From the Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin has a proposal: Take May 1 away from the Communists, and make it “Victims of Communism Day”.
May Day began as a holiday for socialists and labor union activists, not just communists. But over time, the date was taken over by the Soviet Union and other communist regimes and used as a propaganda tool to prop up their regimes. I suggest that we instead use it as a day to commemorate those regimes’ millions of victims. The authoritative Black Book of Communism estimates the total at 80 to 100 million dead, greater than that caused by all other twentieth century tyrannies combined. We appropriately have a Holocaust Memorial Day. It is equally appropriate to commemorate the victims of the twentieth century’s other great totalitarian tyranny. And May Day is the most fitting day to do so. I suggest that May Day be turned into Victims of Communism Day….
The main alternative to May 1 is November 7, the anniversary of the communist coup in Russia. However, choosing that date might be interpreted as focusing exclusively on the Soviet Union, while ignoring the equally horrendous communist mass murders in China, Camobodia, and elsewhere. So May 1 is the best choice.
Indeed. There’s no controversy over remembering victims of other mass atrocities. And yet:
In recent decades, the question of acknowledging communist crimes has become something of a left-right issue in many quarters. That situation is deeply unfortunate, but far from inevitable. Among those who fully recognized the evils of communism in the past were liberals such as Harry Truman and Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson and leftists such as George Orwell. In Eastern Europe, some of the most important leaders of the anti-communist dissident movement were social democrats such as Vaclav Havel and Andrei Sakharov. It is not too late for today’s noncommunist left to follow their example.
Despite his wishful thinking, the trend is in the other direction. In fact, it seems that there’s a move afoot to rehabilitate Communism. If this evil can be rehabilitated, is the rehabilitation of genocide far behind? It seems like genocide, and it’s cousin eugenics, are already popular among the hard left, and people like science czar John Holdren are quite open about their support for eugenics.
So today we remember the tens of millions of victims of a monument to the vanity of man. GtoC, please add this to your list this weekend and pray for the souls of the innocent victims of this evil, and pray this evil is finally purged from this world.
And as for the communists themselves, I hope that Satan has a special circle set aside for vain, ideological villains.
Tags: Remembrance
