Twenty-four years ago, June 8, 1982, Ronald Reagan spoke to the British House of Commons. In that speech President Reagan said, in part, the following:

We’re approaching the end of a bloody century plagued by a terrible political invention — totalitarianism. Optimism comes less easily today, not because democracy is less vigorous, but because democracy’s enemies have refined their instruments of repression. Yet optimism is in order because day by day democracy is proving itself to be a not at all fragile flower. From Stettin on the Baltic to Varna on the Black Sea, the regimes planted by totalitarianism have had more than thirty years to establish their legitimacy. But none — not one regime — has yet been able to risk free elections. Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root.

Historians looking back at our time will note the consistent restraint and peaceful intentions of the West. They will note that it was the democracies who refused to use the threat of their nuclear monopoly in the forties and early fifties for territorial or imperial gain. Had that nuclear monopoly been in the hands of the Communist world, the map of Europe–indeed, the world–would look very different today.

The decay of the Soviet experiment should come as no surprise to us. Wherever the comparisons have been made between free and closed societies — West Germany and East Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, Malaysia and Vietnam — it is the democratic countries that are prosperous and responsive to the needs of their people. And one of the simple but overwhelming facts of our time is this: of all the millions of refugees we’ve seen in the modern world, their flight is always away from, not toward the Communist world. Today on the NATO line, our military forces face east to prevent a possible invasion. On the other side of the line, the Soviet forces also face east to prevent their people from leaving.

Almost one year later President Reagan gave his famous speech in which he called the Soviet Union an ???????evil empire.??????? He was vilified by many in the media and the political left for these comments. President Reagan would later comment on that speech by saying:

At the time it was portrayed as some kind of know-nothing, archconservative statement that could only drive the Soviets to further heights of paranoia and insecurity.

For too long our leaders were unable to describe the Soviet Union as it actually was. The keepers of our foreign-policy knowledge – in other words, most liberal foreign-affairs scholars, the State Department, and various columnists – found it illiberal and provocative to be so honest. I’ve always believed, however, that it’s important to define differences, because there are choices and decisions to be made in life and history.

The Soviet system over the years has purposely starved, murdered, and brutalized its own people. Millions were killed; it’s all right there in the history books. It put other citizens it disagreed with into psychiatric hospitals, sometimes drugging them into oblivion. Is the system that allowed this not evil? Then why shouldn’t we say so?

Well, several months ago at its parliamentary assembly in Strasbourg, France, the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) said so—PACE passed a resolution, Need for international condemnation of crimes of totalitarian communist regimes, condemning the crimes committed by totalitarian Communist regimes. The Council of Europe reported in its resolution that the crimes committed by totalitarian Communist regimes have included individual and collective assassinations and executions, death in concentration camps, starvation, deportations, torture, slave labor, persecution against ethic minorities and religious believers, deprivation of freedom of belief, thought, speech and press and other crimes. The resolution specifically states that, ???????The Assembly is convinced that the awareness of history is one of the preconditions for avoiding similar crimes in the future. Furthermore, moral assessment and condemnation of crimes committed play an important role in the education of young generations. The clear position of the international community on the past may be a reference for their future actions.???????

A report issued by PACE noted that since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war, information obtained from archives illustrate that there is no essential difference between communism and Nazism. The report states that both ideologies proclaim the establishment of a “perfect” society and the need to sweep away all obstacles. Both totalitarian regimes adopt similar means to maintain their power, for example, organizing youth groups, carrying on ideological propaganda in schools, implementing military control in society, cult worship of leaders, deprivation of freedom of speech and persecution with every conceivable method against their opponents.

You probably didn????????t read much about this PACE condemnation and their report in the US media. It seems that the media has a difficult time expressing negative comments, or reporting on any moral outrage directed at Communist. Just as when President Reagan called the Soviet Union an evil empire, the media, and many on the political left, see this resolution as, to quote President Reagan, ???????some kind of know-nothing, archconservative statement.??????? To point out the atrocities of the Communists is seen as McCarthyism. The mainstream media and the political left realize that ???????some??????? of the Communists were bad, but gee????????let????????s not dwell on the Communist????????s inadequacies, after all the capitalist system has its faults too.

But anyone who has been through the Museum of Soviet and Nazi Occupations in Estonia, or the Occupation Museum in Latvia knows that 50,000 Estonians were deported, 75,000 Latvians were arrested out of a total population of 126,000, also 20,000 were shot and almost 60,000 (including children) were deported to godforsaken regions in the Soviet Union where many died. People were rounded up in the middle of the night and loaded into cattle cars with very few of their belongings. If you visit the KGB Museum in Lithuania you will learn that 350,000 people — one tenth of the country’s population — were imprisoned, deported to Russian gulags or massacred in Lithuania. In a grim and depressing underground building you can see where the KGB torture took place and where, in the execution room, prisoners were shoot twice in the back of the head by a special KGB unit, and then the bodies were stacked in piles until they could be secretly trucked away to mass graves. When I visited these museums it convinced me that the Soviet Union was an ???????evil empire.???????

Of course this was only part of the horror. There was the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of Don Cossacks, Stalin intentionally starved 5,000,000 Ukrainian peasants, not to mention the murder of 6,500,000 Kulaks. It is estimated that Stalin executed almost a million Communist Party members during the Great Terror. The list could go on and on. It was really easy to become a victim of the Communist tyranny????????you only had to be wealthy or own property. Or just be from the wrong country, or the wrong political entity. You could end up deported or dead for being the parents of the wrong person, or the child of someone on the Communist????????s list, or the spouse of someone in disfavor. Or you could just be a Pole, Hungarian, Romanian, Ukrainian or a Muslim (it is estimated that 2 million Muslims were murdered in the Soviet Union.) You could end up deported or dead if you were in the wrong profession????????Communist didn????????t always like teachers, religious people or writers.

We all know the horrors committed by the Nazis, and documentaries, stories, movies and various media remind us that we can never let something like that happen again. We have prosecuted Nazis responsible for the atrocities, and until this day we still hunt for fugitive Nazis????????as we should. But, what Communist has been prosecuted for the atrocities committed in the Soviet Union? (Karl-Leonhard Paulov and Mikhail Farbtukh are the only two men that I know of who have been convicted–in Latvia–of Stalin-era crimes.) What Hollywood movie tells the story of the atrocities committed in the Soviet Union? How many documentaries have you seen on PBS about the mass deportations, the murders and the torture in the former Soviet Union? Have you seen films showing the gulags, the KGB torture rooms, the mass graves discovered, like the one near Minsk that is estimated to contain over 250,000 bodies?

The effects of the repression, the loss of liberty, the total control of humanity in the Soviet Union left scars on the people that only now are disappearing with the youngest generation????????anyone over 30 years old in the former Soviet Union countries still feels the consequences of the Communist legacy. What would the countries of the former Soviet Union be like today if they were not held back and brutalized for more than 50 years?

If we ignore or forget the atrocities committed by Communist regimes, then history will lose its meaning. Future generations will never know why we fought the Cold War, and why the sacrifices of so many brave people were for a just cause. Will the history of Communism and the atrocities committed be taught as a right-wing conspiracy plot; invented by the Ronald Reagans of the world? Will we lose sight of the damage being done by the remaining Communist regimes in China, North Korea, Cuba and some of the thugs in South America?

The PACE resolution calls for ???????all Communist or post-Communist parties in its member states which have not yet done so to reassess the history of communism and their own past, clearly distance themselves from the crimes committed by totalitarian Communist regimes and condemn them without any ambiguity.??????? I applaud them for their efforts, and I call on the western media to do the same????????reassess the history of communism, and condemn the atrocities without any ambiguity. The media and historians can make sure that we don????????t forget and that we learn from the past.

Stalin once said, “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” Let????????s not prove him right.