On April 23, 2026, I attended the Roll Call ceremony at the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington, DC, organized by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
Each year, the ceremony commemorates the millions of men, women, and children who suffered or perished under communist regimes worldwide. The Memorial is modest in scale but immense in meaning. It features a bronze replica of the Goddess of Democracy, modeled after the statue erected by Chinese students during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. The inscription below the statue reads:
To the more than one hundred million victims of communism and to those who love liberty. To the freedom and independence of all captive nations and peoples.
The ceremony gathered ambassadors from former communist countries, representatives of civil society, religious leaders, scholars, and survivors of totalitarian regimes.
Wreaths were laid as speakers reflected on the moral obligation to remember the victims and to speak honestly about the systems that oppressed them. Several emphasized that remembrance is neither bitterness nor revenge, but an affirmation of human dignity and moral truth.
The illiberal and inhumane nature of totalitarian socialism is revealed by its relentless historical record. Both national socialism and communism produced systems of mass repression. Both negate the founding principles of the United States—the inherent worth of every human being and the existence of innate, inalienable rights.
Stalin’s grim remark—that one death is a tragedy while a million is a statistic—captures the moral corruption that enabled such crimes. The deaths of more than 100 million people under communist regimes cannot plausibly be dismissed as accidents or aberrations. The theory itself calls for violence and intolerance. When enforced by state power, it proved as lethal as its execution.
As Alan Kors once wrote:
No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents, and more orphans than socialism with power.
He further remarked that wherever socialism acquired the authority to plan society, abolish private property, suppress markets, and allocate resources, it crushed individual, economic, religious, associational, and political liberty. By contrast, societies rooted in voluntary exchange, personal responsibility, and the rule of law have repeatedly produced both prosperity and abundance of human choice.
Those who lived under communism are often deeply grateful to the United States because they remember oppression, fear, and enforced conformity. Those who escaped such regimes and found refuge in America are grateful not only for freedom, but for the opportunities that freedom creates.
Memory makes gratitude possible. Gratitude sustains a civilization. Without memory, freedom is taken for granted; without gratitude, it cannot endure.
Nora D. Clinton is a Research Scholar at the Legal Insurrection Foundation. She was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria. She holds a PhD in Classics and has published extensively on ancient documents on stone. In 2020, she authored the popular memoir Quarantine Reflections Across Two Worlds. Nora is a co-founder of two partner charities dedicated to academic cooperation and American values. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and son.
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY
