Memorial to victims of communism
June 19th, 2007 by ashish
The 20th century has seen 2 major wars, with millions of victims in these wars, and other wars. Hitler is decreed as the worst killer in history, and he surely is ! However, in all these, what never gets mentioned is the people who get killed by their citizens due to ideological conflicts, or sheer madness. In terms of numbers, communism was one of the largest killers, with the regimes in China, Russia, and North Korea being one of the largest killers. Most of these killing were due to ideological reasons, and as yet, are not recognized as major problems.
China has had a history of major citizen deaths, with the Tianmen Square killings of 1989 being one of the most remembered, but in the Long March, in the period of consolidation after that, in the Cultural Revolution, and in the 1970’s, millions of Chinese citizens were killed, either at the hands of the state, or at the hands of fellow citizens inspired by the state. And this is never highlighted. China continues to be controlled by the Communist Party that still does not believe in giving power to the people, and it will never aim for such past massacres to be highlighted. So, when the US President George Bush opened a memorial in Washington DC dedicated to the people killed in communist countries, it was expected that China would react, and react it did:
Bush had said that the Victims of Communism Memorial was dedicated to tens of millions of people killed in communist regimes including China, the Soviet Union, North Korea and Vietnam, and that their deaths should remind Americans that “evil is real and must be confronted.
China’s Foreign Ministry responded Wednesday evening, saying Beijing had protested to the United States after the inauguration of the bronze memorial in Washington, D.C. and Bush’s comments, made Tuesday. “There are political forces in the United States who still think in Cold War terms and seek to provoke conflicts between different ideologies and social systems,” ministry spokesman Qin Gang said in a statement posted on the ministry’s Web site.
Despite tussles over trade issues, relations between the countries have generally been good recently, especially in cooperating on trying to shut down North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.
And this is the fundamental problem in terms of trying to bring democracy to China. China’s communist party will see any depiction of mass killings or any such action as designed to get its citizens to think about the communist party and its past, and it sees such actions as threatening its hold. And it may be right, because when people start to think about independence, nothing can stop them. As a matter of reflection, if somebody tried to setup such a memorial in China, they would be facing a 10 plus years jail sentence for ‘dissidence’ or for ‘disturbing the peace’.
And its not only China that was involved in violence against its own people. Russia ran a state security apparatus that mirrored the Germans in brutality and repression, with infamous terms such as the gulag referring to forced prison camps in Siberia in appalling conditions for dissidents and the like. People suspected of activities against the state would be pulled out and many times vanish.
