The [Communist] revolutionary believed it to be in
the nature of things that dictatorship and terror are needed if the
good of humanity is to be served, just as the Aztec priests
believed themselves to be entirely justified in ripping the hearts
out of thousands of victims, since had they not done so, the sun
would have gone out, a far worse catastrophe for mankind. In either
case, the means are acceptable, being inevitable — that is, if the
theory is correct….
— Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged
Century
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.
“We’re trying to do several things,” Edwards told me last week.
“We are memorializing the victims. This is the world’s first
memorial to all the victims of Communism. Number two, we
are honoring those who resisted Communism. Real leaders. People
like Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa, Harry Truman, Pope John Paul II,
Ronald Reagan, Solzhenitsyn: The list can go on and on….All of
these various people who successfully stood up and resisted
Communism. Third, this is part of an ongoing educational program.
We want to educate people about what a terrible tyranny it
was….There is not the same kind of recognition of the Communist
holocaust.”
Edwards continued: “It is based upon the idea that the Soviets
and the Chinese and the Cambodians thought that they could create a
new man, and they set about it in the most ruthless way, and
anybody that got in their way, they destroyed. The got caught up in
this Utopian nightmare and cut down anybody who got in their
way….
“For example, in 1959, and for the next three years, Mao tried
to bring about a collectivization of agriculture in China….The
first year, 5 million people died. He said to keep going. The
second year 10 million died. He said ‘keep ahead.’ The third year
20 million died, all during what was called the Great Leap
Forward….
“We can certainly conclude that there is this maniacal impulse
which leads them to do maniacal things like the purges, like the
famines, like the mock trials…. I really think it goes back to
this Utopian notion that makes them think they can remake people,
which of course I think is rather insane.”
The word “Utopian” itself is problematic. Edwards’ point is that
man is incapable of creating a Utopia here on Earth, and that all
efforts to do so carry in their very nature the need for brute
force to achieve it, because only through brute force can the
nature of man even appear to be changed. On that point,
Edwards is right.
But I think the word “purported” should be placed in front of
“Utopia.” In truth, what’s wrong with the Communist vision isn’t
merely the means used to achieve it, and it isn’t merely the
mistaken assumptions about the perfectability of man. Instead, the
goals themselves — the very life envisioned by the revolutionary
dreamers — would be a nightmare, not a Utopia, even if realized by
entirely peaceful means.
DESPITE WHAT SO MANY American lefties would say even today, the
vision outlined by Marx and Engels is not wonderful but terrifying.
The leveling impulses itself is a mistaken one. It is evil, not
Utopia, to say that all people should forfeit their individuality,
their family ties, and their unique dreams in order that the
material circumstances —yes, the wealth — of all people
be the same. Granted, society should provide care for “the least of
these,” and none of us should treat the poverty of another as an
acceptable existence. But the goal should not be equality of
result, of material circumstance; instead, the goal should be the
expansion of opportunity, and of the possibility for human growth
and achievement.
Furthermore, that opportunity is not merely material, but
spiritual. The Communists, the Utopians, belittle the human spirit,
all in the pursuit of what they call a “common good.” But that
which inspires human striving, in the self-chosen pursuit
of a greater good rather than one chosen, dictated, by the greater
society, is of far more value than is any “good” achieved by the
gray and enervating sameness of the Communist vision.
Marx and Engel write of their ideal “proletarian” that “Law,
morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind
which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests,” and he
denounces “the bourgeois claptrap about the family and education,
about the hallowed correlation of parents and child.”
But family love and family ties are not claptrap. It is an
ennobling facet of human nature, not a disreputable one, which
cherishes the love between husband and wife, brother and sister,
parent and child.
TO CLIMB DOWN A BIT from this theoretical realm, back to the
realities of the horrors of Communism, one need only rent a
wonderful, stark, and ultimately redemptive movie on most
Blockbuster shelves these days. The Lives of Others, which
won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film, is set
in the Communist East Berlin of the 1980s. It tells of how the
Communist secret police, the Stasi, spy on and punish anybody
suspected of Western (freedom-loving) sympathies. Without giving
away the plot, suffice it to say that the reality depicted in this
film is ample and powerful witness to the ills that did not just
happen by mistake under Communism, but that are an inherent aspect
of that horrid system.
The dedication of the Victims of Communism Memorial this coming
Tuesday should warn all of us against such a tyrannical
faux Utopia, and inspire us to adore the freedom that is
its antithesis.
“You must resist tyranny,” Edwards insisted to me. “You cannot
just accept it. You cannot just think it is not going to challenge
me….You must stand up to tyranny with purpose and with conviction
and with dispatch.”
The lesson of the new memorial, and of tragic historical
experience, is that Communism — all Communism — is by
its very nature a tyranny of the sort Edwards warned against. It is
certainly not the only tyranny, but so far it is the worst one this
Earth has ever known. We Americans led the way in defeating it. We
should not forget why the battle was necessary.
