Communism: Lessons Not Learned | CLIP | International Roundtable

All right, let's continue our conversation. I really wanted to ask the two of you. You both grew up, you didn't grow up under communism, but you grew up in a very anti-communist household. Can you tell me a little bit about what that was like? First of all, maybe just introduce your dad. Our father, Dr. Lee Edwards, he was known for many things, but he was known for his anti-communism, his stance for freedom. His moment where he really understood it was in 1956. He had done his, he had graduated from college, he had done his two years in the army, and he was in Paris, living on the left bank, trying to write the great American novel, at which he did not succeed. And that's when, in the fall, the Hungarian Revolution broke out. And he thought, this is it, we're finally going to get rid of communism. And then it's crushed by the tanks, the Soviets go in, the communists make it even worse than before, hundreds of thousands end up fleeing. And my dad, our dad, was waiting for what's the response, what's the West going to do? And nothing happens. So he said at that point, he vowed to, whatever he was doing in his life, to try to help those who were trying to get away from communism. So for him, it begins then, and that's the kind of, years later, that's the kind of home we're born into. My parents would have over people for dinner, and Catherine is younger, so she doesn't remember some of the early things, but we would have guests at the dinner table. And so just growing up, I started to realize, wow, there are people who have had to swim through shark-infested waters. That's one of the one from China. You'd start realizing there were people from different hemispheres. So I'd hear from somebody who had been a boat person from Vietnam, and then at dinner another night, there'd be a boat person from Cuba. So I started realizing these are all different countries, but they wanted to escape. They wanted to get away from this totalitarian communism that had repressed everything. And so for me, it started that way, and then I was a voracious reader. So interesting. So I mean, in terms of the themes that we've been talking about, personal stories and storytelling is so important. So actually, I want to talk about how we get this message through to people, how you're all educators, you're all writers, you've all had these different experiences, and you're trying to reach different audiences. Yeah, I mean, I guess the first thing to figure out is who is your audience? So as you're, are you dealing with a child? Are you dealing with a teenager? Is that person sympathetic to communism or not? Where do you need to reach them? And I was actually reminded, when you were telling your story about hearing those survival stories, those resistance stories like yours, my youngest is 11, and I remember when he was nine, he was sort of half listening to my lesson with my homeschooler on the Baltics, and on the Baltic Way, and that resistance movement where they held hands through three countries as a symbol and a cry for freedom, and it was weeks later when I had mentioned the Baltics, and my young son said, they're the people that held hands for freedom, and he had been listening, and he was really drawn in by that survival story, by that resistance story, and then, of course, that follow-on question is, why did they do that? What were they resisting? And so sometimes you, for someone like my son or for a younger child, you want to maybe hook them with a positive story or with something exciting, and then come in and say, well, what were you fighting against? And then maybe for an older student, it might be something different. I know my son, Zach, who is actually the illustrator of Mia's First Potato Chip, and he's a film student in Chicago. For him, it was hearing the story, not so much as a resistance story, but such a dramatic story of the S-21 prison in Cambodia, which has a near zero percent survival rate. During the Khmer Rouge, during the Cambodian genocide, tens of thousands went in, and I think less than a dozen or around a dozen survived. I show in my classroom witness videos all the time so that they can hear from the mouth of someone who survived it and maybe was buying into it as you did. You were convinced that Mao was a god, Mao was, and then at some point in time, you realize that's not the case. So when I went to the Lawton School board meeting and I just delivered that comment, less than a minute, and I thought, of course, it's obvious to everyone what I'm talking about, and it was really to my big surprise that how little Americans know about the Cultural Revolution, communism in general, especially Chinese communism. And I say it's my fault as well, because when I came here in 1986, I thought I fled communism, communism's history's behind me, I'm now in the land of freedom, I will be okay. Who wants to talk about those unpleasant memories? And that is a bad, bad mistake. So I did not share my story. And then I realized the story is not told in our educational system, not in college, not in public schools, not in schools in general. And that's when I really, really, really realized we have to start educating American people. And that's when I quit my job and start writing that book. My book is so easy to read because I'm not a scholar, I'm not a historian, I'm a survivor, and I think my book is for everybody. I have found teaching both undergraduate students and graduate students that often what they know first about the Cold War is duck and cover. They've been shown some video, and it's important to understand about the nuclear dimension of the Cold War, but that doesn't help you understand communism and why we had to fight the Cold War, why it was imposed on the West, imposed on the free world, and why we have terms like the West and the free world. And I'd just like to emphasize something that both of you were pointing to. This education mission really starts with understanding that we are starting at the beginning. People know nothing. I know you've said this, I know you've just said this, but I would like to emphasize that when you are trying to teach about this and we're doing different kinds of outreach, our teaching is not just in a classroom, right? We're gonna always be trying to help people understand. You're starting over each time with each audience, even sometimes the people who are older have forgotten, right, or they are not on the same page, but you can always start at the very beginning. So how do each of you start at zero? Well, let's kind of have your, start the conversation with me. If you hear someone talking about a different topic, like let's say we were talking and you were upset about censorship in America or something like that, I can say, well, let's talk about censorship, and then I would, through that topic, talk about censorship in China or North Korea. Do you get the argument, but communism's good, it's a good idea, it just wasn't implemented maybe so well, and so what do you say? Yeah, no, I told, that's, I think, that's why I think I do play a role because my role is that I'm a victim. I live through it. In a leftist terminology, it's lived experience. So I do that, and I have to say that I don't have access to a lot of young people. Schools would not invite me, and schools who want to invite me and would invite me. Can you imagine that happening in the Cold War? Everyone would have listened to the Russian who escaped. Sorry, carry on, but it really is. Exactly. So X is now the battlefield for me, and so I would tell them, Mao told everyone, you follow me, we're gonna share everything. We're gonna share land and property so that we're all happy. It's not something new. It's an old lie, and I would tell them what happened afterwards. A lot of Americans don't understand. They still think about the promise, but that's why history is so important. We have to know what happened after people bought that promise. They think that everything should be shared, and then the rights extended to other people's stuff and extended to services provided by other people that they're entitled to, and so it's a battle every day, and I love Twitter because I get to see the other side, and I always tell them what happened. That's what you believe, and that's what Chinese believed, and that's what happened. As we've been hearing, communist regimes don't just arrive one day and take power. It's a process, one that involves selling the population on progressive socialist policies that sound noble but are based on deceit. Marx wrote that socialism is the first step to communism, and our final discussion will delve into how to break through that deceit. And they don't even understanding that these were false promises because it's baked into the cake of the ideology. It's not even there because communism, of course, is trying to base everything on a wrong understanding of everything we can think about from nature to politics to history to culture, and so you can't come up with, it can sound good in part, but when you really start parsing it, it's not even good in theory, so I think this is something that I would start with at zero. Both of what Jie and Catherine are pointing to, though, I think if you're starting at zero with a group, whatever it looks like, having a couple of the best stories at hand to grab them, you are a living embodiment, so you can just start with your own story, but it's part of the reason the book studies work so well because they're based on real stories or inspired by real stories, and then that draws in students and others. I always do also an easier reading level because you want your students or your children to get just drawn in to the story itself. One other thing I was thinking about when you're talking to someone, especially if they're not sympathetic, is not to get drawn in to this false dilemma. If you're talking about communism, then they assume, well, you must be for this unfettered, terrible capitalism, and they'll list some bad thing that happened because of that, and we need to stay focused on this. Just because I'm against communism doesn't mean I'm for everything that's not. What do you say at that point in the conversation? I would probably just isolate that moment and say, yeah, that sounds terrible, but that actually doesn't negate what I'm saying, and just move on, really. The problem is now we've had decades and decades of bad education. We have the ignorance that we've already talked about. We have misinformation and disinformation, propaganda, things like that. So it's multiple different challenges, and that's part of the reason the stories are a good way to combat it, and then straightforward facts in an interestingly presented history is another way to combat it. That's part of what we're trying to do at the UC. Starting early enough, because I know in the case of my son, Zach, I know his views on a number of things have shifted, but his views on communism have not, and because he did the little victims of communism course with me, and he knew all of those different examples of the patterns of communism and the carnage that it leaves behind.