For those fighting communism around the world, seeing democratic countries working with suppressive nations is a “kick in the balls,” said a human rights activist who won an award Friday for fighting communism.
“In dictatorships, the war is going on. It’s not that visible from the outside, but it has casualties, has victims,” said Alexander Podrabinek, who received the Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. “[A handshake between democracies and dictatorships] demonstrates that great democracies value mutual understandings with dictatorships more than freedom and basic human rights.”
Podrabinek was forced to cease his medical ambitions in the Soviet Union when he began to investigate the party’s brutal psychiatric practices. His book, “Punitive Medicine,” published in 1977, led to his arrest and a five-year exile in Siberia. He was imprisoned many times after that.
Other speakers at the Victims of Communism Commemoration agreed that the battle with communism is far from over.
“We still have to fight. There are many other threats and challenges. We all know about the barbaric destruction of [the Islamic State],” said János Martonyi, former Hungarian minister of Foreign Affairs. “We cannot accept aggression or invasion of sovereign, independent nations. We cannot accept the occupation of a part of their territory. We cannot accept any kind of whitewashing of history.”
Martonyi drew on his intimate experience with communism, recalling the trials he and his mother suffered at the hands of the communists during the Hungarian Revolution.
“What is communism?” he asked. “Is it a beautiful idea, a utopian dream about a bright future? Or is it something else? Is it a mother that enters the room of a five-year-old and wakes him up … and tells her son, ‘My son, you have to get up because the Soviet Army is attacking Budapest again.'”
Martonyi’s sentiments were echoed by Guillermo Fariñas Hernández, the other recipient of the Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom this year.
“We will continue to combat communism because we believe it is a malefaction to the human people, much more than a philosophy,” Hernández said, who has been outspoken against President Obama’s efforts to normalize relations with Cuba.
The Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom is given to those who have “demonstrated a life-long commitment to freedom and democracy and opposition to tyranny.” Hernández is a Cuban dissident who went on more than 20 hunger strikes in the 11 years that he was held captive by the Cuban government.
Lee Edwards, chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, helped found the foundation after he and others realized that there was a lack of concern about communism after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
“Little did we realize how critically important the memorial and our foundation would become,” Edwards said. “The communists understand it well. Our website is constantly under attack … Why are we targeted? Because we tell the truth.”
He mentioned that, after drawing attention to the despotism in other areas of the world, his website has become the target of rants, diatribes and attacks from supporters of those regimes. Most of which, according to Edwards, were not fit to mention in public.
“We are committed to the proposition that truth will not only set you free, but truth will keep you free.”
