Twenty years after Reagan uttered,Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall
the 100 million plus victims of Communism finally get a memorial. Thanks almost wholly to Lee Edwards, who came up with the idea, with the help of Lev Dobriansky.
The memorial is in the form of a massive bronze goddess clutching a flaming torch in both of her hands. She is an exact replica of the original 10 meter-high Goddess of Democracy that was erected by Chinese students during the Tiananmen Square democracy demonstrations of 1989.
She's there behind the President; couldn't find a better photo, unfortunately. The President's very nice remarks are here (find audio/video there too).
We dedicate this memorial because we have an obligation to those who died, to acknowledge their lives and honor their memory. The Czech writer Milan Kundera once described the struggle against Communism as "the struggle of memory against forgetting." Communist regimes did more than take their victims' lives; they sought to steal their humanity and erase their memory. With this memorial, we restore their humanity and we reclaim their memory. With this memorial, we say of Communism's innocent and anonymous victims, these men and women lived and they shall not be forgotten. (Applause.)
A privately funded memorial, by the way (interestingly, with large donations from Taiwan and Vietnam). Which is both as it should be and sad simultaneously. The world has been slow and reluctant to acknowledge Communism's crimes.
