Column: A visit to Washington’s Victims of Communism Museum
Feb. 8 (Asia Today) — A few years ago, I visited Washington for work related to South Korea’s advisory council on democratic and peaceful unification. A former senior official offered a simple suggestion: if you come to Washington, there are two places you should see. One was the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The other was the Victims of Communism Museum.
At the time, I only had enough time to rush through the Holocaust museum. The other stayed on my mental list as unfinished business.
On this trip, I finally went.
The museum sits not far from the White House in a modest building downtown. The moment I stepped inside, the mood shifted. The exhibition design is not flashy, but it is not bare either. Everything, however, points toward a single question: what happens when an era believes ideology can “save” humanity, then turns human beings into expendable tools.
I left feeling a kind of melancholy. It was not only sadness. It was sharper than that, like a demand that you keep hold of your own judgment and values until the end.
The museum is run by a private nonprofit, not the government. Admission is free, and it operates on donations. The exhibition is organized as a narrative: the rise of communism, rule by terror, resistance and freedom. It begins with the Russian Revolution and the formation of the Soviet Union, then moves quickly into the machinery that crushed individual lives. It ends by tracing how communist rule spread beyond borders and how resistance emerged, linking that history to places where repression continues today.
As you follow the exhibition, a map of country names unfolds: the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, China, Cambodia, Cuba, Vietnam. Then comes a name Koreans know all too well: North Korea.
Any system can look clean on paper as theory. But once it becomes a state, power and organization, it often reveals a different face. Revolutions promise liberation. But when the power that enforces liberation refuses to tolerate criticism, promises become orders. At that point, people are no longer the goal. They become the means.
What stayed with me most was not the statistics, but the human faces. The museum foregrounds a sweeping claim that more than 100 million people died under communist regimes. Numbers are powerful, but they cannot fully convey the texture of tragedy. A diary entry, a photograph, an arrest record can linger longer than any total.
The exhibition shows how hunger arrives under the name of “policy,” how suspicion hardens into the label of “enemy,” how silence is demanded as “loyalty.” That is when visitors confront another lesson: violence does not always begin with guns. It can begin with language. Words like “people,” “justice,” “history” and “enemy” can become knives that divide and judge.
Another section that shifts the tone is testimony from those who fled and rebuilt their lives elsewhere. Leaving a regime is not the end of struggle. It can mean crossing borders at risk, living with guilt over family left behind, surviving in a new society. Their stories make one point unmistakable: freedom is not a destination. It is a starting line.
That is also why the North Korea-related exhibits feel especially immediate. “Human rights” stops being an abstract phrase and becomes a concrete voice. For someone living under severe control, freedom is not a debate. It can be the question of whether you make it through the night.
Still, this is not a national museum. It is a memory space built by a private organization with a clear viewpoint. When complex histories are grouped under a single label, there is always a risk of simplification. Visitors should read not only what is presented, but also the frame that shapes what is emphasized.
Yet even with that caution, the voices of victims demand priority. Before any schematic, a human being comes first.
Of course, capitalism has its own failures: inequality, exclusion, greed and recurring crises. Blind faith in the market can also be dangerous. But criticizing capitalism’s defects is not the same as arguing that communism is a better alternative. Communism often presents itself as the promise of a fairer society. But where power concentrates and dissent becomes a crime, the system is driven not by fairness but by fear.
Walking through the museum, one sentence kept returning to my mind: capitalism’s imperfections do not make abandoning freedom the answer. The real question is whether a society still has living channels to correct itself.
Washington is filled with places that confront the world’s darkest chapters. If the Holocaust museum shows what happens when hatred becomes institutionalized, the Victims of Communism Museum asks how far human dignity can be pushed when ideology becomes the language of power.
Neither place is comfortable. But that discomfort may be the minimum price we pay to avoid crossing the same threshold again.
So I would recommend this museum to visitors. It is not a cheerful stop. But if you can spare 45 minutes to an hour, it can be a meaningful way to repay a debt of thought.
Ideology often leads with beautiful words. The harder question is what happens when those words become reality: whose voices are silenced, whose lives are erased.
Leaving the building, I found myself returning to what matters most. Not a “perfect system,” but the freedom and institutions to criticize and reform any system, and the dignity of each person.
Song Won-seo is a professor at Shumei University in Japan. This column reflects the writer’s views, which may differ from those of Asia Today.
— Reported by Asia Today; translated by UPI
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Original Korean report: https://www.asiatoday.co.kr/kn/view.php?key=20260208010002760
