False Memorial

There is a new memorial in Washington, D.C.:

Questions arise over memorials

Monument selection scrutinized in D.C.

By Leora Falk
Washington Bureau
Published June 13, 2007


WASHINGTON -- The nation's capital, a city of monuments and statues of long-dead warriors and politicians, gained another memorial Tuesday.

This one, however, does not commemorate a specific event or luminary, but rather the terrors of communist regimes. The monument in memory of the millions killed under communist regimes is a 10-foot bronze replica of the Goddess of Democracy statue that student demonstrators erected during the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing in 1989.

[...]Lee Edwards, chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, said the Vietnamese community in the U.S. was instrumental in helping raise the $1 million needed to build the memorial.

The dedication was the culmination of a 14-year effort. The choice of the Goddess of Democracy "symbolizes both the worst about tyranny and the best about freedom and democracy," Edwards said.

Now... I know what you're thinking: "Bryan, you love democracy and hate brutal regimes that kill millions of people. What can you possibly have against this memorial?"

Well, I am glad you asked. I am not against the memorial itself, but I do disagree with its title "Victims of Communism Memorial." I would argue that there are no victims of "communism," but rather victims of tyranny, oppression, and dictatorships.

Communism is simply basically an economic ideology, not a form of government.

As a political movement, communism was attempted by brutal, oppressive regimes made up of evil people seeking power and wealth (both of which communism seeks to dilute). These people never succeeded in implementing the economic policies of communism because they were only using communism as a pretense to hide their true ambitions. They deceived, pludered, and killed for their own personal gain. They did this not through democracy or the true will of their people; they did this through brutal force and the exploitation of their people's trust.

Communism seeks to advance economic equality for everyone, which is, by itself, a noble sentiment, but the "communists" never sought and therefore never acheived such an ideal.

Communism was not our enemy during the Cold War, but tyranny was. When Joseph McCarthy was seeking to combat "communism," he should have realized this. Perhaps then he would have avoided becoming tyrannical himself.

Tyranny is the enemy of democracy, and tyranny is not exclusive to "communists". It has existed in many forms thoughout human history, and if this memorial is to be a true memorial it should be a memorial for all the victims of tyranny, not just the victims of "communism."

Update (regarding the comment from Anonymous):

Anonymous,

Wow, your hypocrisy beyond is hilarious. How can you so completely misunderstand my point and then call me "stupid" with a straight face? You describe me as "naive" and "ignorant" while failing to comprehend communism, Lenin, Mao, Che, and everything I just wrote.

Here is some advice for you. When making an argument, have some evidence or supporting statements to back it up. Otherwise, your argument is ineffective. If name-calling is your only defense, it really makes you seem unintelligent.

So for the sake of your apparent lack of education and inability to comprehend basic concepts, I will go into greater detail about what I wrote.

Lenin, Mao, and Che may have been considered communists in terms of economics, but they were dictators in terms of politics. True communism supports the idea that the people should control the government, not the other way around. That concept is known as democracy, and it is an idea that Lenin, Mao, and Che discarded from their communist belief system.

Lenin, Mao, and Che were tyrants, and THAT is what made them evil. Even if they had been capitalists, they still would have been evil because they were tyrants. (For example, Hitler was a tyrant but not a communist. He sent communists to concentration camps.)

My point still stands: tyranny is the enemy of democracy, not communism.

I will agree with you that I should not have said "communism is simply an economic ideology," and I have changed the word "simply" to "basically" in my post because that is what I meant to express. Communism is basically an economic ideology, but if you delve deeper, communism is much more complex than that. Wikipedia.org states that communism "is an ideology that seeks to establish a classless, stateless social organization based on common ownership of the means of production." If you want to know more about the complexity of communism, read the rest of the Wikipedia article. For the purposes of this addendum however, I would like to focus on the basics.

If you had taken the time to understand what I was trying to communicate instead of resorting to your narrow-minded Right-wing name-calling, you might be able to make an intelligent argument about why you think communism is not a good economic system.

And I might agree with you because, despite your illogical conclusion that I am a Trotskyist, I am actually not one. I do not think that communism is better than capitalism, and I don't know anything about Trotsky. I actually prefer a well-regulated fair market form of capitalism. (My previous post goes into greater detail about my views on a fair market economy.)

I would like to reiterate, that communism has only ever been attempted by tyrannical regimes that never actually acheived a true communist economy. If everyone in a democracy voted for an economic system that was based on communism, you could disagree with their decision, but you would have to agree that they have the right, in their democracy, to do that. In a free, democratic society they might have a chance of making communism work, but communism has never had a chance to work because it has always been pushed by oppressive dictatorships that ultimately only served the dictators' selfish desires for power and wealth. I am not saying that I think that a communist economy would work; I am just saying that it has not been given a real chance to work.

Lenin, Mao, and Che may have believed that communism was the best economic system, but their governments were dictatorships, and dictatorships are wrong regardless of what ideology they base their economy on. Lenin, Mao, and Che probably thought that their communist intentions or communist ideals were good, but they never could have acheived those ideals, whether they were sincere or not, because their tactics were inherently evil and corrupt. They blocked freedom and forced communism onto people through deception, thievery, and violence, and, as we are seeing in Iraq and have seen throughout history, when you use such tactics to force your beliefs onto people, you get failure.

I have no problem with being against communism as an economic system, and I am not defending it as an economic system. I am trying to correct the historical error that conflates communism with tyranny when they are actually two different things. Again, in human history, communism has only ever been attempted by tyrannical governments, so I understand why that error was made.

However, tyrants are evil regardless of whether they are considered to be communists (Lenin, Mao, and Che) or capitalists (Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Mobutu Sese Seko, King George III, or Jefferson Davis), and both types are enemies of freedom and democracy.

I stand by my statement that this memorial to democracy should honor all the victims of tyranny and dictators, not just the victims of communist tyranny and communist dictators.

Update 2007-06-19 (regarding the comment from Zak):

Zak,

Thank you for your comment. As oppossed to the comment that preceeded yours, your comment actually used thought and reason.

I don't really think that we are in disagreement. I wasn't trying to defend communism. I just think that dictators and their brutality are to be blamed for the deaths of thousands (or millions), not communism.

The aspects of communism that you listed sound like an extremist form of communism. Such an extreme form of communism is obviously inherently flawed and would never work, but I think almost any system would fail if it becomes extremist. (As to whether a moderate form of communism would work, I honestly don't know and don't really care. I am certainly not willing and do not I have the patience to try it and find out.)

An extreme form of capitalism can also be dangerous (as the Great Depression proved). Even freedom cannot be entirely absolute without causing chaos. Absolute freedom would be anarchy, so to combat that we have laws and punishments that limit freedom for the purpose of sustaining order and justice.

The fight between ideologies (just like fights over where to set the thermostat) is seldom one extreme against another. Usually, it is between two different levels of moderate.

However, whether a given form of communism is extreme or not, or whether communism is inherently flawed or not, is not an integral component of the original point of my post that it should not matter whether an genocidal maniac is communist (like Stalin) or not (like Hitler) and all victims of such demons deserve to be memorialized.

I don't care whether a person, a faction, or a state is communist or not, but I care immensely about whether or not they are enslaving, raping, and killing people. I criticize China because of their human rights abuses and extreme restrictions on freedom, not because they are ruled by a communist party. I criticize China as much as I criticize Sudan for genocide in Darfur and Saudi Arabia for torture, brutality and inequality.

If people want to only think memorialize the victims of communist regimes, that is their choice, but I think they risk neglecting the victims of other brutal regimes both past and present. That is how America has ended up supporting many evil and deadly regimes in the past (like that of Saddam Hussein) and in the present (like Saudi Arabia). This hypocrisy and moral ambiguity in American foreign policy might be our biggest flaw, and it leads to horrific consequences and more victims.

We really need to fix this uneven treatment of brutal regimes in both our minds and our foreign policy. Only by consistently condemning all brutal regimes and working through sensible approaches to end them all can we truly memorialize and honor all victims of tyranny.