Hoffen wir, dieser symbolische Akt ist eine Inspiration auch für Westeuropa! Es wäre dringend an der Zeit.
“The estimated 100 million people killed under communist regimes were remembered Tuesday in the nation’s capital as President Bush accepted, on behalf of the American people, a monument honoring their sacrifice. “Evil is real and must be confronted,” Bush told the audience at the dedication of the Victims of Communism Memorial. Among the invited guests were ambassadors from Eastern European nations subjugated by the Soviet Union in the aftermath of World War II.
The bronze “Goddess of Democracy” statue, created by Northern California sculptor Thomas Marsh, is a replica of the papier-mache figure — itself modeled on the Statue of Liberty — erected by Chinese students during the pro-democracy Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. The memorial is two blocks from Union Station, within sight of the U.S. Capitol.
The ceremony was held on the 20th anniversary of President Reagan’s challenge — “Tear down this wall!” — to Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev during a speech at the Berlin Wall.”
Hier kann man Bushs bewegende Rede nachlesen.
“The sheer numbers of those killed in Communism’s name are staggering, so large that a precise count is impossible. According to the best scholarly estimate, Communism took the lives of tens of millions of people in China and the Soviet Union, and millions more in North Korea, Cambodia, Africa, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Eastern Europe, and other parts of the globe.
Behind these numbers are human stories of individuals with families and dreams whose lives were cut short by men in pursuit of totalitarian power. Some of Communism’s victims are well-known. They include a Swedish diplomat named Raoul Wallenberg, who saved 100,000 Jews from the Nazis, only to be arrested on Stalin’s orders and sent to Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison, where he disappeared without a trace. They include a Polish priest named Father Popieluszko, who made his Warsaw church a sanctuary for the Solidarity underground, and was kidnaped, and beaten, and drowned in the Vitsula by the secret police.
The sacrifices of these individuals haunt history—and behind them are millions more who were killed in anonymity by Communism’s brutal hand. They include innocent Ukrainians starved to death in Stalin’s Great Famine; or Russians killed in Stalin’s purges; Lithuanians and Latvians and Estonians loaded onto cattle cars and deported to Arctic death camps of Soviet Communism. They include Chinese killed in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution; Cambodians slain in Pol Pot’s Killing Fields; East Germans shot attempting to scale the Berlin Wall in order to make it to freedom; Poles massacred in the Katyn Forest; and Ethiopians slaughtered in the “Red Terror”; Miskito Indians murdered by Nicaragua’s Sandinista dictatorship; and Cuban balseros who drowned escaping tyranny. We’ll never know the names of all who perished, but at this sacred place, Communism’s unknown victims will be consecrated to history and remembered forever. ...
The men and women who designed this memorial could have chosen an image of repression for this space, a replica of the wall that once divided Berlin, or the frozen barracks of the Gulag, or a killing field littered with skulls. Instead, they chose an image of hope—a woman holding a lamp of liberty. She reminds us of the victims of Communism, and also of the power that overcame Communism.
Like our Statue of Liberty, she reminds us that the flame for freedom burns in every human heart, and that it is a light that cannot be extinguished by the brutality of terrorists or tyrants. And she reminds us that when an ideology kills tens of millions of people, and still ends up being vanquished, it is contending with a power greater than death. (Applause.) She reminds us that freedom is the gift of our Creator, freedom is the birthright of all humanity, and in the end, freedom will prevail. (Applause.)”
