Honoring the Victims of Communism

Yesterday, June 12, marked the twentieth anniversary of President Reagan's extraordinary "Tear Down this Wall" speech in Berlin. I remember that speech well, as much for the derision it elicited from my then-fellow graduate students at Michigan as for the speech itself. How, I thought, could anyone, liberal or conservative, not wish for the Wall to fall? I was naive, of course: hyper-educated white collar towns like Ann Arbor were (are) chock-full of elites filled with contempt for America, her people, and her freedoms. And Ronald Reagan, the Hollywood cowboy? The man who was, in the words of the disgraced Clark Clifford, an amiable dunce? We're supposed to take him seriously, they sneered?

When the Wall fell but two years later, the shouts of joy in Central Europe were met in parts of Ann Arbor with silence and horror. Nowhere was this more evident than in Michigan's German department, where lamentations for the the GDR (German Democratic Republic, DDR in German, or East Germany) were almost ubiquitous.

I was during those days privileged to teach in the Great Books program of Michigan's Honors College. For one year only, the director substituted a few modern works for the list of classical Greek and Roman works that we normally assigned students. Among the works we read in lieu of timeless classics was the East German author Christa Wolf's mediocre novel Cassandra, in which Achilles was a rapist--think of it as a dumbed-down feminist interpretation of one of Western culture's seminal works.

To lecture on this book, a professor from the German department whose name I have long since forgotten--I've looked at their web site and don't see her photograph--was brought in. She droned on for several days about the brilliance of Wolf, a pampered, hypocritical intellectual who spent as much time in Berkeley as the East, and who, a connected friend then told me, had a laptop--an unimaginable luxury in East Germany. That is, she enjoyed the fruits and freedoms of the West, all while attacking it from the perspective of an "advanced" writer in the East. She was seen by her champions in the West as a rebuke to Western ideas of individualism and liberty. If you see neither intellectual integrity nor philosophical consistency in this, you're vision is spot-on.

The most memorable part of that semester of wasted time came when she told the class that the fall of the Wall was to be lamented, for it meant that (and her words are burned into my brain) "we will never know the potential of the GDR."

This was, of course, a lie. We knew the potential very well, for it was realized every day of that artificial prison-country's life: death, oppression, the Gulag, torture, distrust among neighbors, dissension within families, the state as all-powerful, perverse parent whose evil knew no end.

Last summer, I visited the Stasi Museum in Berlin. It was a remarkable place, not for the clever eaves-dropping devices under the glass counters, but for bringing home to visitors the degree of malice exercised by the state against everyone. Vulnerable young men were turned against their wives or lovers; children made to report their parents for activities against the state; thought itself made a crime.

Two pieces on the web today deserve our attention. The first is by my friend and sometime Democracy Project blogger, Laurie Morrow. Her essay, "Tear Down What Wall?," appears at Minding the Campus, the new blog sponsored by the Manhattan Institute. Laurie argues persuasively that Marxism on campus is not dead, decades-old obituaries notwithstanding. She's correct, I'm afraid; such a heresy cannot die so quickly. Laurie lauds the Victims of Communism Memorial, dedicated yesterday.

The second is the speech that President Bush delivered at that dedication. I've reprinted the text below.

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THE PRESIDENT: Thank you all for coming. Please be seated. Dr. Edwards, thanks for your kind words. Congressman Lantos -- no better friend to freedom, by the way; Congressman Rohrabacher, the same. Members of the Czech and Hungarian parliaments; ambassadors; distinguished guests; and more importantly, the survivors of Communist oppression, I'm honored to join you on this historic day. (Applause.)

And here in the company of men and women who resisted evil and helped bring down an empire, I proudly accept the Victims of Communism Memorial on behalf of the American people. (Applause.)

The 20th century will be remembered as the deadliest century in human history. And the record of this brutal era is commemorated in memorials across this city. Yet, until now, our Nation's Capital had no monument to the victims of imperial Communism, an ideology that took the lives of an estimated 100 million innocent men, women and children. So it's fitting that we gather to remember those who perished at Communism's hands, and dedicate this memorial that will enshrine their suffering and sacrifice in the conscience of the world.

Building this memorial took more than a decade of effort, and its presence in our capital is a testament to the passion and determination of two distinguished Americans: Lev Dobriansky, whose daughter Paula is here -- (applause) -- give your dad our best. And Dr. Lee Edwards. (Applause.) They faced setbacks and challenges along the way, yet they never gave up, because in their hearts, they heard the voices of the fallen crying out: "Remember us."

These voices cry out to all, and they're legion. The sheer numbers of those killed in Communism's name are staggering, so large that a precise count is impossible. According to the best scholarly estimate, Communism took the lives of tens of millions of people in China and the Soviet Union, and millions more in North Korea, Cambodia, Africa, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Eastern Europe, and other parts of the globe.

Behind these numbers are human stories of individuals with families and dreams whose lives were cut short by men in pursuit of totalitarian power. 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. We'll never know the names of all who perished, but at this sacred place, Communism's unknown victims will be consecrated to history and remembered forever.

We dedicate this memorial because we have an obligation to those who died, to acknowledge their lives and honor their memory. 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. With this memorial, we restore their humanity and we reclaim their memory. With this memorial, we say of Communism's innocent and anonymous victims, these men and women lived and they shall not be forgotten. (Applause.)

We dedicate this memorial because we have an obligation to future generations to record the crimes of the 20th century and ensure they're never repeated. In this hallowed place we recall the great lessons of the Cold War: that freedom is precious and cannot be taken for granted; that evil is real and must be confronted; and that given the chance, men commanded by harsh and hateful ideologies will commit unspeakable crimes and take the lives of millions.

It's important that we recall these lessons because the evil and hatred that inspired the death of tens of millions of people in the 20th century is still at work in the world. We saw its face on September the 11th, 2001. Like the Communists, the terrorists and radicals who attacked our nation 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. (Applause.) 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.

We can have confidence in the power of freedom because we've seen freedom overcome tyranny and terror before. Dr. Edwards said President Reagan went to Berlin. He was clear in his statement. He said, "tear down the wall," and two years later the wall fell. And millions across Central and Eastern Europe were liberated from unspeakable oppression. It's appropriate that on the anniversary of that speech, that we dedicate a monument that reflects our confidence in freedom's power.

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. She reminds us of the victims of Communism, and also of the power that overcame Communism.

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. (Applause.) She reminds us that freedom is the gift of our Creator, freedom is the birthright of all humanity, and in the end, freedom will prevail. (Applause.)

I thank each of you who made this memorial possible for your service in freedom's cause. I thank you for your devotion to the memory of those who lost their lives to Communist terror. May the victims of Communism rest in peace. May those who continue to suffer under Communism find their freedom. And may the God who gave us liberty bless this great memorial and all who come to visit her.

God bless. (Applause.)