It is our obligation to remember the victims of communism every year and from day to day because failing to do so would be committing a grave sin, the sin of omission. On this day in 1953, some 1,500 Hungarians were allowed to return home from political exile and labor camps.
While 30 years after the fall of the Soviet Union it is becoming more and more difficult to accurately recall the horrors of one of the most merciless dictatorships in human history. Communism affected the largest number of countries worldwide, killing more than 100 million people globally. In Hungary alone, more than 800,000 people suffered dire consequences.
Absent of remembrance, it is impossible to build proud and coherent communities that preserve their traditions and follow them faithfully. This is why remembering the political prisoners, many of whom perished under the inhumane conditions of Soviet labor camps, is essential to ensuring that a system driven by such cruel ideology may never return to Hungary.
Unfortunately, the ideology which prepared the ground for communism has undergone a renaissance in many places that consider themselves to be part of the western, enlightened world. The European Union’s Brussels-based bureaucracy in particular has become a stronghold of communist-like policy directions.
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