Victims of Communism with Elizabeth Spalding

This December marks the 30th anniversary of an unusual event, a unanimous act of Congress, which led to the legislation that established the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

Elizabeth Spalding is the chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC) and the founding director of the Victims of Communism Museum. She is a third-generation anticommunist who has devoted her career to scholarship and public education on the history and horrors of communism. She teaches U.S. foreign policy, national security, and other subjects at Pepperdine University and at Hillsdale College. She is also the author of The First Cold Warrior: Harry Truman, Containment, and the Remaking of Liberal Internationalism and co-author with her father Lee Edwards of A Brief History of the Cold War.

In this conversation, we discuss North Korea, Cuba, China, Russia, the VOC Witness Project and the incredible stories of Ji Seong-Ho and Channy Laux, the Xinjiang genocide, Václav Havel, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and the centrality of the lie in communist states, the battle for truth and freedom in our era of disinformation, the importance of honest journalism, the reason people in the West are drawn to figures such as Vladimir Lenin, Truman’s political philosophy, estimates that over 100 million people have been killed by communism, and more.