And there's nothing going on tonight.

We can see it like that.

I mean you just get to the

Michael Miles here.

Welcome to another exciting episode. This is one I've had a long time

coming. We've had with us Marion Smith, executive director of the Victims of Communism Memorial

Foundation.

And this is obviously an issue very near and dear to my heart.

I was born in the Soviet Union.

The core of my work is vis-à-vis North Korea, which you mentioned on the site as one of the I believe five countries that are still under communist domination along with Laos, Vietnam, Cuba, and China.

How did you get involved with this issue?

Well, you know, I never have a great answer to that question.

I think it really comes out of the fact that I was focused on U.S. foreign policy history

and the just reality that the whole concept of American leadership

and the entire concept of a free world really came out of the global contest between civilization and barbarism,

which was the free world and the international conspiracy of communism.

Some 40 countries since 1917 in the Bolshevik Revolution who were all inspired

funded or imposed upon unwilling populations by the Soviet Union or

or their allies.

And this is the thing, how the Soviet Union operated, which it's kind of regarded as dismissed or

Kitchy in political discourse nowadays. This is largely by design and a leftover from those days.

They were meant to subvert and secretly do what they needed to do in order to flip these countries into communist

...