Fall of The Wall Day- 20 Years Ago

This should really be a day of international rejoicing, but for some reason it feels like the lessons of history are being forgotten. We can't even get decent recognition of the event from our gov officials.  Why does Hollywood make hero films about Ernesto Che Guevara?  How is his legacy really any better for humanity than the Fascist dictators who are toxic to champion? Why is it ok for US Administration officials to lovingly quote Chairman Mao, but not Hitler? Pop quiz- who is responsible for killing more people? To me, the only distinction between a "leftist" dictator and a "rightist" dictator are the lies they use to justify their brutal crimes against humanity.

Today, rejoice and remember the brave crowds with the sledgehammers, and the brave border guards who refused to carry out their immoral duties.

[Via Radley Balko]
Today, Berlin celebrates the 20th anniversary of the fall of The Wall. Sadly, much of Europe is already beginning to forget the atrocities wrought by communism. We libertarians regularly make the point that while Nazism is still regularly and justifiably vilified, communism periodically enjoys rebirths of chic. The point can’t be made enough. Not to diminish the horrors of Nazism, but to confront the cultural whitewashing of the horrors of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Il, and the others.
This weekend at the Students for Liberty conference I was privileged to hear the great historian Alan Charles Kors give a rousing and inspiring speech demanding an accounting for the horrors of communism. I don’t think the speech is available online, but here’s an essay Kors wrote for Reason several years ago that touches on the same themes. The concluding graph is stirring.

No cause in the history of mankind has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents, and more orphans than communism. It surpassed, exponentially, all other systems of production in turning out the dead. No one honors those dead. No one does penance for them. No one pays for them. No one is hunted down to account for them. It is exactly what Solzhenitsyn foresaw in The Gulag: “No, no one would have to answer.” Communism was not a “god that failed.” Rather, it was an intellectually organized slaughter and slavery that succeeded, but that could not sustain itself against the productivity and resistance of free men and women.

http://www.theagitator.com/2009/11/09/fall-of-the-wall/

Here's an accounting of the mass "democide".
 

Source: http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.TAB1.GIF