George W. Bush spoke yesterday at the dedication of the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington, D.C., which is designed to remember the victims and educate future generations about the horrors of a totalitarian ideology:
Some of Communism’s victims are well-known. They include a Swedish diplomat named Raoul Wallenberg, who saved 100,000 Jews from the Nazis, only to be arrested on Stalin’s orders and sent to Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison, where he disappeared without a trace. They include a Polish priest named Father Popieluszko, who made his Warsaw church a sanctuary for the Solidarity underground, and was kidnaped, and beaten, and drowned in the Vitsula by the secret police.
The sacrifices of these individuals haunt history — and behind them are millions more who were killed in anonymity by Communism’s brutal hand. They include innocent Ukrainians starved to death in Stalin’s Great Famine; or Russians killed in Stalin’s purges; Lithuanians and Latvians and Estonians loaded onto cattle cars and deported to Arctic death camps of Soviet Communism. They include Chinese killed in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution; Cambodians slain in Pol Pot’s Killing Fields; East Germans shot attempting to scale the Berlin Wall in order to make it to freedom; Poles massacred in the Katyn Forest; and Ethiopians slaughtered in the "Red Terror"; Miskito Indians murdered by Nicaragua’s Sandinista dictatorship; and Cuban balseros who drowned escaping tyranny. . . .
The Czech writer Milan Kundera once described the struggle against Communism as "the struggle of memory against forgetting." Communist regimes did more than take their victims’ lives; they sought to steal their humanity and erase their memory.
Forty years ago, writing in COMMENTARY in the aftermath of the Six Day War, Milton Himmelfarb described the repulsive Soviet Communist actions relating to Israel:
The Soviets were disgusting in the UN, cynical, even anti-Semitic. . . . In fact, the Soviets’ calling the Israelis Nazis was itself Nazi-like. The Nazis told their lies for more than the usual reason, that they hoped to profit from telling them. They told lies because they were sadists. Lying, and above all their kind of lying, is a sadistic gratification: it twists, it tortures, it murders the truth. And this sadistic gratification can have an added, utilitarian advantage. By appalling and terrifying opponents, it can paralyze them. It can scare them into submission, or into the kind of weakness that makes their defeat probable.
Here were the Soviet authorities harping on Nazism and calling Israel Nazi, but in their own country they themselves have consistently repressed the truth about what Nazism did to the Jews.
Forty years later, as a new totalitarian threat embraces state-sponsored Holocaust denial and demonization of Israel, the historical relevance is obvious. President Bush articulated it yesterday as follows:
Like the Communists, the terrorists and radicals who attacked our nation [on September 11] are followers of a murderous ideology that despises freedom, crushes all dissent, has expansionist ambitions and pursues totalitarian aims. Like the Communists, our new enemies believe the innocent can be murdered to serve a radical vision. Like the Communists, our new enemies are dismissive of free peoples, claiming that those of us who live in liberty are weak and lack the resolve to defend our free way of life. And like the Communists, the followers of violent Islamic radicalism are doomed to fail.
By remaining steadfast in freedom’s cause, we will ensure that a future American President does not have to stand in a place like this and dedicate a memorial to the millions killed by the radicals and extremists of the 21st century.
With an emblem of freedom behind him, Bush had an eloquent conclusion to his remarks:
The men and women who designed this memorial could have chosen an image of repression for this space, a replica of the wall that once divided Berlin, or the frozen barracks of the Gulag, or a killing field littered with skulls. Instead, they chose an image of hope — a woman holding a lamp of liberty. . . .
Like our Statue of Liberty, she reminds us that the flame for freedom burns in every human heart, and that it is a light that cannot be extinguished by the brutality of terrorists or tyrants. And she reminds us that when an ideology kills tens of millions of people, and still ends up being vanquished, it is contending with a power greater than death.