Large Logo Remembrance Society
Menu
Donate

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
-Milan Kundera

The Remembrance Society

Fighting for the Future by Remembering the Past ™

The Remembrance Society is a nonprofit organization dedicated to documenting and exposing the crimes of totalitarianism and to raising awareness about present totalitarian dangers.

We believe that the best way to prevent the horrors of the twentieth century from being repeated is to advance knowledge of the history and ideology of totalitarianism.

Truth. Memory. Liberty.

Memorial Bell, Levashovo Memorial Cemetery, Russia - The Story behind our logo.

The Black Book of Communism, Harvard University Press 1999

The Remembrance Society

View More

What is the threat
of totalitarianism?

Millions were liberated by the defeat of Nazism and the fall of the Soviet Union but the shadow of totalitarianism continues to haunt the modern world. More than 20 percent of the world’s peoples today live under authoritarian regimes that draw on the totalitarian legacy. Even in the West, communist and fascist ideas still influence the thinking of a section of the population.
 
The regimes of Hitler, Stalin and Mao reduced human beings to raw material in the pursuit of utopian political aims. Because these regimes masked their intentions with ideological slogans, their true nature was often not obvious to those who rallied to them and were often their first victims.
 
Unfortunately, the history of totalitarianism in the twentieth century is little known in the West. This is why educating students and commemorating the victims is so important. True knowledge can be an important barrier in the way of future tyrants who seek unlimited power and have no concern for the cost of their ambitions in human lives. At the same time, by memorializing those who were killed by totalitarianism, we can affirm those values that, in the end, are the best guarantee of a better future.

Totalitarian regimes have discovered without knowing it that there are crimes which man can neither punish nor forgive. When the impossible was made possible it became unpunishable, unforgivable absolute [radical] evil which could no longer be understood and explained by the evil motives of self-interest, greed, covetousness, resentment, lust for power and cowardice; and which therefore anger could not avenge, love could not endure, friendship could not forgive. Just as the victims in the death factories or the holes of oblivion are no longer human in the eyes of their executioners, so this newest species of criminals is beyond the pale even of solidarity in human sinfulness.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1968)

Sign up below to receive updates about
our work and upcoming events.

Scroll to top