Arizona Republican whose family fled communist regime says some Americans ignore ideology's atrocities

An Arizona lawmaker who fled from communist Romania as a boy believes Americans aren't educated enough about the evils of communism and he's trying to change that in his home state.

Arizona House Speaker and state Rep. Ben Toma recently co-sponsored House Bill 2629, which would require students to spend at least 45 minutes learning about the prevalence of "poverty, starvation, migration, systemic lethal violence and suppression of speech," under communist regimes to graduate from high school.

The bill would also observe November 7 as the day of remembrance for victims of communism. It is co-sponsored by Republican Rep. Quang Nguyen, whose family fled communism in Vietnam. 

Toma shared how his own experience growing up under a communist regime shaped his understanding and why he thinks public schools need to be more transparent about the devastation communism has caused worldwide.

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The Republican was born in 1978 in Romania when it was run by dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu. He still remembers when the secret police showed up at his home to interrogate his father about things he allegedly did against the Communist Party.

"It was a long time ago, a very different world. But we were home alone when I was seven, and I was the oldest. And they just waited in the house and room, for our parents to get home," Toma explained to Fox News Digital. "And so my mom and dad realized that, you know, once that happens more than once… they knew what could happen and what usually did happen, which is that you would disappear or they'd come up with some trumped-up charges and you would end up in prison for a long time, never to be seen again in most cases. And so my parents decided not to risk it and they decided to flee the country."

"Of course, at the time, we didn't know. Nobody in the family knew what they were doing. They just told us they were going to go on vacation, and they did. But after three or four weeks passed and they didn't come back, my grandparents and other family members came to move us out. And, when they did, on the back of a painting hanging on the wall, they did find a note from my mom, explaining what they had planned to do, that they decided to risk it and flee, hoping, of course to make it to the Western world outside the reach of communism and hopefully be reunited with us," he continued.

Toma said he and his siblings were reunited with his parents about a year and half later in the United States. His family settled in Portland, Oregon, before moving to Arizona when he was a teenager.

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Toma's bill comes at a time when conservative education activists are warning that communist ideology is creeping into public schools and some polls show more young Americans hold romanticized views of Marxism and socialism. 

He understands why some Americans would think these systems could work, in theory.

"It seems like it's a good idea. Right? Why wouldn't you take people who have too much and share it with those that don't have enough, and then everybody's happy, right?" he said. "The problem is, it doesn't work in the real world… The only equality it leads to is equal misery for pretty much everybody."

Those in the West who sympathize with communism and socialism misunderstand human nature, he argued.

"It would work if human beings were perfect. The problem is human beings are not perfect. And so it ignores human nature and so it doesn't work," he said. They [also] think you can somehow force charity, but that doesn't work either, because once charity is forced, it's no longer charity… It's intellectually inconsistent and dishonest at the end of the day."

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Socialized health care is one example of something that works better on paper than in practice, he said.

He remembers how his parents had to bribe officials with cigarettes and coffee to get their family's documents to be able to see a doctor.

"Otherwise you could die in the waiting room," he said. "So that's how everything got done. It was all incredibly corrupt. It was about who you knew and whether you had someone willing to look out for you and whether you could pay, quite frankly. That's really what determined whether you got the services that you were entitled to, according to their own system of government, that is."

Schools, he suggested, need to teach young people the truth about how communism has failed everywhere it's been tried and led to millions of deaths.

"I've experienced it," he said. "And the truth of the matter is, even as I said in the committee, at least 100 million people have lost their lives, under brutal communist regimes of various sorts all across the globe. It's failed and it's led to all kinds of atrocities, starvation, abuse of human rights."

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"And yet somehow we just want to pretend like it didn't happen or not teach it, because presumably we're so —some of us, anyway —are so, infatuated maybe is the right word, with the ideas of socialism, that we don't want to be honest about the fact that they failed everywhere in the world," he continued.

"Part of the reason people repeat the same mistakes is because they don't actually know history. And when I talk to my kids, they haven't been taught the realities of the evils of communism and what's actually resulted from it. And that's how mistakes are made. That's how you repeat history," Toma said.

His bill is currently making its way to the House floor, where Toma expects it to pass with the Republican majority. Last week, the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee all voted against the bill.

Last year, Democrats in Virginia also rejected a bill that would have required schools to teach about the dangers and victims of communism after the state’s largest teachers union argued that it may encourage anti-Asian sentiment. 

Fox News' Bradford Betz contributed to this report.