy, I mean, are their lives really better in any of these cases? So communism has been tried, but they have to build walls. They have to build up barbed wire to keep their people in, right? There's no vast immigration to Cuba. There's no vast immigration to Vietnam. Those people want to get out.

They want to leave. That's the evidence. So anyone who believes what's clearly a lie, that communism has some sort of, it just hasn't been tried. Look at Cuba. Look at North Korea. Look at China. It's been tried. And every single time, it's bad ideas that then are institutionalized to crush the majority of the citizenry. I think a lot of people out there believe today that China's actually figured it out. I mean that. There's a kernel of truth to it. I'm curious what you think, that it's lifted the Chinese regime, the CCP has lifted a billion people out of poverty.

So it hasn't been successful in your mind. I mean, I understand how you're looking at it, but a lot of people would say it has been. No communist approach has raised the standard of living of its people over decades. Instead, what has happened, as we see some standard of living going up in Vietnam, for instance, they had to liberalize their economy. In other words, they violated the principles

of state control and communism, and they allow an opening, a small opening, for people to act with innovation and with personal responsibility outside the tight control of the party. That's what's happened in Cuba. Cuba cannot feed its own people. That's why it's had riots annually since 2021. What does it do? It slightly opens a few things, lets foreign capital to come in. And the reason is the ideas of communism have never, over a longer period of time,

were able to produce innovation, to go ahead in the sciences, to go ahead in agriculture in ways that make a difference for their people. Every time it's ruthlessly imposed, you get the killing fields like in Cambodia, you get famine like you got in China, you get the killing fields like in Cambodia. You get famine like you got in China. You get the economy falling apart like in Cuba. So anytime there's prosperity, they're stealing innovation from someplace else. And a small group is prospering. And they're allowing some sort of free market to happen.

That's not communism. So you might think, you know, I thought Eric said, I mean, China's really communist. And now I hear him saying, well, maybe there's some freedom there. So what I'm saying is, is that when it's in the interest of the elites, and they recognize that the that all of their economic theory just really doesn't work, what do they do? Well, they will often steal technology from someplace else or they will allow very, very low working conditions for their own workers to let foreign capital come in and benefit from that. Or they'll allow a little bit of

limited but managed entrepreneurship. What they're not doing is saying, okay, go for it. We're gonna get the state out of this. What you find so often is that right behind the scenes is the Chinese Communist Party either getting kickbacks or they own the businesses at the macro level or they're highly involved. This is not a free market. What they'll do is they'll manage, they'll kind of wall off a little area for it to be those types of growth. And here's the question just comes down to over time is, can people make choices for themselves? And are people free to make choices, including choices to say, immigrate or to leave or to vote for a different political party and things? All of

those things, even if there's a little bit of economic vitality that's allowed, right behind the scenes, overseeingeing it willing to pull it back in at any given time is the CCP as we finish up I really enjoyed doing you know some years back now the episode with Elizabeth Spalding the curator of the VOC Museum I'm just curious as you know how things have developed since that time for the museum and it's somewhere I recommend people visit. Well, thank you. Elizabeth Spalding's the chairman of our board and was the founding museum director for the museum, a great academic in her own right. We opened the museum here in Washington DC in July of 2022.

So we've just celebrated our second birthday with the museum. It's near the White House right across the street from the McPherson Square exit, Metro stop and it's free and open to the public Tuesdays through Saturdays. And what the museum does is it has three galleries that tell the history of communism in the 20th century and the hundred million people murdered by communism during that time. And then we have a temporary gallery where we every quarter move through really a national story of overcoming communism. We had one about the induced famines that killed 3 million and things from Lithuanian life during the Cold War, such as making churches into gymnasiums or keeping the music of a folk song but having to add Soviet type of lyrics to it to praise the comrade chairman or whatever. Our next exhibit, which opens next week, is on Venezuela, and particularly on the crimes of the regime attacking students and teachers

and normal citizens who were standing up for the right to vote or standing against oppression in the country. It's a very powerful exhibit. I just went through. They're assembling it today, and it will be open by August 16th or August 16th or 17th of this year so we invite people to come. Let me say one other thing about the museum and that is is that it's also an art museum. We have 50 paintings by a trained artist named Nikolai Getman who spent eight years in the Soviet Gulag in the late

40s and in the 1950s. Over the next four decades, he painted 50 brilliantly colored kind of semi-expressionist paintings about life in the Gulag, mining for gold by hand, people being on short rations, having to work out in the fields. It is a magnificent collection. And bring your earbuds. You can listen to an audio tour of the paintings through your cell phone on your earphones. So thanks for bringing it up. It's a fantastic place. It's a beautiful place, and it's a great learning tool for families and for students and for the interested public. Well, I'll be very excited to see the Venezuela exhibit once it's up. A final thought as we finish? I'd just say that, you know, we live in a time where there are questions about the resilience of democracy and what is American

society about. I think everybody should just slow down and take a deep breath. Maybe read the Declaration of Independence or read a letter from Birmingham jail by Martin Luther King Jr. or read Lincoln's second inaugural address, or just the short Gettysburg Address, I think that you'd find that the beauties of American history and American civic life, and the fact that America's been a champion for the rights of others all around the world, that there's actually deep, deep wellsprings of both freedom and opportunity that are part of the American experience. And that we ought to be renewing that in our civic culture and recognize that we never want to impose that on anyone else,

but that there's a reason that millions and millions of people want to try to come to the United States. And that's because this idea of human dignity and opportunity in all of its manifestations, the right to assemble, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, et cetera, that's a beautiful gift that people want all around the world. And we have something very, very precious here in the United States that's worth conserving, but it's also worth defending. And so I would just say that actually I have a lot of hope for the future because the promises of the American experiment in order of liberty are still what people want. And they are most in tune with what does it mean to be an

authentic human being. Communism, on the other hand, it only works by force. It keeps its own people locked away in countries that are essentially gulags. It doesn't value the human person, the fundamental dignity of men and women as they are. And so just like we had beautiful, peaceful revolutions that brought communist Bulgaria and communist Poland to their knees in 1989. I believe we're going to see that happen in Cuba, in Venezuela, in Vietnam, and even China in the years ahead. Well, Eric Patterson, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you. Thank you very much for hosting. Thank you all for joining Eric Patterson and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.