Venezuela’s Flawed Elections and Latin America’s ‘Axis of Evil’: Eric Patterson

[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “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.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Eric Patterson, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Eric Patterson:
Thank you for having me, Jan.

Mr. Jekielek:
The Victims of Communism has been making a bit of noise around the whole situation in Venezuela recently. Please tell us where things are on the ground right now.

Mr. Patterson:
Venezuela had a national election on July 28th. This is a big election year in the Western Hemisphere for Mexico and the United States and others. Argentina was earlier in the year. It’s really a moment of reckoning. We started the year with 13 of the 19 governments in Latin America with socialists in control. Then one fell off, the country of Argentina. Venezuela has had a contested election, because of the heavy-handed authoritarian socialist regime of Nicolas Maduro.

There are a lot of people throughout the region trying to raise the profile on this. That’s what we did at the Victims of Communism Museum with op-eds, public testimony, and public witnesses. We couldn’t really stand another corrupt election in Venezuela. Think about what the month of July was like in U.S. politics. You had the NATO summit, the assassination attempt on President Trump, and the naming of his vice-presidential pick, J.D. Vance. Then the calls for Biden to step down and the announcement of the candidacy of Kamala Harris. Then there were the Olympics.

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. Then there was a really corrupt election on July 28th that the Maduro regime says that they won, but that all the evidence points to the opposition winning.

Mr. Jekielek:
Why is Venezuela one of the most important elections in the Western Hemisphere?

Mr. Patterson:
Venezuela is a country that at one point was a top ten, and by some measures, a top four economy in the world just 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 country into a deadlock. Venezuela is a country that at one point 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.

Venezuela is important because it could be a very wealthy country. It has a strong democratic past, it has a highly educated citizenry, and they’re really a leader in Latin America. Now, they have to import oil. They don’t have enough because of corruption and a terrible infrastructure. They bully their neighbors. They’re a center for narcotics activity.

The small country of Guyana next door discovered vast oil reserves off the coast. Venezuela has created a new federal state over the ocean to get to Guyana’s oil. They had 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 the 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 to the Sandinistas, which are Marxist-inspired, but they couldn’t win another election through the 1990s. They ultimately came to power in the 1980s. They came to power about 20 years ago, and they have ferociously enriched themselves, denuded the country, but kept themselves in power.

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, and kicked out of the country. It’s a really terrible situation in Nicaragua. Venezuela had 400,000 refugees flee the country because of the heavy handedness in the last year. There are 6 million people who have left Venezuela and are living abroad. By the way, only about one or two percent of them were allowed to vote in exile in this most recent election on July 28th. Those three countries are destabilizing and they cause refugee flows. They typically look the other way or work with the narco traffickers.

Mr. Jekielek:
Before we talk about the international context, people may wonder why Maduro even has elections at all.

Mr. Patterson:
Political scientists say there are two kinds of elections. One type is truly representative where people vote and their viewpoints are heard and manifest in who is elected. The other type of election is an instrumental election. In other words, the regime sees the process of voting as reaffirming its hold on power. 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, saying, “Come and vote and rubber stamp us being in power.” Of course, socialist regimes operate that way. Maduro has been under a lot of pressure to have a regular election every six years. 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. That’s really what’s happened in this instance, and this is what happened six years ago in another set of elections. It was a flawed presidential election in Venezuela.

Mr. Jekielek:
It happened at an unusual time, as part of a negotiation that he had with the U.S.

Mr. Patterson:
There’s a lot of pressure within the society to hold elections, but then a demagogue like Maduro just rigs them. In this very specific case, we have evidence that this was a bad election. In Venezuela, people go in and they vote with a piece of paper, and they put it in the machine. Then they leave with a piece of paper, and they vote with a piece of paper that tallies their ballot. The regime has a hard copy of the records that they will not release. They’ve been called on since the very beginning to release them. But through exit polling, the opposition has the receipts in a sense, where people have said, “This is the way that I voted.”

On the one hand, the regime says, “We won, trust us.” The people who walked out of the polls said. “Our side won. By the way, here’s my paper to prove that I voted for the opposition.” That’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 that this is a flawed election. There is actual evidence to prove it.

Mr. Jekielek:
Joseph Humire was on the show about this election, and he was expecting that as time goes by, the regime would provide some fabricated numbers that would go against what the opposition has tabulated on this special website. Has any of this happened? Has any of this come out?

Mr. Patterson:
This isn’t the way the regime has been operating. Instead, they continue to declare that they won and they’re doing targeted attacks on people throughout the country. It’s not that they’re going after the top leaders of the opposition. They’re hitting the poll watcher in this neighborhood and the organizer three neighborhoods over. It is state terroristic activity to cow the opposition. The U.N. is saying that about two dozen people have been killed, but as many as 2,400 have been illegitimately thrown in jail by the Maduro regime since the election.

Mr. Jekielek:
What is your organization’s role in South America? I’m very familiar with your work related to China, especially the historical work. The Victims of Communism Museum here in Washington, D.C. is now a couple of years old. How are you involved in that?

Mr. Patterson:
Our work is largely in education; school education, university education, and active research. We also do policy-relevant research on China and Taiwan, two very different cases. We look at post-communist legacy, such as in Russia. We study Marxist-inspired regimes in Latin America, whether it’s Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, or elsewhere.

In the 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 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, the Venezuela Rising Live Tracker that started during the election, with daily reports from people on what they are seeing and what is happening.

A very simple Google search of Venezuela Rising Live Tracker will bring it up. We’re providing real information of what’s happening on the ground in Venezuela to news bureaus in Washington and around the world, to the expat community, some of which is here in Washington. We want to provide the critical information about what’s really happening in Venezuela.

Mr. Jekielek:
Recently, there has been a lack of public diplomacy among, frankly, a lot of Western nations. What you’re doing isn’t exactly public diplomacy, but you might call it track two diplomacy or a public awareness campaign.

Mr. Patterson:
We’re a non-profit and a research institution and we don’t lobby. We try to put the facts so that governments and the media and other entities can say, “This is what international law says about human rights. These are the facts on the ground, whether it’s the Uyghur genocide or the stolen election in Venezuela. We see ourselves as the 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. We don’t take sides with political parties, we just like for them to not be repressed, thrown in jail, lack religious freedom, or lack press freedom. We see ourselves as on the side of peace and democracy and the common person in these societies.

Mr. Jekielek:
We share a common interest in religious freedom. First of all, welcome to your role as the new president of VOC [Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation]. Can you tell us about your background?

Mr. Patterson:
I am a foreign policy academic. 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 of deep interest to me. In my last role, I served for five years in the leadership of the Religious Freedom Institute here in Washington, and they do a lot of the same great work. One of the things that was so attractive in my time in VOC was looking at the competition between world views.

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? There is a clash of ideas, particularly the 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.

Mr. Jekielek:
The U.S. has a secular foreign policy. We don’t talk about religion or faith or even worldview, which is obviously fundamental. I would like to expand on that.

Mr. Patterson:
Yes, this has really been a flaw for U.S. foreign policy. It’s hard to believe, but it’s now been 25 years since Madeleine Albright, in her autobiography called, “The Mighty and the Almighty,” criticized U.S. foreign policy. She said, “Diplomats of my generation were trained that religion was fire and we shouldn’t touch it. You didn’t talk about religion.” When she became Secretary of State, she was dealing with places like Bosnia and Croatia, and she learned that religious identity was very important there. Religious identity is important in Sudan and in the Middle East. You couldn’t understand what was going on in these conflicts, unless you understood the full range of what motivated people.

Smart diplomacy means that a diplomat says, “If it matters to you, I have to know about it, and it should matter to me. That doesn’t mean that I embrace it, but I should 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. We need to understand that if we’re going to have a smart U.S. foreign policy.

Mr. Jekielek:
Do you mean fully bringing that into the foreign policy space or into foreign policy discussions?

Mr. Patterson:
Yes, that’s exactly right. As a diplomat, someone could be a secular atheist. It doesn’t mean that they have to be a Christian or a Jew or Muslim. But they would think, “In North Africa, the way they express their Muslim identity in their politics really matters to people. I better learn about that.” 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 and make decisions.

This is also true of secular states like China. China is not only about trade, there is also a ruling ideology that has been expressed by President Xi. It’s very much worth understanding the way that he sees the Chinese government. It’s very much worth understanding the way he sees the Chinese as a socialist nation that has a civilizational role to play. It’s important to understand 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 in economics and geography and religion and culture and political history. You want to have a holistic approach.

Mr. Jekielek:
Do you see communism as kind of a quasi-communism?

Mr. Patterson:
I do. There are people who say that it doesn’t meet the classical definition of what a religion is, which is the belief and behavior around the supernatural, the transcendent, a faith, or a philosophical leader. But communism is a holistic ideology that says that it has an answer for what a religion is. It’s a holistic ideology that says it has an answer for every part of life.

Communism has a theory of economics and politics and human anthropology. It is an all-embracing, totally atheistic worldview. It takes on all the practical trappings of religion in the sense that it does have its higher castes and its high priests. It has its sacred books like Mao’s Red Book. True Marxist believers, of which there have been many throughout history, operate just like it’s a religious faith.

Mr. Jekielek:
Deng Xiaoping’s famous maxim changed the course of Chinese history after Mao’s horrible economic and genocidal policies. He said, “To get rich is glorious.” Since then, many people don’t believe it is communism anymore. They say that the Chinese have embraced capitalism. It’s like people forgot all these other dimensions that you just mentioned. Do you have any thoughts on this?

Mr. Patterson:
Yes. Both China and post-Soviet Russia are two good expressions of the Chinese-Russian relationship. It is true that they do not have a formal, communist economy in the sense of an evolution from Marx and Lenin. They haven’t tried to go back to year zero in the way that early Castro, Pol Pot, or Mao did.

That being said, if you look at both what we have in practice in Moscow today, and especially in China, much of the economy is under the control of a small group. The means of production, to use Marxist terminology, is largely controlled by an oligarchy.

In Russia, it is people with direct ties to Vladimir Putin. He can very quickly weigh in on any part of the economic sphere. Even if it’s not quite the same way as the Stalinist bureaucrats in 1949 and 1950, it still has that centralization. It’s a post-communist society with this communist element still in there.

In the case of China, they did a little bit of opening up. But think about how they’ve done it. It was not through innovation, but by stealing state secrets and by industrial espionage against the West. They have not lived under the rule of law. They will copy anything that they can, and then they will reproduce it.

Mr. Jekielek:
They have a policy that you have to turn over your intellectual property if you’re going to do business there.

Mr. Patterson:
That’s right. In a sense, that is communism 101. Their economy in the 21st century is largely managed or controlled by the CCP [Chinese Communist Party]. That’s not capitalism and it’s not real competition. Then you add on the slave labor and a variety of other factors. At a low level, this is a semi-market economy, but it’s under the control of the Chinese Communist Party. It’s just a new form of totalitarianism.

Mr. Jekielek:
You made a statement at a recent press event about the billion-dollar Chinese organ transplant industry. It was about forced organ harvesting for prisoners of conscience, a practice that has been going on for several decades. I’m going to quote a portion of your statement, “This case highlights the urgent need to address medical atrocities carried out by the Chinese Communist Party.” At the press event, there was a survivor of this forced organ harvesting practice. Please tell us about the VOC’s response to this.

Mr. Patterson:
We have had cutting-edge research over the past several years from the Xinjiang police files to peer reviews. We’ve done ongoing work on this forced organ harvesting issue. We are trying to report on how the citizens of China are taken advantage of by their own government, and how they’re seen as simply a commodity. This crime has been committed on religious practitioners like Falun Gong and ethno-religious minorities like the Uyghurs. Up until 2016, the evidence was right in front of us. If you spoke Chinese or could read Chinese, hospitals were advertising, in 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 with a 24-hour notice.

What kind of organ industry can advertise that you can shop around and on very short notice get a vitally needed organ? That can only happen if you have a supermarket approach where organs are right there, ready on demand. How could this happen? Here’s how the evidence works. Hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of people, if they were taken into police custody, would then be blood-typed. There are no other countries around the world where you’re taken into jail and have your blood type checked.

Then there were massive disappearances of people. There were long-term incarcerations of members of Falun Gong, of Christians, of Uyghurs, and of other groups. The evidence is very compelling that the purpose of the blood typing was to match a donor organ with a person who could pay for it, like a party member or an industrialist. You had this terrible system of Chinese or even some tourists coming in for this medical tourism and taking advantage of their fellow men and women.

Those hospital advertisements came down in 2016, but it appears that this crime has continued beyond 2016. That’s from our reporting, the Economist’s reporting, the BBC’s reporting, and university reporting. There have been many reports about this.

Mr. Jekielek:
It’s very difficult to report on this, because there isn’t an easy way to tell the story. It’s the collection of evidence that provides the story, but no one piece of evidence tells the whole story. However, this survivor at the press event had x-rays done, and a substantial chunk of his liver and lung had been taken out. Multiple medical experts attest to this. Do you have a sense of why these types of issues are not covered as much?

Mr. Patterson:
They are very disturbing and they happen far away. Is America even able to be a force for good anymore? It didn’t go all that well in the back end of Afghanistan, where we had tried so hard and invested so much money. We really did want to help women, children, and average people, and it didn’t go well in the end. Did we make Iraq a better place? What I’m hearing from people who are 16, 18, 20, and 22-years-old is that America spent a lot of lives and treasure trying to help people, and it didn’t go all that well. Maybe we just don’t have a lot of efficacy, to use a fancy word.

In other words, maybe it’s just really impossible to affect change so far away in a flawed world. Maybe we ought to stop worrying about it. That can also put us into a very dangerous sense of complacency, a non-love your neighbor type of mentality. It’s not that we need to go crusading all around 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.

Mr. Jekielek:
People say that there’s a lot to fix back home and does it make sense to be looking outside? How do you react to this sentiment?

Mr. Patterson:
We can’t do everything all the time. But an amazing thing is that the United States, but also some of our neighbors, are incredibly generous. Through private giving, through churches and charitable organizations, there really is a spirit in the United States of wanting to try to help others. You can see this across a whole set of justice initiatives that are out there for young people that they care about. They don’t only care about what’s right in their own backyard, there is a sense of having global responsibility.

But all that being said, when you’re thinking about a very powerful government like China, or a ruthless dictator who plays by his own rules like Maduro in Venezuela, it is easy to think, “What can be done? Is there some way to change all this?” 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.

The second thing is that we want to be calling on our government officials to use statecraft to not prop up these types of governments. We need a much stronger statement by the U.S. and other governments, such as, “This cannot stand. We’re not going to recognize this government. This is wrong.” In the case of forced organ harvesting or the Uyghurs, 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 just hard-headed realism about a foreign policy that should say that China is a competitor.

One of the ways that they’re competitors, they use slave labor to keep prices down. We ought to be strategically thinking about challenging China and investing in markets in the Western hemisphere, rather than investing in China. It’s that type of approach that is going to help people and is going to be in our own national interest.

Mr. Jekielek:
In your statement you endorsed the Falun Gong Protection Act, recently introduced in the U. S. Senate, which is really an organ harvesting accountability legislation. How does that help this bill?

Mr. Patterson:
This bill is designed to allow U.S. government agencies to target centers of illicit activity as they understand them. If there was a specific individual, a political, scientific, or business leader that was directly implicated and there was evidence of their participation, then there could be targeted sanctions there against those individuals. That’s been a strategy that has worked in other contexts, such as going after terrorists. Again, we see ourselves as being on the side of the Chinese people. We don’t want them to be plucked off the street, detained extra judiciously for a minor infraction, blood typed, and then perhaps lose their organs.

Mr. Jekielek:
They may be jailed for believing something that the regime decides is not allowed. You discussed the local reality in Venezuela and Cuba’s influence, but there is an international influence as well. Please lay that out for us.

Mr. Patterson:
The CCP has a nefarious influence in Latin America. This has manifested itself in many ways over the past 20 years. They give very low interest loans to try to pull some of these poor countries into the Chinese orbit. There is a willingness by the Chinese government to look the other way on human rights violations when cutting business deals. Whereas, in the United States with the Leahy Act, we have a set of restrictions on government funding of foreign countries if the leadership of those countries are presumed to have committed human rights violations.

For instance, this has been a sticking point with our Colombian allies in the past. More recently, we’ve seen a quiet but very persistent bullying of those countries that have recognized Taiwan. This summer, as reported by Reuters and The Guardian, legislators from around the world went to the annual meeting of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China [IPAC] held in Taiwan. These are legislators from 23 different countries who are worried about China’s role in the world.

It was reported that multiple delegations were being harassed for their official position of standing up for Taiwan, and also for participating in a conference that was seen as anti-Chinese. This is diplomatic bullying. How would you feel to get a personal message on your cell phone that came from Beijing arguing that you should not go to this conference?

How would you feel to be pulled aside at a diplomatic meeting by a representative of the Chinese government pressing you to think twice about supporting Taiwan or saying anything that’s pro-democracy or against the Chinese government. That type of bullying happens in Geneva, it happens in other places, and it has happened most recently at this IPAC meeting.

Mr. Jekielek:
I had the former president of Micronesia, David Panuelo, on the show. When he was at international meetings, there would be a Chinese diplomat whispering into his ear about what he should say, and what he’s allowed to say. This is the brazenness of some of these Chinese diplomats, especially when they think they have a lot of power in the situation.

Mr. Patterson:
Have you ever heard of a Muslim-majority country like Indonesia or Saudi Arabia coming out strongly against China’s treatment of its Muslim Uyghur population? There hasn’t been very much said in recent years. In fact, some countries like Turkey have actually returned Uyghurs and others to the Chinese regime, even though these people haven’t broken any laws. They have been outside the country calling attention to Chinese terrible behavior. But there are always these very urgent, serious, somber talks between Chinese government officials and the officials of these countries on matters of trade, opening new ports, investment, and low-cost loans. China has been very good at doing this.

Mr. Jekielek:
Given that you have been a student of communism, maybe more on the religious freedom side, what is the allure of communism? You always hear that it has never been tried properly.

Mr. Patterson:
I’m always flummoxed that Marxist theories, from socialism to full-fledged communism, could be attractive to anyone. It’s very young or idealistic people that say the world should be more egalitarian, then they just stop there. They never think through the ramifications for policy, or what are the concrete, actionable steps that you need to take to make the world a better place.

But it is a lie to say that true communism has never been attempted.
The Soviets, with Lenin and Stalin, had total power and demigod-like status. The North Koreans, with 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 made 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, because the rest of the world was in a Great Depression. They had 30 years to try the experiment of communism. China has been practicing communism since 1949.

What country today has one to two million people that have been to the concentration camps? What country, if you were just to express your faith in public, would you be thrown in jail? What country has a one-child policy? Are their lives really better in any of these cases? These countries have to build walls with barbed wire to keep their people in. Communism has been attempted in many places.

There is no vast immigration to Cuba. There is no vast immigration to Vietnam. Those people want to get out and they want to leave. That’s the evidence. It’s clearly a lie that communism hasn’t been tried. Look at Cuba. Look at North Korea. Look at China. It’s been tried, and every single time, its bad ideas are institutionalized to crush the majority of the citizenry.

Mr. Jekielek:
Many people today believe that China’s actually figured it out, and that the CCP has lifted a billion people out of poverty. In your mind, it hasn’t been successful. I understand how you’re looking at it, but a lot of people would say it has been successful.

Mr. Patterson:
No communist approach has raised the standard of living of its people over decades. Instead, what has happened as we’ve seen some standard of living going up. In Vietnam, for instance, they actually had to liberalize their economy. In other words, they violated the principles of state control and communism. They allowed a small opening for people to act with innovation and with personal responsibility outside the tight control of the communist party.

That is what has happened in Cuba. Cuba cannot feed its own people and they have had riots annually since 2021. What does Cuba do? It slightly opens up a few things, and lets foreign capital come in. The reason for this is that the ideas of communism have never been able to go ahead in the sciences, in agriculture, and in ways that make a difference for their people.

Every time communism is ruthlessly imposed, you get the killing fields in Cambodia, you get the famine in China, you get the economy falling apart in Cuba. Anytime there is prosperity, they are stealing innovation from someplace else, and only a small group is prospering. They’re allowing some sort of free market to happen. That’s not communism.

I thought I heard someone say, “China is really communist.” Then I heard them say, “Well, maybe there’s some freedom there.” When it’s in the interest of these CCP elites, and they recognize that all of their economic theory really doesn’t work, what do they do? They will often steal technology from someplace else. They will allow very, very low working conditions for their own workers to let foreign capital come in and benefit. They will allow a little bit of limited but managed entrepreneurship.

But what they’re not doing is saying, “Okay, go for it.” They are saying, “We’re going to 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, owning the businesses at the macro level, or being highly involved. This is not a free market. They will just wall off a little area for that type of growth.

The key questions to ask are, “Can people make choices for themselves? Are people free to vote for a different political party or leave the country? Even if there is some economic vitality that is allowed, the CCP is overseeing it right behind the scenes, and willing to pull it back in at any given time.

Mr. Jekielek:
Some years back now, I really enjoyed doing the episode with Elizabeth Spalding, the curator of the VOC Museum. How have things developed since that time for the museum? I highly recommend the VOC museum to our audience.

Mr. Patterson:
Thank you. Elizabeth Spalding is 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, D.C. in July of 2022.
We’re celebrating our second birthday with the museum. It’s near the White House, right across the street from the McPherson Square exit on the Metro. It’s free and open to the public, Tuesdays through Saturdays. The museum has three galleries that tell the history of communism in the 20th century, and the story of the hundred million people murdered by communism during that time.

Then we have a temporary gallery where we move through a national story every quarter. We had a story about overcoming communism. We had one about the induced famines called the Holodomor that killed three million Ukrainians in the 1930s. We just did an exhibit on the cultural erasing of music and religion from Lithuanian life during the Cold War, such as making churches into gymnasiums, or keeping the music of a folk song, but adding Soviet-type of lyrics to it to praise the comrade chairman.

Our next exhibit which opens next week is about 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 and it will be open by mid-August of this year. We invite people to visit.

Let me add that we also have an art museum. We have 50 paintings by Nikolai Getman, an artist who spent eight years in the Soviet gulag in the late 40s and 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, and having to work out in the fields.

It is a magnificent collection. Bring your earbuds and you can listen to an audio tour of the paintings through your cell phone. It is a beautiful museum. It’s a great learning tool for families and for students and for the interested public.

Mr. Jekielek:
It will be exciting to see the Venezuela exhibit. A final thought as we finish up ?

Mr. Patterson:
We live in a time where there are questions about the resilience of different cultures. What is American society about today? I think everybody should just slow down and take a deep breath. Maybe read the Declaration of Independence, or read, “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” by Martin Luther King Jr., or read Lincoln’s second inaugural address, or just the short Gettysburg Address.

You will find the beauty of American history and American civic life.
You will see that America has been a champion for the rights of others all around the world. There are deep wellsprings of both freedom and opportunity that are part of the American experience. We ought to be renewing that in our civic culture. We recognize that we never want to impose that on anyone else, but there is a reason that millions and millions of people want to come to the United States.

This idea of human dignity and opportunity and all of its manifestations, the right to assemble, freedom of conscience, and freedom of religion are a beautiful gift that people all around the world want to have. We have something very precious here in the United States that is worth conserving and also worth defending. I have a lot of hope for the future because the promise of the American experiment and the promise of liberty are still what people want. It is most in tune with what it means to be an authentic human being.

On the other hand, communism only works by force. It keeps its own people locked away in countries that are essentially gulags. It doesn’t value the human person and the fundamental dignity of men and women. 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 in China in the years ahead.

Mr. Jekielek:
Eric Patterson, such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mr. Patterson:
Thank you very much.

This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.