Communism's Victims Now Have Memorial

By OMAR FEKEIKI The Washington Post

Published: Jun 13, 2007

WASHINGTON - President Bush, attending Tuesday's dedication of a memorial to an estimated 100 million victims of communist regimes, compared the fight against radical Islam to the Cold War battle against totalitarian communism.

In warning Americans that "evil is real and must be confronted," Bush also equated the Sept. 11 attacks with the tyrannical rule imposed on residents of countries such as China, North Korea and the former Soviet Union.

"Like the communists, the terrorists and radicals who have attacked our nation are followers of a murderous ideology that despises freedom, crushes all dissent, has expansionist ambitions and pursues totalitarian aims," he said at the ceremony.

The ceremony was held on the 20th anniversary of President Reagan's speech at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, in which he implored Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." Two years later, the wall fell.

The Victims of Communism Memorial is a bronze Goddess of Democracy statue. It is a replica of a replica - a reproduction of the papier-mache statue that Chinese students modeled on the Statue of Liberty and carried into Tiananmen Square during pro-democracy protests in 1989.

The memorial was 17 years in the making. The idea was born in 1990, two months after the Berlin Wall came down, said Lee Edwards, a conservative historian who is chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

The foundation says communism's victims were killed by a variety of means, including purges, famine and gulags.

The memorial was built with $950,000 in private funds, including donations from the Czech Republic, Lithuania, nation of Georgia and Taiwan. Its location was chosen to be near the Capitol, Edwards said.

More than 400 people attended Tuesday's dedication.