It was a grey morning, and the smell of exhaust fumes was heavy along Massachusetts Avenue; even so, when the wind shifted you could just catch the scent of flowers.
Folding chairs were laid out in a little arc to accommodate a small crowd of perhaps 150 people. The fragrance came from flower garlands: Twenty-odd bright wreaths on little wire stands, each from a different part of the world, each commemorating some of the estimated 100 million victims of communism.
“The Republic of PolandÉthe Slovak RepublicÉthe Laogai Research FoundationÉ” One group after another slowly placed the floral tributes by a modest statue at the intersection of Massachusetts and New Jersey Avenues.
On that corner two years ago – 90 years after communism began its bloody march – supporters raised the first monument to those slain by this poisonous ideology.
The Victims of Communism Memorial is bronze, rather than alabaster-hued, but in every other respect it looks just like the Goddess of Democracy that students erected in Tiananmen Square twenty years ago.
I wonder: Put that way, does communism sound like ancient history? Two years ago, 20 years ago, 90 years ago? To many young people, it does.
The end of the Cold War and the decades of suffering preceding it seems so newsreel-era that it’s practically sepia-toned: the occupation of whole countries, the imposition of totalitarianism, the camps and famines, the heaps of corpses, the German youth shot dead while trying to scale the Berlin Wall.
“Our children must learn about the past, in order to understand the present,” said Dr. Aldona Wos, at the wreath-laying ceremony, echoing the urgency of other speakers.
Dr. Wos, a former U.S. ambassador to Estonia, was born in Communist-ruled Poland; her father survived a concentration camp. For a family like hers, there would be no difficulty in seeing the self-evident evil of communism.
But it’s not necessarily so for other children today. Schooled as they are by Hollywood depictions of bad guys, children shown photographs of Joseph Stalin, Chairman Mao, and Ho Chi Minh may find it almost impossible to believe these avuncular characters could be such wicked tyrants.
In China right now – we know this from foreign reporters stationed there – a generation has grown up since the Tiananmen Square massacre in complete ignorance of the civilian blood shed by the very same government that controls the country today.
That ignorance is deliberately cultivated by officialdom, of course, and it’s unbelievably poignant; on the radio earlier this month, I heard university students in Beijing expressing defensive bewilderment at the suggestion that their government would ever roll tanks across the bodies of Chinese people.
In Russia, meanwhile, a Kremlin-sponsored effort is under way to scrub the darker aspects out of Soviet-era history; the Duma is reportedly considering changing the law to make the “falsification of history” an offense punishable by a jail term. Already the Stalin-era body count is drastically minimized in Russian textbooks, according to reports.
But do American children know any better? Western society, which, after all, fought and won the Cold War, has never seemed to relish a full reckoning of the horrific cost of communism.
It has been easier to focus on the crimes of 20th-century fascism. The mass murder committed by the Nazis was more freakish and short-lived than the steady, ghastly toll taken by communism since its imposition in Russia in 1917 and its gangrenous spread across Europe and Asia.
The world stopped the Nazis dead – yet communists are with us still, whether running things in North Korea and Cuba, or creeping around Europe’s parliaments under assumed names like “progressive” and “socialist.”
Children must know what communism is, what it was (and did), and that, in Orwell’s phrase, it means a boot stomping on a human face – forever.
Now there’s a way to convey it in a manner that young people will appreciate: The first on-line Global Museum on Communism.
Sponsored by the same foundation that erected the memorial on Massachusetts Ave, the museum brings together facts, maps, timelines, and individual histories, with red and white text on an inky background that evokes the bleakness and bloodshed of the subject.
Direct your children to globalmuseumoncommunism.org. Then, to paraphrase Chairman Mao, let a thousand term papers bloom.
Examiner columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of the The Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursday.
