“Liberty, liberty, what [crimes have been committed in your name!” went the cry as the tumbrels of the French Revolution lumbered toward the guillotine. In the two centuries since, the bloodthirsty appetite of revolution, no longer calling for liberty, has grown with each new scheme for implementing revolution’s demands. In our own century, the ultimate revolutionary scheme of them all — Hitler’s Holocaust against the Jews — punctuated the marginally less demonic but longer-lasting terror of Stalinism, in what used to be called “the socialist sixth of the world.”
After the Nazis’ defeat in 1945 and Stalin’s death in 1953, it was possible to begin the agonizing process of assessing what had happened. In the case of the Nazis, the memory of evil was so intense that Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust’s greatest memorialist, imposed a full ten years of silence on himself before he could write adequately as a witness. Even then, his Night — only 109 pages in its current paperback version — did not appear in English until 1960. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago did not appear until 1973, twenty years after the author’s release from the camps. Though the two men were awarded the Nobel prize for different reasons – – Solzhenitsyn in 1970 (before Gulag) for literature and Wiesel in 1986 for peace — each accomplished the purpose of documenting wickedness while at the same time commemorating its victims. Perhaps there is something intrinsic in human beings that will not rest until the full darkness — of murder in particular — is exposed to public gaze, public reflection, and public lamentation.
