Is now a good time to mention that the Victims of Communism Foundation’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? Not only does the foundation count Nazi sympathizers among its scant few donors, but many other immortalized “victims” were involved in the deportation and extermination of Jews, Poles, Roma, Serbs, Belarusians, and Ukrainians on behalf of Nazi puppet regimes across Europe. This kind of hyperbolic revisionism meets roadside tourist trap is capitalist projection at its finest. In fact, World War II isn’t even included in the museum’s timeline. Hardly anywhere in the foundation’s documents, or in the museum, are Nazis, fascists, royals, colonizers, or capitalists portrayed as aggressors.
Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, too, are portrayed as running authoritarian, anti-democratic regimes, yet British colonialism and American imperialism garner nary a mention. Inside the museum, Mao Zedong figures as a “mass murderer,” but Adolf Hitler is nowhere to be found. The book, as well as the foundation, peddle the spurious notion that a “ double genocide” took place in the twentieth century: one by fascists and another by so-called “Judeo-Bolshevik Communists.”Īccording to the Victims of Communism team, all Nazis killed by Soviets are victims of communism, as are all deaths resulting from Covid-19. Its central belief that communism has claimed “more than 100 million” victims was lifted from The Black Book of Communism, a controversial piece of Western agitprop that has since been delegitimized by its own contributors. Originally founded during the Clinton era by a unanimous act of Congress, the Victims of Communism Foundation is a relic of Cold War-era propaganda. What better destination for their new museum than Washington, D.C., just one mile away from the U.S. Meanwhile, Orbán’s vocal denunciations of Soviet occupation helped launch a political career filled with what critics call “pure Nazi speech.” Despite the cognitive dissonance of this display-Müller’s father served in the Waffen-SS, for god’s sake-the strategy allows the decades-old Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation to position all anti-communists as renegade freedom fighters regardless of their fascist associations, thus rebranding its Holocaust revisionism anew. Ai Weiwei, among the highest-selling artists in the world, has earned his keep resolutely opposing the Chinese Communist Party. These public figures are the latest faces of a long campaign to flip the historical script. Among the many victims and honorees: Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, the Dalai Lama, Romanian writer Herta Müller, Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong, and Hungarian neofascist Viktor Orbán. We are near the end of our visit to the new Victims of Communism Museum, standing in an elevator-size lobby with photographs of “victims” screen-printed all over the walls. “There is no way he is a victim of communism,” my partner quips, pointing to a photo of the late Pope John Paul II.
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