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Now Playing at Reason.tv: Remembering the Victims of Communism
Twenty years ago today, the Berlin Wall was breached and Soviet communism, at long last, entered its death spiral.
After claiming approximately 100 million victims in the 20th century, communism was dismissed to the ash heap of history. But those who suffered under its boot heel have largely been confined to the history books when not forgotten altogether.
Author and historian Lee Edwards set out to correct this oversight with the creation of the Victims of Communism memorial and online museum, dedicated to those who perished because of Communist regimes between 1917 and 1989.
Reason.tv spoke to Edwards about the importance of historical memory, plans for a forthcoming bricks-and-mortar museum in Washington, DC, and the paintings of Ukrainian gulag survivor Nikolai Gettman, currently on display at the Heritage Foundation, where Edwards is a "Distinguished Fellow in Conservative Thought."
Produced by Meredith Bragg and Michael C. Moynihan.
Interview by Moynihan. Shot and edited by Bragg. Approximately 4 minutes.
Click here for downloadable versions and embed code. Subscribe to Reason.tv's channel now.
James Hudnall|11.9.09 @ 3:08PM|#
I wish it were that simple. We're seeing a repeat.
http://jameshudnall.com/blog/2.....the-walls/
|11.10.09 @ 3:08AM|#
All totalitarianism are behind us? I suggest you to look at Hugo Chavez, Iran or China. The stalinist regime in NK. Ever heard of them? What about that Mugabe?
|11.10.09 @ 9:18PM|#
You must be living in an ideal world, because you certainly are not living in my world. Totalitarianism thrives all around us. Look at Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, and China. If you don't consider those countries and many others following their examples totalitarian, I don't know what you consider totalitarian. Keep thinking that way and Obama's totalitarianism will descend upon us so quickly you will not be able to stop it. Those who forget their past are doomed to repeat it.
|11.9.09 @ 10:52AM|#
"After claiming approximately 100 million victims in the 20th century, communism was dismissed to the ash heap of history."
Which calls into question the mindlessly repeated canard that more people have been killed in the name of religion than any other reason.
|11.9.09 @ 12:23PM|#
I don't disagree with you. The canard refers to organized religion's extremes (the Crusades, the Inguisition, 9/11 etc), and is usually trotted out by lefties to mock the simpletons, when it's the lefties who can't see, pace your comment, that their "faith" has produced far more death and suffering.
|11.9.09 @ 1:00PM|#
But the "lefties" are presumably also including the murderous genocidal record of Islam in the Middle East, Africa and India. In terms of wiping out other people's indigenous cultures both Christianity and Islam have pretty piss-poor records. Communism seems in retrospect more like a strange virus of cultural suicide. In the end, the Russians and the Chinese managed to do more damage to themselves in terms of deaths and destruction of cultural heritage than they ended up doing to outsiders (which was still considerable of course).
|11.9.09 @ 10:55PM|#
Murdered by outsiders or by one's own government doesn't seem like much of a difference if you're the one getting murdered.
Michael|11.9.09 @ 2:43PM|#
If you haven't yet had the opportunity to confront a Marxist in conversation about Communism's death toll and witnessing their apologia yourself, I highly recommend it. There's really not much that is more deeply chilling.
|11.9.09 @ 3:29PM|#
That statement is incorrect, ""After claiming approximately 100 million victims in the 20th century, communism was dismissed to the ash heap of history." there has been way over 200,000,000 people murdered by communism and those people were for the most part citizens of the countries where they were murdered. China has murdered over 70,000,000 and one of the most terrible aspect of their murdering has been selling of the murdered's body parts. In just one Russian Gulag called Kolyama over 3,000,000 people were shot, frozen to death,worked to death, killed in hundred of ways and that was only one of 150 Gulag camps.
Communism is known by many names other than murderer, some like Marxist, Leninist, Trotskyite, Socialist, much worse than any Nazi ever thought to be. We have Marxists in our Universities, in our media and in our Government now, we have deadly problems coming up. Communists are murderers.
BakedPenguin|11.9.09 @ 10:55AM|#
Well, I guess I'll go ahead and post the link to The Soviet Story, which shows Soviet Russia's collusion with Nazi Germany in the Holocaust, and then documents the USSR's own mass murder.
Ironically, it's playing on PBS stations across the country.
anon|11.9.09 @ 11:54AM|#
I looked it up on Wikipedia, and who could have guessed it, but the NYT apparently doesn't take well to people criticizing their Red heroes.
"The New York Times in its review of the documentary stated:
The film is not dispassionate scholarship; Mr. Snore, who is Latvian, and his backers (including some members of the European Parliament) obviously have an agenda, though to the casual American viewer it may not be clear what it is."
|11.9.09 @ 11:56AM|#
Telling the truth about Communism's crimes is clearly an objectionable agenda in the age of Obama.
anon|11.9.09 @ 1:11PM|#
Looks like the only people who criticized the movie other than the NYT were people working for the Russian government or who wish for Latvia to stay close to Russia and opposed Latvian independence. I'm sure the NYT is glad to be in such good company.
|11.10.09 @ 1:01AM|#
I must say, I'm going to enjoy seeing the NYT go belly-up. There are a lot of pinkos there who would have to get real jobs.
-jcr
|11.9.09 @ 2:04PM|#
The cooperation between the Soviets and the Nazis from 1939-1941 is well known and is not controversial.
|11.9.09 @ 2:19PM|#
According to a National Film Board of Canada propaganda piece from 1944 the USSR invaded Poland because the realized the German threat. BS I know.
What gets me is people who talk about how Russia won world war two, as though Soviet tyranny is somehow better than Nazi tyranny. Tyranny is tyranny!!!
|11.9.09 @ 2:27PM|#
Brett,
They invaded to regain the territory they lose to the Poles in 1921 when the Poles kicked the Soviet's in the ass. The Polish-Soviet war of the early 1920s was something that was banned for Polish school books during the entire era of Soviet dominance.
Zeb|11.9.09 @ 2:07PM|#
To be fair, it does not say that the agenda of the film makers is objectionable. And I don't think that the film is intended to be dispassionate scholarship.
I agree with most people here that the times is turning into a pile of shit, but reviewing a movie not entirely positively is not the same as saying "yay Stalin".
|11.9.09 @ 3:40PM|#
Walter Duranty who was the Moscow Bureau Chief for the New York Times in the 1930's concealed the Genocide of 10,000,000 Ukrainians, the killing by contrived starvation and execution lasted for years. Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for his false reporting which the New York Times will not give back to the Pulitizer Committee even though the Ukeranian Government has asked them to do so many times.
It is now thought by many the Walter Duranty was working for Stalin and that the New York Times had to have known about the Genocide. The cover up of for Communism has gone on for decades by our media. [google up additional information, walter duranty]
|11.10.09 @ 1:00AM|#
the NYT apparently doesn't take well to people criticizing their Red heroes.
The NYT employed Walter Duranty to sing Stalin's praises. They've been a pack of commie rat bastards for many, many years.
-jcr
|11.9.09 @ 11:18AM|#
Funny how the Chad, Leffiti, Edward and the rest of the house liberal trolls never show up on these threads.
|11.9.09 @ 11:34AM|#
plans for a forthcoming bricks-and-mortar museum in Washington, DC
I'm guessing that will have to be a private museum. I doubt the leftists who currently control the federal government will OK an appropriation to build a museum in DC showing communists doing terrible things.
And, it would be fraught with irony if a museum was built with money stolen from people by collectivists showing the horrors of giving that much power to collectivists.
mark|11.9.09 @ 5:11PM|#
I propose that the museum be located in that monument of planning, Celebration, Florida, coincidentally located in freshman Rep. Alan Grayson's district. As a reminder.
BakedPenguin|11.9.09 @ 11:43AM|#
In Riga, Latvia, there was a Communist-era museum dedicated to the Nazi occupation. After the fall of communism, it was converted to a museum about the Nazi and Communist occupations.
Warty|11.9.09 @ 12:49PM|#
Presumably, the Soviet-era museum had exhibits about mass murders and disappearances. I wonder how many museum patrons got themselves shipped off to gulag for laughing.
|11.9.09 @ 11:52AM|#
Wow, its hard to believe that that much time has already passed. Can you imagine??
Jess
privacy-stuff.be.tc
The Gobbler|11.9.09 @ 12:33PM|#
You fucked up the link. When you drug use interferes with work, it's time to consider treatment options.
Episiarch|11.9.09 @ 1:13PM|#
Is it just me or does it seem fitting that Anonymity Douche's email account is an AOL account?
z|11.9.09 @ 11:59AM|#
Maybe the difference is the victims that liberals are concerned with were victimized because of race, whereas the victims of the communist regimes were dissidents, those that, by their own choice, stood in the way of the communist utopia.
|11.9.09 @ 12:53PM|#
The vast majority of the victims of Communism were not dissidents at all. The "average" victim of a Communist regime was a peasant simply dying of starvation - China in the 1950s/60s, the Soviet Union in the 1930s, North Korea in the 1990s. Most of the victims of Communism didn't even have the opportunity to face their persecutors or voice any discontent, they were simply treated as cogs in a vast human experiment and disposed of as unnecessary.
|11.9.09 @ 12:33PM|#
No one suffered under communism, and no one will suffer under my new platform, rolling out in 2011 after I suspend elections.
chubbs|11.9.09 @ 1:17PM|#
Wonder when some enterprising person will do a documentary on the NYT's abject fealty toward the Stalinist regime, ala Duranty. The Times has been, is now, and will always be the the official apologist for Communist crimes.
|11.9.09 @ 2:17PM|#
Well, in the NYT's defense, it has in recent years been very critical of Duranty's work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W.....tzer_Prize
|11.9.09 @ 1:57PM|#
communism did not begin its death spiral with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The fall of the Iron Curtain began in Poland on June 4, 1989 when Solidarity won 99 of 100 contested seats in the Polish Sejm.
ed|11.9.09 @ 1:57PM|#
Medvedev just finished speaking at the Berlin festivities. He took full credit, on behalf of the USSR, for the fall of The Wall. Oddly, he didn't mention who was responsible for building and maintaining it for almost 30 years, or the millions in the Eastern Bloc who suffered and died under Soviet domination.
|11.10.09 @ 9:49PM|#
Too bad Joe Wilson was not at that speech. We need someone like Joe at every speech a lefty makes. Being rude is a small sacrifice to make to prevent the spread of tyranny.
|11.9.09 @ 2:13PM|#
convexhull,
As I recall, the one seat that they did not win was due to some sort of technicality or some such.
Zeb|11.9.09 @ 2:15PM|#
So, do people really believe that there are a lot of liberals out there who think that the USSR was a great idea? Most of the lefty sorts that I know seem to want some sort of European style semi-socialist welfare state. While the merits of such a system are quite debatable, it is really not comparable to totalitarian communism.
anon|11.9.09 @ 2:32PM|#
I believe a lot of extremely left wing liberals think the USSR could have been a utopia if they only had the right people in charge.
Zeb|11.9.09 @ 4:38PM|#
OK, I am sure you are right there. A lot of commenters here seem to think that the contemporary left is going to start agitating to have the Berlin wall put back up any day now.
mark|11.9.09 @ 5:26PM|#
They only put up walls when people don't do what they want (remaining in slavery, in the case of East Germany). So, just wait a few years and I'm sure there will be plenty of walls.
|11.10.09 @ 1:16AM|#
a lot of extremely left wing liberals think the USSR could have been a utopia if they only had the right people in charge.
Some of those idiots still think it was a utiopia, and that we're all just lying about it.
-jcr
John Markley|11.11.09 @ 7:59PM|#
I don't think any significant number of liberals actually want a Soviet-style state in this country, but they nevertheless often work very hard to downplay or excuse Communist crimes. It's similar to the way many white supremacists and anti-semites treat the Nazis- I don't think the average Holocaust denier wants to institute the same policies as the National Socialist regime, but it's still in their interest to defend the Nazis because they share a family resemblance with them.
|11.9.09 @ 2:37PM|#
After claiming approximately 100 million victims in the 20th century, communism was dismissed to the ash heap of history. But those who suffered under its boot heel have largely been confined to the history books when not forgotten altogether.
The victims were the result of the idea that the "Collective" somehow has more rights than the individuals, a favorite argument for people that are sociopathically suspicious of a free people.
Lee Reynolds|11.9.09 @ 6:19PM|#
Communism has never been dismissed. Like a virulent disease, it simply altars its appearance and attacks once more.
Communism, like all forms of evil, never really goes away. It may be beat back for a time, but it always regroups and re-emerges, usually in a different guise, but always with the same objective: the death of freedom and the enslavement of mankind.
The only effective defense against this evil is eternal vigilance. The willingness to exterminate one's enemies comes in handy as well.
|11.9.09 @ 9:00PM|#
That's nonsense. "Communism" never existed in a vacuum. "Communism" or, more accurately, Marxism-Leninism was just disguised Russian imperialism, and then adopted by China. It appeared to be a useful ideology for holding back the tide of nationalism in aging imperial states. You're correct that the imperial drive to dominate one's neighbors will probably never go away, but next time it won't look like Soviet Communism, just as the USSR didn't look like the Ottoman Empire.
|11.13.09 @ 2:22PM|#
Ah, so the subordination of the individual (which by the way, did not occur to nearly the same extent under the czars) did not occur in Russia or China? So people were NOT treated as simply replaceable parts of the state, disposed of easily and removed if inconvenient?
That "imperial drive" is the defining feature of Communism...except on an individual scale, not just on the intranational.
The crushing of dissent, the centralization of the means of production, the wealth of the nation, and the ability to use force was not "disguised Russian Imperialism." It was the foul, disgusting ideology known as communism.
It's your comment that's nonsense vanya.
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