The Velvet Revolution and Victory Over Communism

Milos Klas
November 24, 2009
UPF - Slovakia

Bratislava, Slovakia - During the last months there have been numerous conferences and media reports throughout Europe and the world about the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain. All reports omitted one important name: the Rev. Dr. Sun Myung Moon, whom the Soviet daily Izvestya once labeled the world’s #1 Anti-Communist.

“No individual has invested so much effort and resources to resist the expansion of Communism and stop the atheistic ideology of Marxism as our founder did,” says Milos Klas, General Secretary of UPF-Slovakia.

To fill that gap, UPF Slovakia organized an event on the theme of “The Iron Curtain: What Was That All About?” in the Slovak capital of Bratislava on November 24, 2009. Another leading motive was the fact that the awareness of Communism as a threat to human life and peace in the world is near zero nowadays in Slovakia. Especially young people have little idea what the Iron Curtain was, how the human rights were denied, etc.

The event took place in the beautiful Zichy Palace in the old town of Bratislava. At first a DVD was shown about the Iron Curtain which included haunting pictures of the deadly border in the early 1950s. The first speaker was Lubomir Morbacher from the Nation’s Memory Institute, which researches the crimes of Communism in former Czechoslovakia. Mr. Morbacher is a historian and co-author of such important books as The Iron Curtain and The Crimes of Communism in Slovakia. He said that many of the responsible officials have not yet been prosecuted even though they have caused great suffering. The majority of people who wanted to cross the Iron Curtain were arrested; all of them were sentenced to prison terms and persecuted even after their release. About 22,000 victims have been recorded; hundreds have died, and around 650 soldiers lost their lives while serving at the border.