U. S. Sen. Cory Gardner, R- Colo., is standing up to the enduring lie of communist China.

ommunism is a failed ideology that was imposed on the Chinese people against their will and against their celebrated history and traditions,” Sen. Cory Gardner said in a statement this week. “As the Chinese Communist Party celebrates the 70th anniversary of its totalitarian rule, over a million Uighurs are imprisoned in labor camps, millions are repressed in Tibet, and millions are on the streets of Hong Kong marching for autonomy and human rights. The United States will always stand with the people of China to have the freedom to choose their destiny.”

The senator’s unambiguous denunciation of the despotic regime contrasts with President Donald Trump’s celebratory tweet: “Congratulations to President Xi and the Chinese people on the 70th Anniversary of the People’s Republic of China!” While the president has spoken out on behalf of Hong Kong, most recently at the United Nations, and other human rights abuses in China, his criticism of Xi on these issues has been infrequent. His reluctance to criticize Xi on human rights may be part of the art of the deal in ongoing trade negotiations. Trump supporters would say tariffs speak louder than words. Still, it makes one nostalgic for President Ronald Reagan’s bold defense of human rights and condemnation of the evils of communism.

In the 19th century, communism claimed the lives of 100 million people through genocide, government- created famines, forced labor and executions. The People’s Republic of China gets credit for 65 million of the dead. In Albania, where I just spent two weeks, communist dictator Enver Hoxha orchestrated the deaths of 100,000 people over his four- decade reign, a significant number given that the Vermont- sized nation has only 3 million people.

The committed Marxist leader closed off Albania to the world. Foreigners were not allowed in, and Albanians were forbidden to leave. Only party leaders had cars and enjoyed free movement throughout the country. Dissenters were executed, imprisoned, interred in forced labor camps or exiled. Private property was confiscated. The officially atheist regime destroyed churches and mosques, and imprisoned and murdered religious leaders. Practicing one’s faith was illegal. Secret police kept dossiers on families and made family members pay a price if a relative stepped out of line. An act of rebellion could send family members to labor camps or blacklist the next generation from attending a university.

Part propaganda, part defense, Hoxha ordered the production of hundreds of thousands of concrete bunkers. The eerie mushroom cap structures can be found on mountaintops and on shorelines, in cities and in fields. Some are small enough to house a single person with a rifle, while others house a warren of underground rooms. Made to withstand war, the bunkers are a lasting monument to Hoxha’s paranoia and his desire to induce fear of the omnipresent state in his subjects.

These are not the only scars on the landscape. In the countryside, I drove past derelict buildings once political prisons and explored the dank halls of an 80room fallout shelter built to house the party faithful during a nuclear war. In Tirana, behind the art museum, languish the deposed statues of Lenin, Stalin and Hoxha. Lenin is armless and Hoxha is missing his nose. The Albanian dictator’s lovely house remains standing among the poorly aging concrete apartment buildings where everyone else was consigned to live.

I hope these reminders remain. It’s too easy to forget the horrors of an all- powerful state. There is no communism without political prisons, labor camps, bunkers, propaganda and secret police. Slavery requires a whip.

An Albanian friend asked me why some Americans are flirting with socialism. Pernicious ideas have the durability of concrete bunkers. The collapse of communism in the early 1990s didn’t stop the later ascent of Hugo Chavez and his heir from destroying the once- prosperous nation of Venezuela in the name of socialism. The idea of a powerful, beneficent state able to provide for everyone’s needs is compelling and can find fertile soil anywhere.

That’s why we need more leaders like Sen. Gardner who speak with moral clarity. It’s too easy to be taken in by an enduring lie. Christine Moser, Vice President, Advertising; Justin Mock, Vice President, Finance and CFO; Bob Kinney, Vice President, Information Technology