This morning, on a tiny triangle of land near a train station on Capitol Hill, the Victims of Communism memorial was dedicated. Here’s the link.

As we move away from World War II, a war memorials have been getting smaller. The Korean War memorial is a patrol of stone men, looking somewhat lost. The Vietnam war memorial was a black marble v carved into the ground until protests forced the feds to put up three life-size GI statues. The look in their faces is not triumphant.

(Even though, when U.S. forces left South Vietnam in 1973, the Vietcong had ceased to exist as an independent fighting force and the North Vietnamese Army had been decisively beaten back.)

Now comes a monument to America’s victory in the Cold War, the nation’s longest war. We enjoyed an unambiguous victory–the Berlin wall fell, the Soviet Union dissolved and Russia legalized private property–but the memorial is the smallest yet.

In fact it is not even conceived of as a war memorial at all. It is a kind group tombstone for the 100 million killed by communists world wide.

Why isn’t there a place a honor for America’s spies and soldiers and its allied dissidents and exiles? They suffered and died so that more than one billion people could be free. Surely, their sacrifice is worth a few square feet on the Washington Mall?