An observer asked the old man, “Why in the world are you wasting your money buying a lottery ticket? Don’t you know your chance of winning is only one in ten million?” To which the old man replied, “Ah, but each ticket gives me a week of hoping.”
That’s a good analogy to the way we felt 30 years ago when President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Captive Nations Week Law in July 1959. We didn’t ponder the ridiculously small odds that the nations under Communism’s boot might ever really be able to throw off their slavemasters, or the impracticability of that impossible dream, but we focused instead on keeping alive the hope that freedom is the ultimate goal and that it could miraculously happen.
No other U.S. act ever caused such a furious reaction from the Soviet bosses. Nikita Khrushchev railed at Vice President Richard Nixon on his trip to Moscow, saying, “It stinks and is provocative.”
The statute imposes the responsibility on the President of the United States to issue a proclamation proclaiming the third week of July as Captive Nations Week each year “until such time as freedom and independence shall have been achieved for all the captive nations of the world.” All Presidents have obeyed this law (except Jimmy Carter in 1977), and the wording of these annual proclamations reflects the incumbent President’s personal intensity of commitment.
In the years of Nixonian détente, the phraseology was tepid and the announcement was sometimes made on a Saturday, too late to make the Sunday newspapers and so that it would be stale news by Monday. In the years of Reagan’s “evil empire” oratory, the wording was enthusiastic and ethnic representatives were invited for a White House media event (although the television networks usually didn’t find this newsworthy).
Through all those 30 years, all over the United States, the ethnics and their anti-Communist friends commemorated the Week with speeches, rallies and parades. Like a faithful relative who makes an annual trip to the cemetery to bring flowers to the grave of a lost loved one, thousands of Americans remembered and resolved, memorialized and declaimed, about how we share with the peoples of the Captive Nations “their aspirations for the recovery of their freedom and independence.”
In the 1960s and 1970s, speakers during Captive Nations Week pessimistically asked, “who’s next?” Indeed, many countries were added to the 22captive nations listed in the 1959 statute, including Cuba, South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, Angola, and Mozambique.
The uprisings in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and in Poland in 1970 and 1981 were so bloody, so heartbreaking, and so futile. With their bare fists and a few Molotov cocktails, men could not successfully battle armored tanks in artillery fire.
The confrontation was always followed by a methodical liquidation of the leaders who attempted to turn back the inexorable forward march of Communism. After all, hadn’t we heard again and again that history is on the side of the Communists?
But the hope and hunger for freedom live on despite brutal oppression; Lech Walesa calls it “the wheat that can grow on stones.” Armando Valladares in Cuba and Natan Scharansky in the U.S.S.R. say that the words of hope we spoke in America could be heard in the remote dungeons of the Communist world.
Now, on the 30th anniversary of the Captive Nations Week resolution, for the first time we dare to dream that liberation from Communism can really happen. This unpredicted turn of events has come about because of a combination of two factors: the now-obvious economic and moral disaster of Communism, and the good news that freedom produces prosperity, which is now broadcast by television, radio, VCRs, computers, fax machines, and communication satellites.
Historians of the 21st century will probably look back on the 1980s and fix the turning point at which history moved from the side of Communism to the side of freedom. Perhaps it was Grenada, where we buried the Brezhnev doctrine with the Reagan doctrine; perhaps it was the Soviets pulling their troops out of Afghanistan; perhaps it was the 1989 Polish elections (which had been promised since 1945), or Hungary dismantling its barbed-wire border; perhaps it was the students demonstrating in Tiananmen Square
More likely it was when the Russian people discovered that they can’t eat or live a fraction as well as the Germans they defeated in World War II, and when the Chinese students discovered that their blood-brothers on Taiwan enjoy living standards ten times higher than mainland Chinese. With modern communications systems, there’s no way to hide any longer the total and compelling contrast between the economic conditions produced by Communism and by freedom.
President Bush has a great opportunity to issue a Captive Nations Proclamation this July which calls for liberation from Communism dictatorships all over the world.
