Victims of Communism Memorial

In the middle of June 17th Street, about 200 yards West of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, stands The Caller. It gets lost amid the other nearby world-bending landmarks – the Victory Column, to taunt France; the Soviet Memorial, to taunt Germany; and the Reichstag, where … well, nothing of note has ever happened. The Caller is a curved, avant-garde figure on an unmarked pedestal; you’d miss him if you weren’t scanning the median. With lips agape and hands cupped, he screams a clanging “We haven’t forgotten you,” a silent chord of solidarity with East Germans that never saw him.

Thirteen years on, The Caller remains my favorite Cold War relic. And so, when I came across a Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington, it had to be the first station on the Obscure Monument Hunt. The memorial, which opened in 2007 at the triangle of New Jersey, Massachusetts, and First, stands three blocks from the Capitol and four from Union Station. Like The Caller, there’s little to the memorial itself – The Goddess of Democracy statue and a few engravings, and there’s little to learn there and even less cause to stay more than a few minutes.

For a country whose reputation hung on all things anti-communist, the memorial demonstrates remarkable restraint. Unlike the WWII Memorial – a visual treat, but which reads like a resume (“So, Mr. States, tell me about the time you were at Guadalcanal…”), the lack graphic symbolism or depiction of figures is particularly poignant. No victim or hero encapsulates an Iron Curtain that swept half the world. Like The Caller, its simplicity speaks more.

Ironically, though, the Goddess of Democracy looks, well, REALLY communist. The actual statue is a five-foot iron mockdown of a ten-meter papier-mâché statue that sprung up for four days at the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. The Goddess, research tells me, was purposely not modeled on the Statue of Liberty, but on the Worker and Kolkhoz Woman, a suburban-Moscow, Leninist wet dream. (Though, if the architects WERE going Tiananmen Square, it’d have been tremendously ballsy if they’d bronzed a guy in front of a tank. Had they, China probably would have ended our relationship. Just saying.)

What’s bittersweet about the VOCM, and its stated mission to educate subsequent generations about state-begotten terror, is the flitting gravitas that the word “communism” portends. Communism once connoted totalitarianism and Big Brother, telescreens and death camps, Stalin and Kolyma. Now, the term has degraded to one in common discourse, a slur that Fox News viewers use to describe people who don’t watch Fox News.

It’s a slippery alley, these semantics, one which the Goddess all but begs us not to take. The Kolyma camps, the Killing Fields, Tuol Sleng, Katyn Forest, Great Famine and the other atrocities she recalls are among the darkest moments in history. By degrading the word that defined them to a quip about a countryman who disagrees with you, you risk silencing the Goddess’ very message, sullying the 200 million deaths from tyranny and oppression. As visitors to the monument, it’s incumbent on us to separate history from demagoguery.

When The Caller went up in 1989, he screamed that we hadn’t forgotten. The Goddess implores us not to now.