Leer en Español
In a 1983 speech, President Ronald Reagan directed a question to the leaders of communist countries. “If communism is the wave of the future,” he asked, “why do you still need walls to keep people in and armies of secret police to keep them quiet?”
Great question, though it was one that was answered eloquently eight years before by the great Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago:
Communism is as crude an attempt to explain society and the individual as if a surgeon were to perform his delicate operations with a meat-axe. All that is subtle in human psychology and in the structure of society (which is even more delicate), all of this is reduced to crude economic processes. This whole created being—man—is reduced to matter. It’s characteristic that Communism is so devoid of arguments that it has none to advance against its opponents in our Communist countries. It lacks arguments and hence there is the club, the prison, the concentration camp, and insane asylums with forced confinement.
Karl Marx predicted that communism was inevitable worldwide. History, he claimed, was marching inexorably toward it. He convinced a significant number of “useful idiots” that he possessed prophetic powers but of course, he was less accomplished at prophecy than the typical palm reader. As Paul Kengor reveals in The Devil and Karl Marx, the man and his philosophy were evil, corrupt and overflowing with error.
A Museum of Horrors
If anything about communism is inevitable, let’s hope it is that men and women of conscience will reject its murderous ideology and relegate its remnants to the status of museum relics everywhere. In the capital city of a formerly communist country in eastern Europe, that’s exactly what has happened already.
Visit beautiful Prague in the Czech Republic these days and there’s a spot you should not miss. It’s the Museum of Communism, amidst the city’s main shopping district and just a five-minute walk from the foot of famous Wenceslaus Square. I first visited it twenty years ago, drawn to it by advertisements around town that proclaimed with wit and irony, “We’re Above McDonald’s, Across from Benetton, Viva La Imperialism!”
I stumbled into the museum with no expectations of its perspective. Was it sponsored by allies of the old communist kleptocracy, nostalgic for the “good old days” and eager to whitewash the past? Or would it be honest about the country’s painful, 40-year experience with a wicked failure? Fortunately, this place tells the truth.
The man behind the museum is not himself a native Czech. He is Glenn Spicker, an American entrepreneur who was attracted to Prague’s new business opportunities after the 1989 “Velvet Revolution” expelled the communists from power. He introduced bagels to Prague and opened a jazz club and several successful restaurants.
It soon struck him that what was missing in the city was any vivid public reminder of what life was like before 1989. So, he spent several months and $28,000 searching flea markets and junk shops for almost a thousand bits and pieces of Red memorabilia—including busts of Marx and Lenin, textbooks, posters, and samples of the shoddy merchandise that once adorned dingy state-owned storefronts all across the country. The museum opened its doors in December 2001.
ABC News produced a short video about Spicker and the museum. An interview with the founder can be seen here, and also you can check the museum’s website.
Exhibits that explain the communist “dream” greet the visitor upon entering. Slogans, propaganda, and all the paraphernalia of promises made to be broken remind one of the wildly utopian vision offered by Marx and his sycophants.
Communist theoreticians boasted that they would produce an egalitarian “workers’ paradise” of happiness and abundance, but nothing of the sort came to pass in eastern Europe or anywhere else the system was tried. The largest portion of Spicker’s museum is dedicated to portraying the reality of the communist “nightmare”—an Orwellian trap where private hardship was the rule behind all the public smiles.
Prague is often called the Paris of Eastern Europe for its open and lively city life, stately architecture, rich musical heritage, and cultural diversity. Tourists marvel at the art and entrepreneurship evident on every block. Czechs smile and make friends quickly. Three decades since liberation, it’s easy to forget how tyranny once kept these same people in thralldom.
In Spicker’s museum, the reconstruction of an interrogation room used by the secret police provides a chilling refresher in state terror. Records show that under communist rule Czech political dissidents were executed by the dozens; more than a quarter-million were imprisoned. The secret police employed no fewer than 200,000 spies paid to keep watch over their fellow citizens.
In another corner of the museum sits a replica of a grocery storefront, shabby and unattractive because that’s the way storefronts looked under communism. Shelves were often bare or stocked with goods few people wanted. Shoppers had to endure long lines to secure the most basic of commodities.
An inscription tells the visitor that price controls led to a thriving black market in which “poorly paid employees of the shops hid rare merchandise for selected customers, who were able to pay some extra money or provide a certain counter-service.” Much of Czech society resorted to simple barter: “the butcher exchanged his steaks for bananas from the grocer,” for example.
Did communist central planners nurture the natural environment? Hardly. Everywhere communists were in charge—from the Soviet Union and its satellites to mainland China—ecological disaster ensued. An exhibit in the museum explains:
Surface mining in Northern Bohemia changed extensive areas of land into wasteland and the use of solid fuel in power stations polluted the air and killed border forests. Attempts to increase the yield in collectivized agriculture with the application of industrial fertilizers and heavy mechanization led to extensive damage of soil and underground water. This led to the elimination and extermination of a large number of small wildlife species. The statistics show that the average age of inhabitants of communist countries was considerably lower than the average age in the democratic countries. After the fall of communism in the Czech Republic the average age of citizens rapidly increased by about five years.
Though the story the museum is designed to tell is grim, Spicker does have a sense of humor. To help raise money to pay the bills, the museum gift shop offers postcards and poster-size reproductions of communist-era propaganda photos but each with an added caption. One depicts a peasant woman holding aloft in the breeze a piece of cloth. The caption reads, “You couldn’t get laundry detergent, but you could get your brain washed.”
Another shows a parade of smiling teens waving red flags below these words: “It was a time of happy, shiny people. The shiniest were in the uranium mines.”
Near the museum exit stands a portion of the Berlin Wall, still adorned with the graffiti that Westerners scrawled on the free side of that despicable barrier. Among the scribblings are these poignant words large enough that no visitor can miss: “Let me live my life, enjoy freedom, touch the limits, reach the stars, understand the world. That’s what I want.”
Communism was one of history’s most infamous lies. What it wrought—100 million dead and a lifetime of nightmares for millions more—stands as a horrible testament to the “planned chaos” of the omnipotent state it conceived. The truth demands that its record be documented and displayed. Glenn Spicker’s museum does precisely that, for which men and women everywhere should be grateful.
Every country should have such a museum. No one in the world should be ignorant of the deadliest ideology in mankind’s history.
Lawrence writes a weekly op-ed for El American. He is President Emeritus of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in Atlanta, Georgia; and is the author of “Real heroes: inspiring true stories of courage, character, and conviction“ and the best-seller “Was Jesus a Socialist?“ //
Lawrence escribe un artículo de opinión semanal para El American. Es presidente emérito de la Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) en Atlanta, Georgia; y es el autor de “Héroes reales: inspirando historias reales de coraje, carácter y convicción” y el best-seller “¿Fue Jesús un socialista?”
It is unfortunate that all U.S. students above the age of eight are not required to read this article and be told that they WILL be tested about its contents and analysis.