January 16, 2026 Show with Lou Veiga AND Dr. Eric Patterson on “The Forgotten Victims of Communism”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs, chapter 27, verse 17, tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

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Covenant Presbyterian Church and the Victims of Communism Foundation

I'm thrilled to have both a returning guest and a first-time guest who will together discuss a very important organization and a very important theme. I have returning to the program Pastor Lou Vega of Covenant Presbyterian Church, which is a congregation in the Presbyterian Church in America, also known as the PCA, in Houston, Texas.

And Lou Vega's family fled to the United States from Cuba in the 1950s, shortly before the fall of Cuba to Fidel Castro and the Communists. And first of all, it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Lou Vega.

Well, it's all my pleasure and privilege. Thank you.

Why don't you give a brief description of the church where you pastor, Covenant Presbyterian Church of Houston, Texas?

Well, I think the best way to describe the church is that it's a lively congregation in the name of the Lord Jesus here in Houston. We're in West Houston. And we are, I like to say, we're mostly a plain vanilla Presbyterian church and nothing up our sleeves and nothing very distinctive or unique about us.

If you like the Reformed faith and if you're a Presbyterian, you'll recognize us probably within five minutes of the start of worship. And I don't know what else I can say about that. I'm very happy to have come and discovered this godly heritage from the Protestant Reformation.

And it's the expression of the Christian faith, as it is stated in Westminster. I know that, you know, Christy, you are a Reformed Baptist, but we're really very, very close together. I love all the Reformed Baptists of the London Confession there.

And I will say that our unique situation is that since Houston is very much an international city, our congregation pretty much mirrors our neighborhood. At one time, I think we had like 18 different countries represented in our congregation of 174, with probably about 24 dialects spoken, because several of our African members speak multiple dialects.

And of course, I'm the pastor, and so I speak, my first language is Spanish, and I've taken up English nicely, I think. So that's about it. I used to be an engineer, and the church is located in West Houston, which is in the, it's called the Energy Corridor, the Oil and Gas Corridor of Houston, which means we get a lot of techie types, you know, engineers and then financial people.

But then again, the neighborhood is very, very much mixed. And so all kinds of people here. And we have this one thing in common, that the Lord, being lifted up, He has drawn us to Himself, and we enjoy that communion very much.

And that's what we are all about.

And if anyone wants to do more research on Covenant Presbyterian Church in Houston, Texas, go to covenantpca .org, covenantpca .org. And also joining us for the very first time is Dr. Eric Patterson. He is president and CEO of Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and Museum.

And today, both of these men are going to be addressing the forgotten victims of communism and the devastating results of the mass ignorance of their persecution. And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Trip and Zion Radio, Dr. Eric Patterson.

Chris, it's a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me and for highlighting the important work that the Victims of Communism Foundation has been doing for the past 30 years. And we have our work cut out for us in the days ahead.

Amen. And we have a tradition here on Iron Trip and Zion Radio, whenever we have a first-time guest, unlike Pastor Lou Vega, who has been on this program before, but you are the first-time guest on the broadcast today, we always have first-time guests give a summary of their salvation testimony, which would include any kind of religious atmosphere in which they were raised, if any, and the kinds of providential circumstances our Sovereign Lord raised up in their lives that drew them to Himself and saved them.

So I would love to hear a summary of your story.

Well, Chris, I love the way that you just said that, because what you had to say about the providential drawing of Christ, us to Himself, and the role that our families can play, is exactly right. In my own case, I was blessed to have Christian, godly parents—I still have them, I swept them just last night—and grew up in a faithful household that was a God home, went to Evangel University in Springfield, Missouri, thinking that I was going to be working in the church, and felt really God's hand leading me in that direction.

About halfway through college, I felt as if the Lord said in my heart—not in audible voice, but in my heart—you know, Patterson, you finally have surrendered yourself, and now you're useful for service.

And after a lot of prayer and things, I did finish those degrees, but didn't go to work in full-time clergy type of ministry in the church, but instead have been on a path, trying to be salt and light in the primary line where education and international affairs and government service come together.

Again, I can't underscore enough how I was blessed to be raised in a Bible-believing church with great role models and mentors in my home church growing up, and my grandparents and my parents. So I'm so thankful for that, and for the saving work of Christ in my own life.

I have a godly wife, Jennifer Patterson, she's well known with her involvement at Reform Theological Seminary in the D .C. campus, and is the Director of Theology and Public Life there, and for other work that she's done over the years.

So I feel very blessed in just many ways. My last job was as president of the Religious Freedom Institute. I felt like God was using our work there to provide opportunities for everyone to live out their religious faith, but in particular, as a Christian witness, as an opportunity for Christians to be authentically Christian in what they say and do at home and abroad.

And in my current role with the Victims of Communism Foundation, I feel very, very blessed that the work that we do, first and foremost, is to protect the inherent dignity, the fact that every male, every female is created in God's image, and that everyone has that type of worth.

Communism crushes that. Communism crushes the family, it crushes religious faith, it crushes religious authority, and it smashes every institution outside of the communist state. So I feel very thankful for the work that we do here, and I look forward to the conversation.

Amen. And, Lou, how did you become acquainted with Dr. Patterson, so much so that you visited the museum and have developed a friendship with him?

Well, in the Lord's Providence, I was visiting my sister in Jacksonville, and she mentioned that our cousin Rita had several articles, the personal articles that she was displaying in the Victims of Communism Museum as it was hosting the Operation Pedro Pan exhibit.

That was a touring exhibit regarding an organization that was helpful in removing young people, children, and getting them out of Cuba at a time when they were really being snatched and they were being taken by the Cuban government away from their family, away from their parents.

And Operation Pedro Pan, they flew in, and they were relocated here through sponsor families. But when I heard that Rita had those articles contributing to the Operation Pedro Pan exhibit in the Victims of Communism Museum, and that she herself had been participant in the Pedro Pan operation, I thought, well, this is something new.

I did not know that someone who was related to us actually was brought into safety to the United States through Operation Pedro Pan. And the Victims of Communism Museum, very keen to host this exhibit and to give expression to this.

Now, the reason that was just, that would have been merely a point of curiosity with me regarding my cousin. But the reason I really wanted to at least get a couple of words in with Dr. Patterson was that I was an engineer with IBM in Kentucky.

And one evening after work, I was driving home and I was listening to National Public Radio. And I heard the announcer say that this matter of Operation Pedro Pan, all of that, that is not historically true.

It never happened. There was never such thing. That's a misunderstanding. And I honestly, I was driving on Highway 68, which is a hazardous road. It's in the country. Lots of curves and hills. I'm in horse country.

I nearly killed a horse at that point. I nearly flew off the road and crashed through a horse fence and landed on top of somebody's pony. Because I knew I had gone to school with at least seven people, five of whom I interacted with all the time and three of whom I played football with in high school.

I knew this was the case. Why? It was National Public Radio flatly denouncing a plain historical truth. So I had to express myself. I had to just, I had to run to somebody and say, look, what do you know about this?

And when I did, Dr. Patterson was very gracious to acknowledge me as not a crazy person. He looked at me right in the eye and he said, yeah, not only that, but we still fight this very unconventional wisdom in America because they'll fight us on the number of people that actually came over and participated and that there was an organization.

In other words, Dr. Patterson's organization has very well documented everything, all manner of testimony, all manner of receipts, as we like to call things today. So nothing new to him. But I was moved more than just by curiosity.

I was moved with a bit of rage. How is it that we, how is it that in America, a place that we came to flee is now covering up the atrocities that we fled from in Cuba? So anyway, a sane voice in the victims of communism organization.

And that's how, that's how we paired up.

Defining Communism and Socialism

And it would probably be good to, before we get too far ahead of ourselves in this interview, Dr. Patterson, it would probably be very wise for us to have you give an accurate working definition of communism and even compare and contrast that with socialism.

There seems to be a great deal of ignorance on what both of those terms really mean. And if you could lay that out for us.

Yes, yes. Let me start with this just to say something about what we do at the Victims of Communism Foundation and Museum. Our mission is to educate all generations about the terrible history, ideology, and legacy of communism.

That is what we do. And we do it really in four areas. One is through the VOC Museum, which we opened in 2022 here in Washington, DC, which is a schoolhouse that tells the story of communism kind of around the world.

The second thing that we do is we have a set of educational academic programs. We have a whole set of books and curriculum available on our Amazon bookshop. It's literally Amazon Bookshop slash Victims of Communism.

We do teacher trainings. We do things for professors and high school teachers. And we have curriculum that's tied to the kind of state standards about teaching the Cold War and whatnot for across the United States.

And then the third thing we do is we put policy-relevant research into the hands of legislators, policymakers, people at the State Department, the British Ministry of Defense, the United Nations, the U .S. National Security Council, to equip them about what's really going on in places like Cuba and Nicaragua and Venezuela and China and North Korea and elsewhere today.

And of course, we have a convening role bringing people together from the dissident communities, freedom champions from around the world here in Washington, DC. So that's kind of the core of our mission.

We really have an educational mission when it comes to these types of things. Now, you asked the question about thinking about definitions, and since we're kind of in this long-form situation, let me say this, that Karl Marx—you know, going back to Greek times, to Plato, there have been people who have theorized that if you had a—that some sort of elite could run the state in a way to maximize efficiency and equality.

We see that in Plato's Republic. And obviously, the questions are, well, what about individual differences? What about pluralism? What about individual freedom? What about private property? What about choices that people make?

And of course, these types of systems and the best explication of this type of status totalitarianism comes from Karl Marx. And remember, Marx believed that he was a prophet of the future and that capitalism was on its way out and that there would be two phases.

The first would be socialism, a system of political economic organization in which major industries and all of the financial economic sectors of life are owned or controlled by government, not by individuals, not by families, not by companies.

And Marx and his co-author Engels believed that socialism, where government takes control essentially of all of the economic sphere, was only the first of two steps and that the second step is what they called communism.

Communism is a centralized system of political power in which a single-party dictatorship abolishes private property and controls what they call the means of production and distribution of goods, in other words, all sectors of political, social, and economic life.

Now under the pretense of a classless, egalitarian society, what communist regimes do in practice is use force, brutality, and repression that steals private property and represses the kind of fundamental liberties that we think about in the U .S. that are rooted in the individual, speech, religion, assembly, and others.

That's how we think about socialism and communism at VOC.

Why Young People Are Drawn to Socialism

Yes, and I'm assuming that you are as disturbed, if not more, as I am, knowing that, especially among the young, perhaps Generation Z and those that are somewhat a little older than that, but of course there are even elderly people who seem to become enamored with the idea of socialism.

We just witnessed the openly socialist mayor of New York City become elected to that position and obviously there was an overwhelming support for him. This is truly mystifying because it would seem to betray gross ignorance and mass ignorance on the part of the population as to what socialism is, how it has led to full-blown communism, that there's really not that much of a difference in those two ideologies.

In fact, I have heard it often said that the only difference between socialism and communism is that socialism is usually an idea that becomes imposed upon a population through votes and through clever persuasion and communism by the threat of death or the actual conquering of a people through death and torture and so on.

But what do you have to say about this amazing lack of understanding and it seems that the knowledge of church history, which is not that difficult to delve into, would make any sane person want to flee from the very notion of socialism or communism?

I'm with you 100 that any knowledgeable person who has their head on straight would want to flee socialism. Let me tell you how I see the moment that we're in and it's exactly right that a recent poll from last summer said that 62 of younger adults and young adults have a favorable view of socialism, 62%.

And let me suggest how we got there and there's three things I think that get us there. The first one is because you noted, well, every communist regime has come through the imposition of brute force.

Martin Luther King Jr. said that communism always is imposed and maintained in power by violence, lies, and.

Murder.

So that's true, but it is possible, as you were suggesting, for a society to sort of voluntarily slide into socialism. And here's how it happens. Three things. First, you rewrite your own history. You let the hard left revisionists rewrite American history, not as a story of expanding freedom from the Mayflower Compact onward, warts, scars, and all.

Instead, you rewrite it as oppressor versus oppressed, white patriarchy, Christians dominating everybody else. And that critical lens, that neo-Marxist lens, is actually the way we've been teaching American history for the past 20 or 30 years in our universities.

So rewrite your history so your young people think it's a history of oppression and actually come to hate your country. Second, the loss of religious faith. George Washington reminded us that religion and religious morality is at the heart of what it means to be a democracy.

As de Tocqueville reminded us, you want to have individuals who voluntarily obey what is moral and right. That's the role of the church. That's the role of Christianity. And we have seen the benefits of that, not just for Christians, but for Jews and for others in our diverse, religiously free society.

But if you get rid of that, if you ban religion from the public square, if you deride it as superstitious, as part of this critical complex of the old patriarchy, so get rid of it, it's unjust, it's implicated in racism and evil, you've lost the basis for morality.

And the only, then, basis for morality is raw power. Whosoever in power gets to decide what's right and wrong. So rewrite history, get rid of religion. And then third is increasing dependency on the state.

And the young people who voted for Mandami, I think most of them are probably not ideologues, but they're in their early 20s to mid -20s. They've never had a real job. Their K -12 education was free. Their college was largely free.

Maybe they now have a debt for college, but they didn't really pay for it. They have had their food subsidized their whole life. They've had free rent or subsidized rent their whole life. Their transportation has largely been free.

Their phone, which is quite expensive these days, has been largely free. And so they're 22, 25, 27, and they're wondering, you know, how dare you throw all these huge costs on me? I'm entitled to live in New York.

I'm entitled to have a job. Someone should provide these things for me. Rewrite history, get rid of the religious basis of morality, and create a sense of dependency on the state. I think that's how we get to this moment.

Cuba Under Communism

And Pastor Lue Vega, you, as I said earlier, when you were a child, you and your family successfully fled from Cuba before the complete collapse of Cuba to Fidel Castro and the communists. What can you say about what's going on in communist Cuba since then so our listeners get a vivid picture and understanding of why no one should be desiring the rise of socialism and communism in their own nations, such as the United States?

It's quite fascinating and quite telling that countries under communist rule are keeping their citizens fenced in without the freedom to leave there, and you don't have millions of immigrants trying to get into these countries, whereas you do see that happening here in the United States.

Of course, so much so that our current president had to be much more militant in sealing off our borders. But tell us about Cuba and the life you were spared from by God's mercy because you and your family fled.

Well, Chris, let me just say right off, I am not the expert on Cuba as it currently sits because, to me, my primary vocation is to serve the Lord's people here as a pastor in Houston, in America, and if I get too Cuban on these people, I might lose some of our Russians and some of our Chinese people.

I try to stay away from a great amount of interest, but I will say this, regarding the oppression and the plight of the Cuban people, primarily my knowledge of that has been first growing up by personal anecdote of people that I knew that experienced these things, relatives, friends, many of whom were clear-headed, not fanatical people.

They did well in business here in America, and they owned businesses that were professional people. My father was controller of a lumber company in Cuba. I remember him telling me the stories where he handed off the keys to the guard that was posted there at the lumber yard.

He gave him his pistol and said, look, you can have my lumber, you can have my pistol, and where I'm going, said my father, I won't need this pistol. Of course, that was 1959, 1960. So anyway, the anecdotes are plentiful.

In fact, one of the things that I found there, as I get to know the staff at the Victims of Communism Museum, was they have a select bookstore, very choice. In the traveling exhibit, I found, and it was on sale for me at a very, very good price.

I think it was like $30. I couldn't believe it. A 700-page book, and then a hardback, anthology of anecdotes of people that came out of Cuba, their experiences with the repression, with the intrigue, with the persecution, with the atrocities.

That kind of book just doesn't circulate too well on the New York Times bestseller list. So I went ahead and bought it, and I bought it for my family. And I gave it to my brother. I said, you read it first when you're done or pass it on.

I want this to be a family heirloom of sorts. But we have the writings of many people. We have stories of our own families. And then, you know, every once in a while, I'll meet a new Cuban who's a recent emigre.

And you know my friend. You've already met Chet Neal of Paris. You interviewed him on January 6th on your program here. And he and I got together this past Tuesday. And, again, he affirmed to me the dire situation.

But you can't, look, you don't need to base your opinions on the Cuban American voice here. Many, for 40 years, I've been humming these tunes everywhere I go. In IBM, and that was a multicultural organization, and there was a professional there.

I even worked in human resources. It's very interesting over the years how the complexion of corporate America changed with regard to socialism and these factors. So I wasn't always a welcome voice. I became increasingly unwelcome as I talked about the dangers.

Why are we offshoring our manufacturing and engineering to China? I once asked our VP of human resources, why do we have $350 million offshore in a Chinese account? Why don't we bring that money back?

It turns out, you know, that was good bait for the company that I worked for, not IBM, but a subsequent company there, an offshoot of IBM. I won't mention it. I don't feel like getting sued today. But, anyway, it's nice bait when you have that kind of money and you're teaching people your technology, and they'll gladly take all of your patents and exploit those.

But it's very convenient for them to offer China a great incentive for them to buy you out, which they did. They eventually bought out the company that I was working for, and just before that happened, I got a nice bridge to retirement, which allowed me to go to seminary at 50, and that's fine with me, and the Lord's providence that it all worked out nicely.

But what I'm saying is, if you don't trust all of these testimonies of many, many, many objective points, voice, and concerns, you can look online, YouTube, and here's an exercise. Just look up Cuban fishermen, Havana fishermen.

These guys cannot make their ends meet on the $9 a month that they receive as salary from the state. They are electricians. They are plumbers. Besides, they can't get enough protein even with the $9, so they go fishing.

Look at YouTube. Look at the fishermen from Havana and see how they have to supplement both their income and their protein because they don't have enough food, and see how they get along. By the way, what they do is illegal, and the fine imposed on them, I think, is 1 ,400 pesos, which is an outrageous, outrageous punishment for somebody who gets nine pesos a month, all right?

But they do it anyway because if they didn't do that, they would face starvation. That film is not a Cuban production. That film is not a Cuban-American production. It is a European production. I don't know who it was.

Some German guy went in there, I think, or Canadian. I don't know anybody. He just started annotating and documenting the lives of Cuban fishermen from Havana and how they live and how they make ends meet.

Now, I probably mentioned the Cuban fishermen because my grandfather was a Cuban fisherman, and I want to let everybody know it's all right to be a Cuban fisherman. There you go.

Hey, could I just say one thing first? Oh, sure, of course. And that is we interview people who are survivors of communism. We call them witnesses, and so your listeners, we'd love for them to go to our website or go to our YouTube channel.

If you just type in, for instance, Victims of Communism Witness Project, the Witness Project will pop up with these interviews, people from Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, other places, Eastern Europe who fled communism, and they tell their own stories.

Yes, Dr. Patterson is right. Now, Chris, if I would add a caution with that, no concern at all with the Victims of Communism website, by all means do that, but you will get within the United States other witnesses that are false, and this has always been the case.

Beginning in South Florida, well, we've had Cubans, Cuban expats, you know, serving in state functions, purportedly protecting our borders here to the south in Mexico and doing a very, very doublish job of it.

We've got even Cuban immigrants here who should know better who have gone over to the dark side. I know this to be the case, and the commotion in South Florida, the confusion down there is that that has been infiltrated by any number of moles for many, many, many years.

So you're always going to get a naysayer saying, no, it's not that bad, and then you're going to get some Canadian friends who say, we had a lovely time in Havana. Look, keep that in mind. You're going to get any number of spokespeople, but I'm telling you, we've had doctors related to our family who were sick because they could not get sufficient nutrition.

I'm talking about medical doctors who could not get sufficient nutrition and they were dying of diseases related to malnutrition because they could not find enough food, and they are medical doctors in Cuba.

And that's the story that we get from our relatives.

Biblical Refutation of Communism

Well, we have to go to our first commercial break, and if anybody would like to join us with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen, as always, give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA.

Please only remain anonymous if your question is a personal and private one. Let's say you have a question that involves family members that are still living in lands under communist rule and you don't want to identify yourself.

Those kinds of things are obvious reasons to remain anonymous. But if it's a general question, please send us your first name at least, your city and state, and country of residence. Please don't go away.

We are going to be right back right after these messages from our sponsors.

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That's all you need to do when you purchase jewelry from royaldiadem .com and we get 100 of the profits from that sale. So whether you're buying jewelry for yourself or someone you love, whether you are buying jewelry they already have in stock or whether you're having a one-of-a-kind customized piece of jewelry designed and created like an engagement ring or maybe even taking your loved one's church logo or parachurch ministry logo or business logo or seminary logo and turning it into a pendant for a necklace or a ring or anything else your imagination can conjure up.