News Center100 million tragediesJune 19, 2009
WASHINGTON (The Free Lance-Star) --Two 20th-century visions of man vied for earthly predominance. In one, man was divinely created, imbued by his Maker with the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, flowing from which was the freedom, in league with his fellows, to form the sort of government that respects those rights. In the other, man was merely a higher form of animal to be herded by the most powerful of his kind into a utopian stockyard or put through his paces in a theory-tented circus. The most successful and sanguinary herder and ringmaster of the century was communism, whose bloody biography is the work of a new online museum. The Web-based Global Museum on Communism, launched Tuesday from the residence of the Romanian ambassador to the United States, is the second of a three-part project authorized by Congress in 1993 "to educate this and future generations about the history, philosophy, and legacy of communism." Part I was the physical Victims of Communism Memorial, dedicated near the U.S. Capitol in June 2007, around which wreaths were laid Tuesday morning to commemorate the struggle (ongoing: see China, Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, Cuba) of freedom-loving men and women against this ruthless tyranny. Part III will be a bricks-and-mortar building housing the evidence of communism's countless crimes. Part II, the online museum, is a sobering and inspiring foretaste of that evidentiary indictment. Nazism has been called communism's moral twin, but in one respect the two were not identical. Hitler and his cronies killed about 25 million people. The communists, who were in power before and after the Third Reich, murdered 100 million. Yet while fascism--in intellectual circles, in the popular media, in the public mind--bears the obloquy it deserves, communism, for various reasons, exists in a haze of moral ambiguity, seen more as a technical failure than as a devil cast--in many places, at least--back into Hell. Stalin, like other communist dictators, indeed failed "technically." But he was a genius of human psychology. "One death," he said, "is a tragedy; a million deaths, a statistic." The Global Museum on Communism aspires to put faces on some of those statistics, on those who created them, and on those who resisted. The museum will not cure, but will palliate, widespread ignorance about communism's enormities, an ignorance born of something much worse--a sheer stupidity that can resurrect monsters by failing to stand guard at the rim of the pit. When the public teaching of history becomes more of a feel-good therapy for ethnically diverse students than a moral drama speaking to the precariousness of hard-won universal human rights, no ravening danger is truly dead, and the past becomes a possible future. Avoid some futures. According to the seminal "Black Book of Communism," which makes heavy use of documents made public after the Soviet collapse, Lenin and Stalin killed 20 million citizens of the USSR; Mao and his cohorts, 65 million Chinese. Cambodia under Pol Pot suffered 2 million deaths, about a quarter of the country's population; Africa, 1.7 million; and so on. "There is a moral obligation," writes one of "Black Book"'s authors, Stephane Courtois, "to honor the memory of the innocent and anonymous victims of a juggernaut that has systematically sought to erase even their memory." Lee Edwards, the driving force behind the museum (globalmuseumoncommunism.org), and other project contributors are helping a distracted U.S. public meet that obligation while erecting "a bulwark against recurrent communist sympathies wherever they appear." Incidentally, only the laziest intellect--e.g., the gnats that flicker anonymously all over the Web--would dismiss these activities as "right-wing." As early as 1961, a world leader called for a monument to be erected in memory of Stalin's victims. John F. Kennedy is a good guess. But wrong. Try Nikita Khrushchev.
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