In a recent thread about a Holocaust Memorial in Ohio, several posters expressed the opinion that there’s no reason to build more Holocaust memorials. Personally, I feel that it’s entirely appropriate to have public places designed to help us remember the victims of the Holocaust. However, it does raise an obvious question. During my travels across the USA and Europe, I’ve seen many memorials for the Nazi Holocaust, but I’ve never seen any memorial to the victims of communism. The closest thing I’ve seen is a monument, in Prague, celebrating Czech independence from the Soviet Union. Now memorials to victims of communism may exist, but clearly they are much less common, at least in the areas I’ve toured.
It seems to me that, if anything, monuments to the victims of communism should be more common for several reasons. First, even by the lowest estimates, communist regimes killed far more people than the Nazi Holocaust. Second, while racist ideology has thankfully been pushed to the margins almost everywhere, communism continues to make life miserable for vast numbers of people in many countries. A reminder of the evils of communism might therefore be more useful is spurring people to address current human needs. And while it’s true that Americans were directly involved in liberating some of the Nazi death camps, we were also involved in fighting communism in several countries. While we have Holocaust survivors living in this country, we have survivors of communism here as well.
Perhaps it’s different because the Holocaust and World War II were specific events and Communism is a much broader and longer-lasting ideology.
That’s a little overstated. There are four officially socialist countries left and it’s very debatable how socialistic some of them (especially China) really are.
Yeah; a memorial to the victims of Communism wouldn’t be analogous to a memorial to the Holocaust; it would be analogous to a memorial to the victims of fascism in general.
As for why such memorials are less common than Holocaust memorials in the U.S., several reasons come to mind: the atrocities were scattered over multiple nations and a long period of time, which makes finding common cause to fund a memorial more difficult; there may not be a sufficiently large population equivalent to the Jewish population in the U.S. to push for such a thing, and atrocities like the Holodomor and the Great Leap Forward don’t seem as well-known as the Holocaust in America.
In the case of China, Cuba, and Vietnam, the communists are still in power and are unlikely to build such a thing. Russia was liberated from them relatively recently, and seems to have a mixed relationship with their Communist past. (There are memorials to the victims of the gulags).
Americans were not directly involved in liberating any Nazi death camps. As horrific as they were, the camps liberated by Americans were concentration camps, not extermination camps, see map here. The extermination camps were located in Poland. What you conveniently ignore here of course is that our allies who liberated the extermination camps, and indeed did the lion’s share of defeating Nazi Germany were - communists. A monument to the victims of the Khmer Rouge would be a bit awkward for the US or many other western governments to set up, seeing as the government of the Khmer Rouge was repeatedly recognized as the legitimate government of Cambodia in the UN rather than the government installed by Vietnam after the Khmer Rouge were driven from power.
Equating the two is dubious at best, and offensive at worst. Do you truly mean to equate the life of a survivor of a Nazi death camp with say, the life of a typical East German who lived his life under communism in the 1980s who immigrated to the US after the fall of communism?
There are sizable groups of immigrants from China, Vietnam, and Korea. However, the impression I get is that the culture of East Asia puts much less emphasis on memorials or any other organized remembrance of great tragedies. I’ve heard that for some Japanese-American families who were placed in internment camps during WWII, those who actually went to the camps never even told their children about it. The cultural tendency apparently leans towards trying to erase such things from memory.
There is, of course, one well known group of victims of communism in America: Cuban immigrants who fled from Castro. But they haven’t created any memorials that I know of.
I am glad to hear that there are some monuments to the victims of communism in Eastern Europe, even if I’ll probably never see them.
Perhaps one reason is that states freed from Communism can make their own museums. I’ve been to the Museum of Occupations in Talinn, Estonia and it is very stirring.
But the greatest number of murders were within the countries of the population - Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, which can be commemorated inside the country.
It’s pretty hard to make that argument. Obviously people were killed by other people. But the killers were acting as agents of a political ideology. Saying the victims of the Cultural Revolution or the Holodomor or the Cambodian Genocide weren’t killed by Communism is like arguing that the victims of the Holocaust weren’t killed by Nazism.
I wouldn’t equate those two particular persons, but there are certainly countless ones who suffered imprisonment, torture, forced labor and so forth in communist countries. I don’t know what number of such people ever ended up in the USA, but regard that as beside the point. The purpose of memorials is not to serve whatever group suffered the most, but to remind us of our common humanity and to inspire us to help oppressed people as much as we can.
Isn’t racial purity a central component of Nazism? (maybe I’m wrong about that). It seems somewhat more appropriate to talk about victims of an ideology that makes an explicit point of victimizing people. Pointing at dysfunctional, fascist/totalitarian states and claiming that they show the “evils of Communism” (as mentioned by the OP), is about as accurate as pointing at the poor and homeless and claiming that they are victims of Capitalism/Democracy.
As long as the discourse in America includes those who claim that a president and political party that want to levy taxes to spend on programs not approved of by the other party are Communists, then being explicit about the difference between the economic policies of Communism and the fascist applications of Communism is important.
Well, life is cheaper over there you know.:rolleyes: Perhaps you’ve heard of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial or the more controversial Yasukuni Shrine. Regarding China, Vietnam, and Korea, Chiang Kai-Shek, Ngo Dinh Diem and Syngman Rhee were all dictators even if they had some trappings of rigged elections. They all had their political opponents tortured and killed. Recall the elections to unify Vietnam in 1956 were never held because the communists would have won. The US has a sizable Cambodian immigrant community as well, but again a memorial would be rather awkward with the US continually voting in the UN to recognize the government of Pol Pot as the legitimate government of Cambodia after his fellow communists from Vietnam kicked him out.
Are there any memorials to the victims of slavery? Wikipedia says that 2.2 million died during passage from Africa alone.
It would be interesting to see the reaction to a proposal for such a museum.
As Der Trihs said, victims of “Communism”, as opposed to victims of a specific act or campaign within communism (Holodomor, GLF/Cultural Revolution, Khmer Rouge), would be the equivalent to victims of Fascism in general.
Also there’s the small problem that some of what would be the major events to commemorate about victims of communist regimes would be… inconvenient… to bring up around some major business partners and political competitors, of the sort that have nukes and Permanent Seats in the Security Council. So we make memorials to events such as the Holodomor and Katyn that all parties have recognized, and not to those that they may argue about.
Also, many South Vietnamese refugees would probably not appreciate a nice memorial after, in their eyes, we just decided we were tired of prolonging the inevitable and bailed out.
They have, within their own community. But that particular situation is highly politicized right here-and-now, and they get little if any sympathy as “victims” from the rest of the Latino communities.
Directly murdered by Capitalists in the same way that Communist states murdered tens of millions? Or killed due to harsh working conditions? In which case I’m going to go out on a limb and still say that Communism and their charming working practices and environmental practices still killed a hell of a lot more (hell, the death tolls in several former Communist countries continue to roll on due to continuing horrible environmental conditions). But feel free to post some statistics you feel accurately reflect the number of people killed in each of the countries you name due to ‘capitalism’.
