Post by ~ / % ? * on Jul 14, 2022 15:56:22 GMT
Yup, brand new in WashDC, open a month now. I can't not see this one having an agenda that offends and commemorates equally.
Foundation was authorized in 1993 by a unanimous Act of Congress signed as Public Law 103-199 by President William J. Clinton on December 17, 1993. On June 12, 2007, President George W. Bush dedicated the Victims of Communism Memorial statue in Washington, D.C.
victimsofcommunism.org
www.wsj.com/articles/the-victims-of-communism-museum-review-elizabeth-spalding-lee-edwards-victims-of-communism-memorial-foundation-hungary-poland-estonia-latvia-karl-marx-friedrich-engels-lenin-stalin-troktsky-alexander-solzhenitsyn-gulag-archipelago-witold-pilecki-milada-horakova-tiananmen-square-niall-ferguson-vaclav-havel-11657143453
The Victims of Communism Museum, a $40 million project that opened here last month, is the world’s first museum dedicated to the victims of the most murderous ideology in modern times. With three permanent galleries and nearly 10,000 square feet of space in a Beaux Arts mansion at McPherson Square, this museum delivers a short, shocking history lesson in brutality and deceit, along with inspiring studies in courage and a jarring relevance.
The museum—curated by Elizabeth Spalding and Lee Edwards of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which was established by an Act of Congress in 1993, and funded by private donors and gifts from the governments of Hungary, Poland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia—provides an account of the complexities of revolutionary theory that is clear. Communism, we read on a screen in the first gallery, “Remembering the Victims,” is “a system of centralized power in which a single-party dictatorship abolishes private property and controls the means of production and the distribution of goods and services.” The practice is also simple: “Under the pretense of classless, egalitarian society, Communist regimes . . . rely on force, use brutality, and repress speech, religion, assembly, and all other rights and freedoms.” Since the Russian Revolution of 1917, we read, more than 100 million people have been killed by Communist regimes.
“Remembering the Victims” moves efficiently from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s “Communist Manifesto” of 1848 to the Russian Revolution of 1917, Lenin’s launch of the global Comintern in 1919, and the early years of Stalin’s dictatorship. A timeline traces how Marx’s manifesto developed into Engels’s “scientific socialism” and how Trotsky and Lenin seized the moment in 1917. The jerky footage of Bolsheviks in the streets of czarist Russia might seem ancient history to younger visitors. But the crisp photographs on the opposite wall—child soldiers in Nicaragua, civil war and famine in Ethiopia, forced labor in North Korea—show that communism, a European ideology from the age of empires, was the last imperial export in the era of decolonization.
Foundation was authorized in 1993 by a unanimous Act of Congress signed as Public Law 103-199 by President William J. Clinton on December 17, 1993. On June 12, 2007, President George W. Bush dedicated the Victims of Communism Memorial statue in Washington, D.C.
victimsofcommunism.org
www.wsj.com/articles/the-victims-of-communism-museum-review-elizabeth-spalding-lee-edwards-victims-of-communism-memorial-foundation-hungary-poland-estonia-latvia-karl-marx-friedrich-engels-lenin-stalin-troktsky-alexander-solzhenitsyn-gulag-archipelago-witold-pilecki-milada-horakova-tiananmen-square-niall-ferguson-vaclav-havel-11657143453
The Victims of Communism Museum, a $40 million project that opened here last month, is the world’s first museum dedicated to the victims of the most murderous ideology in modern times. With three permanent galleries and nearly 10,000 square feet of space in a Beaux Arts mansion at McPherson Square, this museum delivers a short, shocking history lesson in brutality and deceit, along with inspiring studies in courage and a jarring relevance.
The museum—curated by Elizabeth Spalding and Lee Edwards of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which was established by an Act of Congress in 1993, and funded by private donors and gifts from the governments of Hungary, Poland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia—provides an account of the complexities of revolutionary theory that is clear. Communism, we read on a screen in the first gallery, “Remembering the Victims,” is “a system of centralized power in which a single-party dictatorship abolishes private property and controls the means of production and the distribution of goods and services.” The practice is also simple: “Under the pretense of classless, egalitarian society, Communist regimes . . . rely on force, use brutality, and repress speech, religion, assembly, and all other rights and freedoms.” Since the Russian Revolution of 1917, we read, more than 100 million people have been killed by Communist regimes.
“Remembering the Victims” moves efficiently from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s “Communist Manifesto” of 1848 to the Russian Revolution of 1917, Lenin’s launch of the global Comintern in 1919, and the early years of Stalin’s dictatorship. A timeline traces how Marx’s manifesto developed into Engels’s “scientific socialism” and how Trotsky and Lenin seized the moment in 1917. The jerky footage of Bolsheviks in the streets of czarist Russia might seem ancient history to younger visitors. But the crisp photographs on the opposite wall—child soldiers in Nicaragua, civil war and famine in Ethiopia, forced labor in North Korea—show that communism, a European ideology from the age of empires, was the last imperial export in the era of decolonization.
