By Jacob Laksin
FrontPageMagazine.com
Washington D.C. -- Holocaust victims have one. So do the fallen of World War II and Vietnam. But what of the estimated 100 million who perished at the hands of the last century’s greatest tragedy, communist totalitarianism?
Until recently, these silenced masses -- victims of Soviet gulags, Vietnamese concentration camps, Cambodia‘s killing fields, the East German, Cuban and North Korean police states -- had no fitting memorial to remind the world of their unjust, and often inhuman, fate, let alone of the ideology that abbreviated so many lives. That changed this week with the dedication in the nation’s capital of the world’s first memorial to the collective victims of communism.
It is a long time coming. The memorial is largely the fruit of the labors of Lee Edwards, a writer and a fellow in conservative thought at The Heritage Foundation. Long known for his opposition to communism -- in his well-regarded book, The Conservative Revolution, Edwards proposed the notion that “communism should be defeated, not simply contained” as a core tenet of conservatism -- Edwards credits his wife Anne with coining the idea for the project in January of 1990. “I could see even then that memories about communism were fading,” Edwards said in an interview. “These things worried me.”
What followed is the tale of one determined man’s battle against bureaucracy. Turning to the government for permission for a memorial in the early 1990s, Edwards was presented with a lengthy bill of particulars, some 24 in all, that would have to be satisfied before the project could proceed. Complicating matters further, community groups, determined to stave off tourist traffic, successfully thwarted the original location for the memorial. There was even political opposition, most prominently from communist China -- the "ChiComs" as Edwards puts it -- which had a vested interest in deflecting the spotlight from communism’s brutal legacy. “This is going to take longer than you think,” Edwards recalls the head of the National Parks Service telling him. “Boy, was he right.”
But Edwards persevered. Crucially, he found political and financial support among ethnic communities who had suffered under communism. Vietnamese Americans were especially supportive, contributing nearly 10 percent of the memorial’s $950,000 final price tag, but Eastern Europeans, including Czechs, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Hungarians, and Russians, also rallied to the memorial’s cause. A bipartisan group of legislators, among them Joe Lieberman and Jesse Helms, backed a bill authorizing the project, which was signed into law by President Clinton. Edwards later managed to secure the support of President Bush, who agreed to serve as honorary chairman of his memorial foundation. “It was a rare decision and quite an honor,” Edwards says.
Bureaucratic obstacles dogged the project every step of the way. Then, the big break came. In search of final authorization, Edwards paid a visit to a government bureaucrat with connections to Washington’s Democratic mayor. Given the political differences, Edwards had his doubts about the meeting. He was pleasantly surprised. After listening impassively to Edwards’ case, the official told him: “I just want you to know one thing: I don’t like communism.” It was the green light Edwards had been waiting for.
The opportunity has not been squandered. When it was unveiled this Tuesday morning on Washington‘s Massachusetts Avenue, the monument -- a 10-foot tall bronze replica of the “Goddess of Democracy,“ a papier-mâché imitation of the Statue of Liberty built by Chinese pro-democracy demonstrators during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre -- earned broad approval. How broad could be seen when St. Petersburg-born singer Marina Oberlander performed the national anthem and was soulfully (if not always harmoniously) joined by the assembled audience, a rich tapestry of nationalities that included veterans of Vietnam’s anti-communist forces, as well as political dissidents and émigrés from scores of former Eastern Block countries.
On hand to inaugurate the memorial was an all-star roster of political figures. The undisputed star of the event was President Bush. In his remarks, Bush paid homage to those who died resisting communist oppression. It was important, he said, to “enshrine their sacrifice in the conscience of the world.” The president added that the Cold War offered many lessons for the War on Terror, among them that “given the chance, men commanded by hateful ideologies will commit unspeakable crimes.” Bush also seemed to suggest that the outcome of the Cold War should provide confidence about the current conflict. “When an ideology kills millions of people and still ends up being vanquished, it reminds us that it is dealing with a power greater than death,” he said, drawing cheers from the audience.
Democrats and their media allies have of course derided the Bush administration for linking the global war on terror to the Cold War. So it made for an interesting twist on the day’s events when Congressman Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California, made a similar assertion. In a surprisingly hawkish speech, Lantos, a Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor who serves as the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, pressed the audience to remember that communism “posed an existential threat to the civilized world,” and that Islamic terrorism, “which wants to take us back 13 centuries,” represented a challenge on the same order. To appreciative applause, Lantos noted that, just as in the Cold War, the role of the United States would be vital to victory. “Without the United States, the struggle for human freedom and liberty would have been lost.”
Dana Rohrabacher, a former Republican Congressman from California, underscored that point. One of the original sponsors of the bill to authorize the memorial, Rorbacher noted that throughout the Cold War political and intellectual elites opposed a firm American stand against communism. Drawing on his time as a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, Rohrabacher pointed out that many in the administration, including Secretary of State George Schultz, vehemently opposed the President Reagan’s famous call, issued twenty years ago this week, for Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down” the Berlin Wall. Now that the Soviet Union is no more, these same voices have taken to denouncing a strong American stand against radical Islam, Rohrabacher said.
For evidence of the charge, look no further than some of the responses to the memorial. In lines that eerily recalled the old claim that the U.S. was the true aggressor during the Cold War, the Washington Post’s Phillip Kennicott claimed that the memorial was really a “victory for conservative supporters of our new age of bellicosity.” Kennicott also took strong exception to, as he put it, the memorial's connotation “[t]hat victims of left-wing ideologies have been insufficiently remembered; that new ideologies, such as radical Islam, are being insufficiently opposed.” (emphasis in the original) Apparently, the notion that victims of murderous regimes should be remembered and Islamic terrorists confronted is the sinister plot of the vast right-wing conspiracy.
Not all objections to the memorial, to be sure, are quite so fatuous. It goes without saying, for instance, that no memorial could do justice to the lives extinguished in communism’s name. On the other hand, many would argue that in this instance such failure is forgivable. Among them is Dmitry Goldgaber, who immigrated to the United States from Latvia in 1980. Following the dedication of the memorial, Goldgaber recounted the story of his grandfather, who was detained in Northern Caucasus in the 1940s and, for no credible reason, spent a decade in Stalin’s prisons. Only after the ascension of Khrushchev to power was he finally exonerated, though Soviet authorities refused to explain why he had been jailed in the first place. For Goldgaber‘s grandfather, it powerfully brought home the injustice of spending ten years in jail. “He cried for the first time then,” Goldgaber recalls. In the memorial, Goldgaber sees a small vindication: “One could argue about the memorial, but the fact that we recognized the victims is significant. I am very proud that the United States did this.”
Does this mean that the record of communism’s manifold evils has been set straight? Skeptics abound. At a panel discussion at the Heritage Foundation held in conjunction with the memorial event, Alan Kors, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, observed that the main source of historical education, academia, has failed to put the massive crimes of communism in their proper context. Pointing to the widespread public ignorance about communism, Kors cited the lack of intellectual diversity in higher education as a central cause. Because universities fail “to hire pluralistically in history and political science,” Kors concluded, “we’re not going to get enlightenment about the victims of communism from the American professoriate; it will have to come from civil society.”
Not long ago, that sentiment may have seemed utopian. But as Lee Edwards’ triumphant fight for a memorial demonstrates, it need not be. After all, the United States helped engineer the collapse of international communism. What a shame it would be if it now met its match in domestic apathy.
Until recently, these silenced masses -- victims of Soviet gulags, Vietnamese concentration camps, Cambodia‘s killing fields, the East German, Cuban and North Korean police states -- had no fitting memorial to remind the world of their unjust, and often inhuman, fate, let alone of the ideology that abbreviated so many lives. That changed this week with the dedication in the nation’s capital of the world’s first memorial to the collective victims of communism.
It is a long time coming. The memorial is largely the fruit of the labors of Lee Edwards, a writer and a fellow in conservative thought at The Heritage Foundation. Long known for his opposition to communism -- in his well-regarded book, The Conservative Revolution, Edwards proposed the notion that “communism should be defeated, not simply contained” as a core tenet of conservatism -- Edwards credits his wife Anne with coining the idea for the project in January of 1990. “I could see even then that memories about communism were fading,” Edwards said in an interview. “These things worried me.”
What followed is the tale of one determined man’s battle against bureaucracy. Turning to the government for permission for a memorial in the early 1990s, Edwards was presented with a lengthy bill of particulars, some 24 in all, that would have to be satisfied before the project could proceed. Complicating matters further, community groups, determined to stave off tourist traffic, successfully thwarted the original location for the memorial. There was even political opposition, most prominently from communist China -- the "ChiComs" as Edwards puts it -- which had a vested interest in deflecting the spotlight from communism’s brutal legacy. “This is going to take longer than you think,” Edwards recalls the head of the National Parks Service telling him. “Boy, was he right.”
But Edwards persevered. Crucially, he found political and financial support among ethnic communities who had suffered under communism. Vietnamese Americans were especially supportive, contributing nearly 10 percent of the memorial’s $950,000 final price tag, but Eastern Europeans, including Czechs, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Hungarians, and Russians, also rallied to the memorial’s cause. A bipartisan group of legislators, among them Joe Lieberman and Jesse Helms, backed a bill authorizing the project, which was signed into law by President Clinton. Edwards later managed to secure the support of President Bush, who agreed to serve as honorary chairman of his memorial foundation. “It was a rare decision and quite an honor,” Edwards says.
Bureaucratic obstacles dogged the project every step of the way. Then, the big break came. In search of final authorization, Edwards paid a visit to a government bureaucrat with connections to Washington’s Democratic mayor. Given the political differences, Edwards had his doubts about the meeting. He was pleasantly surprised. After listening impassively to Edwards’ case, the official told him: “I just want you to know one thing: I don’t like communism.” It was the green light Edwards had been waiting for.
The opportunity has not been squandered. When it was unveiled this Tuesday morning on Washington‘s Massachusetts Avenue, the monument -- a 10-foot tall bronze replica of the “Goddess of Democracy,“ a papier-mâché imitation of the Statue of Liberty built by Chinese pro-democracy demonstrators during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre -- earned broad approval. How broad could be seen when St. Petersburg-born singer Marina Oberlander performed the national anthem and was soulfully (if not always harmoniously) joined by the assembled audience, a rich tapestry of nationalities that included veterans of Vietnam’s anti-communist forces, as well as political dissidents and émigrés from scores of former Eastern Block countries.
On hand to inaugurate the memorial was an all-star roster of political figures. The undisputed star of the event was President Bush. In his remarks, Bush paid homage to those who died resisting communist oppression. It was important, he said, to “enshrine their sacrifice in the conscience of the world.” The president added that the Cold War offered many lessons for the War on Terror, among them that “given the chance, men commanded by hateful ideologies will commit unspeakable crimes.” Bush also seemed to suggest that the outcome of the Cold War should provide confidence about the current conflict. “When an ideology kills millions of people and still ends up being vanquished, it reminds us that it is dealing with a power greater than death,” he said, drawing cheers from the audience.
Democrats and their media allies have of course derided the Bush administration for linking the global war on terror to the Cold War. So it made for an interesting twist on the day’s events when Congressman Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California, made a similar assertion. In a surprisingly hawkish speech, Lantos, a Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor who serves as the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, pressed the audience to remember that communism “posed an existential threat to the civilized world,” and that Islamic terrorism, “which wants to take us back 13 centuries,” represented a challenge on the same order. To appreciative applause, Lantos noted that, just as in the Cold War, the role of the United States would be vital to victory. “Without the United States, the struggle for human freedom and liberty would have been lost.”
Dana Rohrabacher, a former Republican Congressman from California, underscored that point. One of the original sponsors of the bill to authorize the memorial, Rorbacher noted that throughout the Cold War political and intellectual elites opposed a firm American stand against communism. Drawing on his time as a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, Rohrabacher pointed out that many in the administration, including Secretary of State George Schultz, vehemently opposed the President Reagan’s famous call, issued twenty years ago this week, for Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down” the Berlin Wall. Now that the Soviet Union is no more, these same voices have taken to denouncing a strong American stand against radical Islam, Rohrabacher said.
For evidence of the charge, look no further than some of the responses to the memorial. In lines that eerily recalled the old claim that the U.S. was the true aggressor during the Cold War, the Washington Post’s Phillip Kennicott claimed that the memorial was really a “victory for conservative supporters of our new age of bellicosity.” Kennicott also took strong exception to, as he put it, the memorial's connotation “[t]hat victims of left-wing ideologies have been insufficiently remembered; that new ideologies, such as radical Islam, are being insufficiently opposed.” (emphasis in the original) Apparently, the notion that victims of murderous regimes should be remembered and Islamic terrorists confronted is the sinister plot of the vast right-wing conspiracy.
Not all objections to the memorial, to be sure, are quite so fatuous. It goes without saying, for instance, that no memorial could do justice to the lives extinguished in communism’s name. On the other hand, many would argue that in this instance such failure is forgivable. Among them is Dmitry Goldgaber, who immigrated to the United States from Latvia in 1980. Following the dedication of the memorial, Goldgaber recounted the story of his grandfather, who was detained in Northern Caucasus in the 1940s and, for no credible reason, spent a decade in Stalin’s prisons. Only after the ascension of Khrushchev to power was he finally exonerated, though Soviet authorities refused to explain why he had been jailed in the first place. For Goldgaber‘s grandfather, it powerfully brought home the injustice of spending ten years in jail. “He cried for the first time then,” Goldgaber recalls. In the memorial, Goldgaber sees a small vindication: “One could argue about the memorial, but the fact that we recognized the victims is significant. I am very proud that the United States did this.”
Does this mean that the record of communism’s manifold evils has been set straight? Skeptics abound. At a panel discussion at the Heritage Foundation held in conjunction with the memorial event, Alan Kors, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, observed that the main source of historical education, academia, has failed to put the massive crimes of communism in their proper context. Pointing to the widespread public ignorance about communism, Kors cited the lack of intellectual diversity in higher education as a central cause. Because universities fail “to hire pluralistically in history and political science,” Kors concluded, “we’re not going to get enlightenment about the victims of communism from the American professoriate; it will have to come from civil society.”
Not long ago, that sentiment may have seemed utopian. But as Lee Edwards’ triumphant fight for a memorial demonstrates, it need not be. After all, the United States helped engineer the collapse of international communism. What a shame it would be if it now met its match in domestic apathy.
1 comment:
youns (vietnamese) are the China's
ethnic people, so youns culture and
their old characteristic letters are the
same as those of Chinese
No wonder that the tradition of this Chinese
ethnic people(youns called by chinese) is that :
- vietnamese men in in any country, most
of them are thiefs or robbers
- and vietnamese women in in any country,
most of them are prostitutes
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