We Must Never Forget

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the end of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain, of which it was a part. We must never forget that half of the world was a vast prison camp, guarded by machine gunners who had written orders to kill anybody who might go near the border, including women and children.

We must remember that this monumental crime against humanity was only the outer skin of a horrible tyranny. Inside of their borders, the Marxists committed murder on a vast scale. To take two examples, they created a man-made famine in Ukraine, which killed millions, and they slaughtered the entire Polish army in cold blood at the Katyn Forest. In the cities, the K.G.B. would arrest people in the middle of the night and torture them so that they would accuse their friends and relations of counterrevolutionary activity. They didn’t care that none of it was true; they had a quota to fill.

It is, perhaps more important to remember that the governments of the west, including many in the press, were always willing to look the other way when the communists showed their true face. There were always spies and traitors, such as Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs, when needed. The press covered up the Ukrainian famine, and Hollywood avoided portraying them as the villains.

All of these are well-known facts. We are told that it is somehow crude and vulgar to notice these things, but that is a false sensibility. Nobody felt the need to cover up Hitler’s atrocities. Why should Lenin receive any gentler treatment?

If we forget what threatened to overwhelm us in those dark days, we may find ourselves in the same chains. It is amazing to see how America has changed in these twenty years. Our schools rigidly exclude any mention of God or Christendom, through fear of left-wing lawsuits. The government freely subsidizes blasphemous art and literature, but says that a cross on public property violates “separation of church and state.” People have learned the habit of censoring themselves to conform to the speech codes of the left, and if they won’t do it, they will face trouble at their universities and workplaces. Our America is in grave danger of becoming what we resisted in the last century.