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Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation

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 Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation
File:Victims of communism memorial foundation.png
Formation1983
FoundersZbigniew Brzezinski,Lev Dobriansky,Lee Edwards
HeadquartersWashington,USA
InterestsWorld Anti-Communist League, anti-communism,Xinjiang
MembershipMarion Smith,David Talbot (VOC),Ilona Teleki,Abraham Armstrong,Brittany Balmer,Murray Bessette,Ashlee Davis,Kristina Olney,Carlos Ponce,Edwin J. Feulner,Elizabeth Spalding,James Burnley IV,W. Bruce Weinrod,Marion Smith,Paula J. Dobriansky,Lee Edwards,Ingrid Gregg,Edith K. Lauer,Thomas Peterffy,Donald Ritter,Randal C. Teague,Aldona Wos,Sali Berisha,Emil Constantinescu,Elida Dakoli,Dennis DeConcini,Robert Dole,Carl Gershman,Mart Laar,Vytautas Landsbergis,Charles H. Nalls,Kevin Rochford,John K. Singlaub,Katrina Lantos Swett,Guntis Ulmanis,Armando Valladares,Alan Charles Kors,Peter Boettke,Jonathan Brent,Frank Dikötter,Paul A. Goble,Paul R. Gregory,Hope M. Harrison,John Earl Haynes,Harvey Klehr,Peter Rollberg,Mark Kramer,A. James McAdams,Sean McMeekin,Aaron Rhodes,David Satter,F. Flagg Taylor IV, George Weigel, Adrian Zenz,Jay K. Katzen,Robert Conquest, Richard Pipes, Rudolph Rummel,Jack Kemp,George W. Bush,Michael B. Ryan,Michael Sawkiw,Karl Altau,Richard W. Carlson,Anhthu Lu,Grover G. Norquist,Robert A. Schadler,Radi Slavoff,Michael M. Szporer, PhD,Randal C. Teague,Vladimir Bukovsky, Brian Crozier,Arpad Goncz,Vaclav Havel,Lech Walesa,Harry Wu, Elena Bonner, Lenart Meri,James Denton,Yaroslav Stetsko, William Odom
"Educating Americans about the ideology, history, and legacy of communism."

The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC) was established by the US government in 1993 for the purpose of "educating Americans about the ideology, history, and legacy of communism."

Activities

The VOC's original co-chairman, Yaroslav Stetsko, once led the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists to ally with Nazi Germany alongside Stepan Bandera, who is now a national hero of Ukraine.[1]

The VOC has established Studies and Program Centers "to promote original academic research on historical and contemporary questions"[2], giving people with the preferred views the finances and work space they need.

These experts then go into a self-referencing system, where they attend one another's conferences and seminars, sit on the editorial advisory boards of one another's journals, review and write forewords for their colleagues' books, and cite one another very frequently. Through this mutually supportive network, these experts establish their 'facts" as true and their very similar assumptions and opinions as mere common sense. They are then frequently chosen as the go-to experts by the corporate press.

100 million dead

The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation is particularly interested in concluding with a maximal number of victims.

"Every man or woman living under a communist regime is a victim, since this tyrannical ideology restricts their rights and denies their human dignity. Under this definition, in China alone there are almost 1.4 billion current victims of communism"[3].

The VOC is one of the main proponents of the "commonly cited figure" of "100m million deaths caused by communism", although their estimates go from 42 million to as high as 161 million[4] The VOC also includes all Nazis killed by the Soviets as "victims of communism"[5]

The group also includes all deaths following "Covid-19",[6] which would push the number of victims higher in an arbitrary fashion.

China

The VOC puts out a significant amount of effort into nurturing dissident exile groups, nowadays concentrating on secessionist Tibetan, Uighur, Hong Kong and Taiwanese groups, plus supporting anyone else opposed to the Chinese government.

In October 2019, Adrian Zenz, "a leading expert on Beijing’s minority policies in Tibet and Xinjiang", joined VOC as a Senior Research Fellow in China Studies. Zenz, a Christian fundamentalist who doesn't speak Chinese, is the source of several dubious claims regarding forced interment in the Xinjiang region.

School indoctrination

In 2024, the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a law, the "Crucial Communism Teaching Act"[7], requiring the teaching of material from the VOC. High school students must learn that "communism has led to the death of over 100,000,000 victims worldwide". This figure comes directly from the VOCMF, and the law explicitly states that the VOC should develop the curriculum. In addition, US students are required to learn anti-Chinese narratives, including topics such as "the treatment of the Uighurs", the "actions taken to deter pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong" and "aggressive posture by the People's Republic of China toward Taiwan".[7]

People

The membership has a significant overlap with the US intelligence services. Since the beginning of the Cold War, some of the CIA's closest partners were Eastern European anti-communist exile groups (often collaborators with the Nazi regime). And many of the dissidents who later became leaders of their countries had covert support from Western services. The VOC is a direct continuation of this effort.

The membership also overlaps with the drug kingpin World Anti-Communist League.

The list of members (above) include Senior Staff, Board of Trustees, Advisory Council, Academic Council[8] per 2020, plus some other prominent staff members and some former or deceases members. George W. Bush was honorary chairman in 2007.


References