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The Victims of Communism Memorial
Historian Robert Conquest, one of the first Westerners to use painstaking research to lift the veil on the terrors of the Great Terror and other murderous purges in the Soviet Union, got the essential nature of Communism exactly right. Brutality, terror, and murder are, and always have been, essential components of Communism. And Communism proved extremely effective with those components. Worldwide, some 100 million victims have died from Communist terror, purges, forced relocations and famines -- and that number doesn't even include all those Americans and other freedom-loving people who died in noble wars (Korea, Vietnam, etc.) trying to keep Communism from spreading. Those numbers, by the way, come not from any right-wing organization. They come from 1999's The Black Book of Communism, written by six leftist French intellectuals and published by Harvard University Press. They are numbers that stagger the imagination. And they are not just numbers but souls, 100 million human souls, whose lives and sufferings deserve commemoration. Enter conservative scholar Lee Edwards and former Ambassador Lev Dobriansky, who conceived of and now have brought to fruition a Victims of Communism Memorial, to be unveiled in a major ceremony on Tuesday, June 12 at 10 a.m. To be located at the busy intersection of Massachusetts and New Jersey Avenues (and 'G' Street), NW, in Washington, D.C., the Memorial will feature a statue modeled on the "Goddess of Democracy" used by the Chinese students in Tiananmen Square in 1989, that statue itself deliberately reminiscent of our own Statue of Liberty. Its inscriptions, front and back, will read as follows: "To the more than 100 million victims of Communism and to those who love liberty," and "To the freedom and independence of all captive nations and peoples." The memorial and its lessons are long overdue... Posted by: Anonymoose 2007-06-08 |
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