Ronald Reagan and the Victims of Communism Memorial
On Wednesday, June 13th, I rose to give the following speech:
On June 12, 1987, twenty years ago yesterday, President Ronald Reagan stood at Brandenburg Gate along the Berlin Wall in Germany and issued a challenge: “Gen. Sec. Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
Just two years later, that wall did fall and the Evil Empire came crashing down with it. But in its wake it had left death and destruction of an unimaginable scale.
Yesterday, on the anniversary of Reagan’s famous speech, the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington D.C. was dedicated to commemorate the more than one hundred million people murdered by communist regimes in the 20th century. Josef Stalin once said, “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.” Communism killed more people than Nazism, fascism and religious extremism combined. Were we to pause for a moment of silence for one second for every person who had been killed, we would be standing in this chamber for more than three years.
Ideas for the new monument abounded. Early proposals included a replica of the Berlin Wall, a Gulag prison, or a boat used by the Vietnamese or Cuban refugees. The final monument is a ten-foot bronze statue based on the “Goddess of Democracy” statue that Chinese dissidents built in Tiananmen Square in 1989 before tanks crushed them and their cause. This is especially fitting as a reminder that the world’s most populous nation is still not free today.
Anhthu Lu, a financial analyst in Virginia who left Vietnam on a boat as a young girl and who was a part of the memorial foundation, said: “We need to educate people about the terror of Communism and continue to eradicate it from the world.”
Indeed, this memorial is meant to remember the victims of communism oppression and the heroes who fought against it, like Natan Sharansky; the refuseniks; Aleksandr Solzhenisyn, who exposed the horrors of the Gulags; and the Polish Solidarity movement. But more than that, it serves as a reminder that there’s still a long way to go.
The Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War ended, but there are those who appear to be bringing it back from the ashes and who are willing to kill every journalist, businessman or ex-spy who stands in their way. Hugo Chavez in Venezuela recently shut down the last national opposition TV station and, like Russia, has nationalized the oil companies. The Chinese are arresting and torturing Christians and the Falun Gong merely for practicing their faith. Kim Jong Il is starving the North Korean people in order to build nuclear weapons. Fidel Castro continues to hold about three hundred political prisoners in Cuba, such as the poet and journalist Raul Rivero.
And, honorable colleagues, if you want to hear stories of escaping communist oppression, you need not look far: just ask Officer Stanley Kolodnicki, one of our very own security guards, who escaped from communist-occupied Poland with his family as a young man.
Now, in reflecting upon the evil that communism has wrought in the world, I’m not saying that we’re a perfect society; indeed, no perfect society has ever existed. Our history has blemishes and we’ve made mistakes as a nation. And yet, one must appreciate the blessings of liberty. Indeed, this year in this very chamber, we debated our nation’s war policy and majority voted to criticize our president and the war and yet not one - not one person feared retribution. Not one person worried that they’d arrested or that they would come home to find that their family had disappeared. We’re fortunate enough that we can take that for granted, but to do the same in any of the world’s communist-controlled countries is to do so at your own mortal peril.
There was an old joke in the Soviet Union about an American lecturing a Russian about freedom. The American explained that, if he wanted, he could walk into the Oval Office and tell him:
“Mr. Reagan, I deplore the policies of the United States. I think you’re leading us down the wrong track.” To which the Russian replied: “So what? I can do that too! Just last week I walked into Gorbachev’s office and I said, ‘Mr. Gorbachev, I deplore the policies of the United States. I think Ronald Reagan is leading them down the wrong track!’”
Adlai Stevenson once said: “Communism is the corruption of the dream of justice… Communism is the death of the soul. It is the organization of total conformity - in short, of tyranny - and it is committed to making tyranny universal.”
I pray that we will live to see the day when this evil ideology is finally relegated to where it belongs: in the ash heap of history.
Thank you.
On June 12, 1987, twenty years ago yesterday, President Ronald Reagan stood at Brandenburg Gate along the Berlin Wall in Germany and issued a challenge: “Gen. Sec. Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
Just two years later, that wall did fall and the Evil Empire came crashing down with it. But in its wake it had left death and destruction of an unimaginable scale.
Yesterday, on the anniversary of Reagan’s famous speech, the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington D.C. was dedicated to commemorate the more than one hundred million people murdered by communist regimes in the 20th century. Josef Stalin once said, “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.” Communism killed more people than Nazism, fascism and religious extremism combined. Were we to pause for a moment of silence for one second for every person who had been killed, we would be standing in this chamber for more than three years.
Ideas for the new monument abounded. Early proposals included a replica of the Berlin Wall, a Gulag prison, or a boat used by the Vietnamese or Cuban refugees. The final monument is a ten-foot bronze statue based on the “Goddess of Democracy” statue that Chinese dissidents built in Tiananmen Square in 1989 before tanks crushed them and their cause. This is especially fitting as a reminder that the world’s most populous nation is still not free today.
Anhthu Lu, a financial analyst in Virginia who left Vietnam on a boat as a young girl and who was a part of the memorial foundation, said: “We need to educate people about the terror of Communism and continue to eradicate it from the world.”
Indeed, this memorial is meant to remember the victims of communism oppression and the heroes who fought against it, like Natan Sharansky; the refuseniks; Aleksandr Solzhenisyn, who exposed the horrors of the Gulags; and the Polish Solidarity movement. But more than that, it serves as a reminder that there’s still a long way to go.
The Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War ended, but there are those who appear to be bringing it back from the ashes and who are willing to kill every journalist, businessman or ex-spy who stands in their way. Hugo Chavez in Venezuela recently shut down the last national opposition TV station and, like Russia, has nationalized the oil companies. The Chinese are arresting and torturing Christians and the Falun Gong merely for practicing their faith. Kim Jong Il is starving the North Korean people in order to build nuclear weapons. Fidel Castro continues to hold about three hundred political prisoners in Cuba, such as the poet and journalist Raul Rivero.
And, honorable colleagues, if you want to hear stories of escaping communist oppression, you need not look far: just ask Officer Stanley Kolodnicki, one of our very own security guards, who escaped from communist-occupied Poland with his family as a young man.
Now, in reflecting upon the evil that communism has wrought in the world, I’m not saying that we’re a perfect society; indeed, no perfect society has ever existed. Our history has blemishes and we’ve made mistakes as a nation. And yet, one must appreciate the blessings of liberty. Indeed, this year in this very chamber, we debated our nation’s war policy and majority voted to criticize our president and the war and yet not one - not one person feared retribution. Not one person worried that they’d arrested or that they would come home to find that their family had disappeared. We’re fortunate enough that we can take that for granted, but to do the same in any of the world’s communist-controlled countries is to do so at your own mortal peril.
There was an old joke in the Soviet Union about an American lecturing a Russian about freedom. The American explained that, if he wanted, he could walk into the Oval Office and tell him:
“Mr. Reagan, I deplore the policies of the United States. I think you’re leading us down the wrong track.” To which the Russian replied: “So what? I can do that too! Just last week I walked into Gorbachev’s office and I said, ‘Mr. Gorbachev, I deplore the policies of the United States. I think Ronald Reagan is leading them down the wrong track!’”
Adlai Stevenson once said: “Communism is the corruption of the dream of justice… Communism is the death of the soul. It is the organization of total conformity - in short, of tyranny - and it is committed to making tyranny universal.”
I pray that we will live to see the day when this evil ideology is finally relegated to where it belongs: in the ash heap of history.
Thank you.