My name is Daniel. I was an English teacher in Seoul, South Korea, and am now a writer who has

published three books including South Korea: Our Story by Daniel Nardini.

                            In the capital of the United States, Washington, D.C., sits a statue modeled

after the Chinese Goddess of Democracy which is a memorial to all those victims of Communism.

This statue was set up by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation to honor all those who were

slaughtered by Communism from 1917 to the present. By just about every account, an estimated 100

million people died unnatural deaths under Communism, and the number is far from finished. Earlier

this month, a person from the Clemson University chapter of the extreme left wing group Antifa 

(an abbreviation for "anti-fascist") waved an Antifa red and black flag in front of this statue in an

act of defiling this statue dedicated to the tens of millions of innocent people who had been murdered

by Communist regimes all over the world. The act was clear---no statue and no one who believes

in freedom of speech is safe from these Antifa fanatics. While there are those who easily condemn

extreme right wing groups in my country like the neo-nazis and Ku Klux Klan (as I do), it seems that

they will not say anything bad about Antifa. I equally condemn the acts and violence of Antifa, and

their acts of defiling a statue in memorial to so many innocent people who did not have to die and

who should have lived and had a better life than they did. But then Antifa believes in the same

killer ideology that slaughtered all of these people---Marxism-Leninism. Socialism is responsible

for the deaths of so many innocents that no other force in history can compare. Worse, despite

all of the doc-umentation from released archives of former Communist states that show their

crimes, I find it sad and depressing that there are young people in America who still believe in

this failed and cruel ideology. I should know, as I have seen what happened in China in 1989

and in the former East Germany of how this ideology has either killed or ruined so many hundreds

of millions of lives. It is the same ideology that has made North Korea the monster that it is. It

is the same ideology that has made Venezuela a hell on earth. And it is the same ideology that

has created Antifa to insult statues dedicated to in memorial to all those victims of Communism.