Victims of Communism A new museum that made me think Bruce D. Abramson
https://bda1776.substack.com/p/victims-of-communism?utm_source=email
On a recent trip to Washington, I was able to find the time to detour by the Museum of the Victims of Communism. It’s a new museum, it’s a small museum, but it’s a worthwhile museum. It’s also worth a few words.
I suspect that I was among the very first visitors. I believe it’s been open less than a month. I booked noon tickets. When I arrived at 11:30, the receptionist looked at me and said “you must be Bruce.” I believe that during my hour-long self-tour, we were the only two people in the building. So it’s fair to say that the crowds have not yet arrived.
Still, it’s an excellent exhibition at a central location—two blocks north of the White House—and it addresses a critical topic. The stories it relates are chilling, though not as chilling as the death tolls. The exhibits go around the world and across time, tallying the fall of European, African, Asian, and American countries to the evils of Communism. The larger downstairs exhibit focused on the Soviet Union, its conquests, and its satellites, sets a somber stage. An upstairs exhibit dedicated entirely to China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre rounds it out.
One thought struck me as I was studying the sizable portion dedicated to Stalin. It’s a thought that’s been gelling for the past decade or so, as I’ve gotten to speak to more people familiar (sadly, many intimately so) with Eastern European Communism. And it’s a thought I find particularly chilling.
We here in the U.S. have been raised with a particular view of WWII, and specifically its European theater. The story is that Nazism arose as a unique evil out to conquer the world. The free countries of the West rose boldly to challenge, contain, and ultimately defeat it. Even Stalin’s Soviet Union—a force of evil in its own right—enlisted in the cause. In fact, I’ve even heard the formulation that FDR brilliantly defeated Nazism using primarily Russian soldiers.
It’s a story that makes us feel good as Americans. We were the good guys defeating history’s worst bad guys. It’s a story that resonates as an American Jew raised among Holocaust survivors. And certainly, the sheer barbarism of logistical planning and scientific advancement that defined the Holocaust marked it as unique, even among history’s far-too-many atrocities. But that doesn’t necessarily make it the only plausible read.
Let’s consider an alternative formulation. What if, as the 1930s were drawing to a close, two of history’s most evil regimes faced off against each other. Hitler’s Nazism and Stalin’s Communism both grew from the utopian rejection of the West’s biblical roots. Both dispensed with the idea that perfection belongs only to God, while human activities are best directed towards improvement. Both believed that if they could perfect society, they could perfect humanity. Both set out to conquer and eliminate all who stood between them and their perverse visions of a perfect society.
What if WWII broke out not when Hitler invaded Poland, but when the Molotov/Ribbentrop Pact divided Eastern Europe, and the two beneficiaries invaded more-or-less simultaneously to stake their claims? What if WWII was not a battle between the forces of freedom and the forces of tyranny, but rather a conflict between two vile, brutal tyrants—with the forces of freedom entering on the side they deemed the lesser of two evils? What if rather than seeing Stalin as helping Roosevelt and Churchill defeat Hitler, it was really Roosevelt and Churchill who helped Stalin defeat Hitler? From everything I’ve heard, that’s precisely how most Russians see it.
Again, as both an American and a Jew I tend to believe that we did indeed support the lesser of two evils. But it’s a reframing that makes it impossible to get the warm fuzzies we typically associate with our great victory over evil.
It is an accurate reframing? I don’t know. It’s a thought that’s been gelling for a few years, but that doesn’t make it right. It’s simply something that I’m considering. Perhaps you’ll find it worth considering, too.
Either way, even a brief hour spent contemplating the victims of Communism should serve as a wakeup call. The ideologies that made the twentieth century so hellish for so many have hardly been defeated. Utopianism is on the rise—around the world and here at home. The victims of its next deadly manifestation are unlikely to fare any better than the victims of its first two. It’s worth the time and effort to ensure that rising Woke utopianism never gets the chance to join its predecessors in the pantheon of brutality.
Any museum that can make you think must be adjudged a success. The new Museum of the Victims of Communism made me think.
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