Yesterday, the Victims of Communism Memorial was opened here in Washington after more than a decade of efforts to make it happen. The Memorial, designed by Thomas Marsh, is a bronze replica of the Goddess of Democracy statue used by Chinese students during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. It stands at the intersection of Massachusetts Ave., New Jersey Ave., and G St., N.W., just a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol.
The ceremony took place on the 20th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s famous speech at the Berlin Wall in which he challenged Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”
Keynote address was delivered by Rep. Tom Lantos, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and the ceremony culminated in the principal address delivered by President George W. Bush. The President repeated after Czech writer Milan Kundera that struggle against communism was the “struggle of memory against forgetting.” He explained, “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.”
This latest edition to the DC collection of memorials is quite unique, honoring people around the world who suffered and died under various oppressive communist regimes but who for the most part remain anonymous. Unlike the world’s proper remembrance to the victims of Nazism, the fate of those who perished under communism has not been as widely known or commemorated. It is estimated that during the last century communist dictatorships claimed over 100 million lives, whether in the Soviet gulags, Pol Pot’s killing fields, or as a result of misguided policies such as Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward. As staggering as those numbers are, though, the meaning of the Memorial goes beyond them and commemorates the two universal human traits that stand in a way of any dictatorial rule: the spirit of hope and the yearning for freedom.
The Memorial dedicated today is the first of three projects by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation meant to educate the world about the victims and crimes of communism. The second one, targeted for launch in late 2008, is the creation of a web-based Global Virtual Museum. Finally, the most ambitious objective of the three involves the design and construction of a commemorative Museum and Library in the Washington, DC area.
Published Date: June 13, 2007