I. A Quiet Doorway in D.C.

I wasn’t planning to visit a museum that day. Between meetings in downtown Washington, D.C., I passed a small sign I’d never noticed before: Victims of Communism Museum. On instinct, I stepped in.

What I found inside stunned me.

Stories of starvation in Maoist China. Executions in Stalin’s USSR. Repression in Cuba, Cambodia, North Korea.

Each room revealed another layer of cruelty committed in the name of utopia — and memorialized the more than 100 million people killed under communist regimes in the past century.

That figure isn’t speculation — it’s the consensus of historians and institutions like The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, and reflected in reports by scholars like The Heritage Foundation.

And yet, few people talk about it.

The museum itself only opened in 2022, after three decades of effort by advocates and historians like Lee Edwards. Multiple attempts failed. Funding dried up. The topic was, and still is, politically radioactive. But the truth persisted.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

— George Santayana, The Life of Reason (1905)

I walked back into the sun with that quote echoing in my mind. Not as a cliché — but as a warning.

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