Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words Hollywood’s ‘Willful Ignorance’ Towards Communist Crimes Was Decades in the Making | Elizabeth Spalding
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Jan 27, 2026 Elizabeth Spalding, chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and founding director of its museum, discusses the museum’s origins and what visitors encounter. She explores Hollywood’s cultural blindness to communist crimes and recommends films and memoirs that document oppression. She also examines the shared DNA of communism and socialism and the risks to civic life.
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Communism's Ongoing Human Toll
- Spalding emphasizes that more than 100 million people were killed under communist regimes starting in 1917 and that communism remains active today.
- She warns that over 1.5 billion people currently live under communist rule or its variants worldwide.
Family Roots Of The Museum
- Elizabeth Spalding traces the museum's origin to a family conversation after Sunday mass where her parents pushed to preserve memory of communism's victims.
- The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation grew from that family effort into a bipartisan congressional initiative and years of fundraising to open a museum in 2022.
Jewel-Box Museum And Gulag Art
- The museum sits two blocks from the White House and presents permanent galleries from the Communist Manifesto to the present.
- It uniquely houses Nikolai Getman's 50-piece gulag art collection, smuggled out of the former Soviet Union to preserve eyewitness visual testimony.
