While in Washington, D.C. recently I ran across a project to erect a memorial to the victims of communism. The project can be found at www.victimsofcommunism.org. It was being promoted by an Estonian acquaintance of mine, so I took a brochure. As an historian of Russia I am well aware of the ghastly history of communist regimes, but something about the idea of a "memorial to the victims of communism" bothered me. I couldn't put my finger on it then. Now, with some weeks to sleep on it, I think I can say what it was.

It is too ideological for me. It is as if I want to say back, "isms don't kill people, people kill people." But that would be to deny the power of ideas. Nonetheless, this memorial doesn't sit right with me. It is a problem I sense also in the memorials to "the victims of National Socialism" which dot the European landscape.

While my politics are certainly "left" of mainstream America, I will be the first to admit that communism as practiced in Eastern Europe was not simply an abberation of an allegedly good idea. There are elements in the idea itself that have not been resolved, even in theory. You can't abolish private property in a modern, industrialized society without creating a powerful bureaucracy, for example. That will replace one source of power - wealth - with another kind. Fairness will not be the result.

But the implication of this memorial, that "communism" as such killed all of these tens of millions of people does not do justice to the myriad of persons, ideas and circumstances which are subsumed in the memorial.

I am not defending any of the cruelty committed by the various "communist" regimes (although some of the numbers of victims on the webpage are inflated). I would, however, plead for fair treatment of the "ism." Should we erect a memorial to the achievements of socialism? The Danes pay horrendous taxes for their social services, but they are statistically the happiest people in the world. Are they victims of communism? If communism is the opposite of liberty, why do so many free people choose to introduce elements of it into their societies? Should we erect a memorial to victims of "capitalism"? If so, should we count all those who were killed by soldiers called in to break strikes, by exhaustion and by starvation on the latifundias or the destroyed small farms of the world, by Hitler's or Franco's "capitalist" armies, by colonial conquest, colonial wars, by the "free trade" of slaves, in the coal mines? If one argues that these are "distortions of the system" and not inherent in the idea, I beg the same deference to "communism." If we understand "capitalism" only when connected to broader political ideas such as democracy and human rights as well, then give communism the same break. That is when we see the absurdity of making the idea itself guilty and throwing too many things into one box. Few if any of the early theoreticians of communism would recognize Stalin's regime or North Korea as a product of their own thinking. The fact that some would only adds to the complexity and does not clear the way for broad demonization.

Memorials to the "victims of National Socialism" are similar, but they are not as inherently vague. They avoid the difficult questions of naming perpetrators and sorting out groups of victims and naming them. That is a thorny political question that such memorials seek to avoid. But they do refer to a specific regime during a specific period engaged in specific policies universally associated with that regime and its ideology, even if the ideology is not entirely internally consistent. "Communism" and its history are much broader than Naziism in every sense and any memorial to all of its victims is ideological in its abstract attempt too discredit the whole concept at the expense of historical information. The need to use a female figure reminiscent of the Statue of Liberty as the centerpiece of the memorial is perhaps a clue. The designers cannot find or agree on a unique central idea of "anti-communism" in symbolic form.

Memorials to specific incidents are always more effective.

Like so many memorials, a memorial to the victims of "communism" creates simplicity where none can be found in the historical record. It paints over a complicated picture with broad, crude brushstrokes. On the other hand, perhaps it is a sign of recognition that the idea of "communism" is not dead and is still a threat to the established state-backed "capitalist" order and the possibly-emerging order of global corporate oligarchy.