“The struggle of memory against forgetting” is how the Czech writer Milan Kundera described the struggle against communism. President Bush quoted his words yesterday in accepting, on behalf of America, the Victims of Communism Memorial that will become, for many, one of the important destinations on visits to Washington. The designers of the memorial, the president noted, could have chosen an image of repression — “a replica of the wall that once divided Berlin, or the frozen barracks of the Gulag, or a killing field littered with skulls.” They chose instead what he called “an image of hope,” a statue of a woman holding a lamp of liberty.

The president spoke of the millions who perished under communism, “innocent Ukrainians starved to death in Stalin’s Great Famine; or Russians killed in Stalin’s purges; Lithuanians and Latvians and Estonians loaded onto cattle cars and deported to Arctic death camps of Soviet Communism … Chinese killed in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, Cambodians slain in Pol Pot’s killing fields; East Germans shot attempting to scale the Berlin Wall in order to make it to freedom; Poles massacred in the Katyn Forest; and Ethiopians slaughtered in the ‘Red Terror’; Miskito Indians murdered by Nicaragua’s Sandinista dictatorship; and Cuban balseros who drowned escaping tyranny.”

We’ll never know the names of all who perished, Mr. Bush noted. “But,” he said, “at this sacred place, Communism’s unknown victims will be consecrated to history and remembered forever.” He said he felt it was important to recall the lessons of the Communist era “because the evil and hatred that inspired the death of tens of millions of people in the 20th century is still at work in the world.” Then he spoke about the current war, launched by “followers of a murderous ideology that despises freedom, crushes all dissent, has expansionist ambitions and pursues totalitarian aims.” He spoke of the need to remain “steadfast in freedom’s cause.” It will sound corny only to those who were able to stand apart in the great struggle against a communism that came all too close to victory.