You’re listening to part two of a Barefoot Lawyer Report special featuring Dr. Lee Edwards, founding chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial foundation. To listen to part one, please check the link in the description.

Bill Saunders: Yeah, I want to mention for the listener a couple of things. One is, as I said, Guangcheng, who is our distinguished fellow, has just written an article that appeared in a magazine called Public Discourse, and a shorter version in the Wall Street Journal about how the Chinese Communist Party does not follow the rule of law, and that law in China is a sham. So if you want to learn more, he’s also written other articles about how, what’s the reality of how the Chinese Communist Party operates. And they’re up on our website, which is catholic.edu/Chr. The CHR is for The Center for Human Rights. 

I also want to mention that we have an archive of these podcasts we’ve done. In one of them that we did, I think in the spring or summer of last year, we talked to Wang Dan, who was one of the student organizers of the Tiananmen Square protests and who is now in the United States. So you can hear his firsthand account of what it was like on our website.

Lee Edwards: Now, Bill, if I could do a little promotion of my own organization: The Victims of Communism Museum.

Bill Saunders: Yes, I want to talk about that.

Lee Edwards: Because what we have is one of the preeminent scholars in the world, Mr. Adrian Zens, who has been able to, through his sources and contacts, to bring out of China literally hundreds of pages of secret documents of the Chinese communist police, showing exactly what they’re doing to the Uyghurs in western China. And it is enough to make your blood run cold. The degree to which they are trying to stamp out the Uyghur culture and the Uyghur ideas and the Uyghur personality, is probably, well, it is genocide.

As a matter of fact, the secretary of state for Mr. Trump, called it genocide. And the secretary of state for President Biden on two occasions, if not three occasions, has also referred to it as genocide. And that’s what’s going on in China today, is genocide. They’re trying to totally wipe out the Uyghurs from their own culture, their own society, and their own being.

Bill Saunders: Yeah, you know, a couple of things about what they’re doing to the Uyghurs. As I understand it, Chinese communist agents live in the homes of the Uyghurs to keep their eyes on them; they have millions of cameras on the street to record everything.

I think this genocide point is very important, because I think what listeners need to realize is this is the way the Chinese Communist Party operates. It is a genocidal organization. It is trying to do the same thing. I mean, Tibet is another example. They want to completely wipe out authentic Tibetan Buddhism. They’ve driven out the Dalai Lama. They’re trying to indoctrinate the people away from Tibetan Buddhism. They also, with the Falun Gong, have an extensive campaign that’s been going on for decades to wipe them out. And they’ve killed millions and millions and imprisoned millions and millions. And they have this, uh, organ harvesting where they take–

So somebody listening, just stop for a second. What does organ harvesting mean? It means they take an organ out of you without your consent, often resulting in your death, because some rich person or some Chinese official can pay for it. That’s what organ harvesting is, taking innocent people and harvesting from them.

It’s like a horror movie. And that’s what the Chinese Communist Party is doing. It’s genocidal. It wants to wipe out the Uyghurs. It wants to wipe out the Tibetan Buddhists. It wants to wipe out the Falun Gong. It wants to completely control the Christian Church and eventually, no doubt, wants to wipe it out. I mean, if you say Tibetan Buddhism, you might have a form of it, or you might have a form of Catholicism, but the Chinese Communist Party controls every aspect of it, including the doctrine, so it’s not authentic. So they’re wiping out a religious group, and that’s genocide.

Lee Edwards: We don’t know how many millions of secret Catholics are practicing their faith underground in China today, but we do know that it’s going on because we do get reports from that. I want to say also, Bill, we’re painting a very dark picture here. It’s one which may make some people throw up their hands and say, “Well, what can we do in the face of 93 million Chinese Communist Party members and the military and all the other means of totalitarianism, which Xi and his people are instituting?”

But at the same time, we know through Adrian Zen’s contacts and others which we have that there is great unrest in mainland China today. There are hundreds and hundreds of demonstrations, protests, because the people are not enjoying the prosperity which those who live on the coastal provinces are.

We know that there are young people who have grown up under the totalitarian nature of Communism who want freedom, who want liberty. Years ago, I had an opportunity when I was making a film, a documentary film about Asia, to visit and to interview the various freedom swimmers who were swimming from mainland China through Hong Kong harbor into Hong Kong, which was then free at that point.

And I asked these young men, all rather physically fit–because otherwise how could they get through that harbor with the sharks and with the patrol boats and just from sheer exhaustion– “Why did you do this?” And I expected them to talk about Hong Kong streets being paved with gold and I’m interested in making lots of money. No young man, after a young man said, “I’m doing it because I want freedom. I want liberty. I want the opportunity to decide where I’m going to work, where I’m going to live, whom I’m going to marry, and how many children do I want to have? I’m tired of being told what to do night and day, from the cradle to the grave, no more. And that’s why I’m in Hong Kong.”

So that spirit is still there, Bill. Despite the best efforts of the Communist Party to stamp it out. And what we and the West must do is to encourage them, to encourage those people as best as we can.

Bill Saunders: Yeah. Again, I just want to mention for people we’ve done podcasts about some of these protest leads, referring to over just the last six to eight months, there have been the white paper or the blank paper protests, the white hair protests; there have been all kinds of protests.

There is ceaseless unrest in China. And Guangcheng, again, our distinguished fellow, thinks that the Communist Party is very rickety and ready to fall. But what they will take to make it fall and to get freedom to China, I think, is a strong United States in the image of what Reagan did. One that stands up to the Chinese Communist Party and says, “You know, tear down the firewall or whatever.” You know, there’s an analogy to the Berlin Wall. “Tear down the firewall, let’s have freedom in China.” I agree with you, there’s a lot of signs of hope. We just have to help.

Lee Edwards: We do that, and then we have to reach out to our friends and allies in Asia as well, and to encourage Japan, to encourage South Korea, to encourage the Philippines, Australia, and so forth, to put together a coalition of the willing and of the freedom seekers and freedom lovers to come together and put up a united front against China.

It can be done. It has been done. President Reagan did it, as you’re talking about. Constantly he talked about peace through strength, and strength is absolutely vital. We have to have a strong military willing to say, “No, this cannot continue.You cannot continue to enslave 1.4 billion people.”

Bill Saunders: Yeah. Lee, one thing I would also like to do is make sure we do talk about the Victims of Communism Museum. I want to put in a plug for it because I took my master’s students, and you were kind enough to show us around the Victims of Communism Museum.

I took my students there in the fall, and I plan to take them again next fall. One of the things that we saw there was a special exhibit on China. It was a great exhibit. I also want to mention one of the things there was a portrait of a lawyer, Gao Xi Jiang, who disappeared into the black jails. And the portrait that he had of him that was in that exhibit is going to move permanently here to Catholic University, to the law school. We’ll talk more about that on subsequent episodes. But he’s a great leader and a great inspiration for a lot of these human rights heroes who have been imprisoned in China.

Tell us about the museum, because, you know, why did you want to do it? It is victims of communism.

Lee Edwards: Well, first of all, we knew from our own research that there were about approximately 100 million victims of communism through things like the gulag, through the KGB, through show trials, through forced famines, through forced locations of millions of people who died in the gulag over the years, starting with Lenin and not just with Stalin. It was Lenin who initiated both the gulag and the KGB. Then Stalin turned it into true night and day weapons of terror. 

And so when young people would say to us, “Oh, you know, communism is not so bad, look, we’re going to have equality, we’re going to be sharing property and so forth,” we could see that it was imperative to have a center in which you could talk about the truth about communism and disabuse young people who keep saying, “Oh, I wouldn’t mind living under communism.” Well, it’s okay as long as you don’t want to have any freedom, you can live under communism.

But the price you’re going to pay is they’re going to be giving up your individuality night and day for the rest of your life. That was our initial thrust of it. That not just because soviet communism had collapsed back in 1991 and so forth didn’t mean that communism had collapsed. No, it was still very much there under one party, one man tyrant rule in places like China, North Korea. Vietnam, little Laos, as I call it, and Cuba. And secondly, not just to look in the past and to properly honor and respect and memorialize those victims.

But to talk about the victims of today who live under rule, under tyrannical rule in China and so forth, 1.5 billion people. We were driven by the desire to make sure that the truth, and the whole truth about communism is told, that it is in fact, a pseudo religion posing as a pseudo science and run by tyrants, by political tyrants.

That is what communism is all about. It doesn’t work. The costs of it are draconian. And that truth must be told and passed along to this generation and future generations. And I’m pleased to say, Bill, that we started and opened last June, that the number of people coming is increasing week by week, month by month, that we’re reaching out to schools and say, come, bring us your classes, bring us your middle schoolers, your high schoolers and your college freshmen, perhaps, and we will take them all on and begin teaching them the truth about communism.

Bill Saunders: Yeah, I think about it with the Holocaust and the second World War and the expression of “never forget.” Memory is essential to avoiding these kinds of horrors in the present and the Victims of Communism does a great service to all these holy, innocent people who were killed.

When you think about that again, people listening think about if your mother or your son or your grandma was dragged off and killed for no reason other than maybe they wanted to read a book you didn’t want them to read or they didn’t hold an opinion.

I mean, that’s outrageous. It’s unbelievable. Yet millions of people suffered that fate of, and I think that we do them a tribute that they are due when we have the kind of memorial of that museum where you can honor their memory because they’re soldiers in a fight for freedom. They’re deceased soldiers, but they were soldiers in a fight for freedom, just like we should be today. 

I want to mention, not let it go past, that this museum is in Washington, D.C.. So anybody who’s listening, who’s in the Washington, D.C. area, the metropolitan area, come to the museum.

If you’re out of town, come and bring a school trip. What’s the address? Where is it?

Lee Edwards: Well, it’s at McPherson Square, only two blocks from the White House. It’s 915th Street. I’m pleased to say that it’s open Monday through Saturday. We welcome everybody to come by. You can look us up on victimsofcommunism.org and we’re there, and there’s a map and you can see exactly where we are. 

I think also I’d like to mention that we have put together and are finishing up now a curriculum which is going to go online, a couple of the first chapters are. It’s “From Marx to Mao and Beyond,” looking at the history of communism, the philosophy or ideology of communism, and the legacy of communism.

And you cannot look at what’s happening and understand what’s happening in Russia today and its invasion of Ukraine unless you realize and look at the communist legacy, which has still got a hold of, and of course, personified in Vladimir Putin, the ex KGB–maybe he’s not so ex–the ex KGB colonel, and who trained very nicely under the KGB and is trying very much to spread his version of totalitarianism in Ukraine right now.

Secondly, we do what we call witness videos, in which we video interviews with those who have lived under and who have survived communism from China or Korea or Cuba or Venezuela or whatever, and then have sent out and made these available online through the Victims of Communism website.

Some of them are so powerful because some of these are young men and women who have, coming out of North Korea, for example, have had to go through all the way to Thailand before they could reach freedom. And they’re doing it by foot, thousands of miles to be able to seek freedom, to make every sacrifice that you can possibly think of to achieve freedom. That’s how important it is to these young men and women.

Bill Saunders: Yeah. And Americans of every generation need to realize how blessed they are to live in a country with freedom and to never give it up domestically. I mean, what we have is the greatest gift of political rule, which is freedom to make our choices. And the rest of the world looks to the U.S. I’m always impressed when I talk to people who’ve come from China, like Guangcheng and others. The US is a shining city on a hill. It is a model. It is something they want. They want political freedom. They want artistic freedom. They want to have freedom to create the world they live in, not to have everything imposed on them. And we have that, and we should be vigilant for it here as well.

Lee Edwards: “Freedom is not free. It must be earned anew by each succeeding generation.” Ronald Reagan said that, and he understood full well the meaning of freedom. And he was one of the great champions of it. And we at the Victims of Communism Memorial museum are blessed to be able to call attention to great champions of freedom like that, not only here in America, but in Cuba, in China, in Korea, in Hungary, and on and on and on. And those 20 or 30 or 40 nations who did experience communism first. They come and they stand there in awe and say to us, “Thank heavens there is this museum.” For me, Bill, I hear their voices, and they keep saying to us over and over again, “Remember us,” and we assure them that we will not forget them.

That is what our museum is all about. We’re going to keep telling the truth about communism, and we believe that in the end, it may not be tomorrow, but it won’t be forever, that freedom will triumph over tyranny.

Bill Saunders: Lee, thank you for coming on the podcast. I encourage everybody again to visit the Victims of Communism museum, either in person or online, and also to visit our center at catholic.edu/chr where you can get other podcasts. In fact, you can become a subscriber to The Barefoot Lawyer Reports, which we do every week. You can listen to back episodes. You can read more about Guangcheng and his story and his escape from China and his continued witness here in the United States to freedom. 

We hope you join us next time, but also want to encourage you to share this, because we want more and more people to get the message of freedom and realize there’s a lot we can do. Like Lee Edwards says, we have freedom. We can do things here in America, and we can do things to help people around the world. And one of the things you can do is to spread the word. So I encourage you to do that. Any last words, Lee?

Lee Edwards: Well, thank you, Bill, so much. We just know from the reports that we get from, from our research fellows like Adrian Zens, that the people of China are yearning for the opportunity to be free, to make their own decisions, to live their own lives. And we, I think it’s incumbent upon us to encourage them, to support them, and to bring about that day when there will be a free China.

Bill Saunders: The sooner the better.

The Barefoot Lawyer Reports recommends our listeners check out CNBC’s recent documentary titled “China’s Corporate Spy War,” which addresses the subject of international property and technology theft by the Communist Party. Waged on American corporations. To learn more about this documentary, visit cnbc.com.