The Berlin Wall came down twenty years ago next Monday (for my birthday!) and represented the beginning of the end for Communism as an organizing political theory. This was a stunning victory of multi-party, free market democracies and the generationally victimized masses who labored under that form of human tyranny for true political freedom. This victory over statist totalitarianism was a crucial turning point in modern history.
As a result it became possible to envision a world in which no one need tremble under the threat of nuclear annihilation, and each person could be free to live and express himself without fear of government repression. It held out the prospect, at least, that the rights and privileges of government truly did come from the people, for the good of the people. That human rights are individual rather than collective, that no one is to be left sole arbiter of the “common good.”
It is easy for those of us here at home to forget what a breathtakingly novel challenge this was to the arc of human history, which for the vast majority of its span has meant the increasing aggregation of power to the few over the many solely for the good of those who could claw their way to the top. In later years the bloody sword and the divine right of princes was replaced by Utopian ideologies that nevertheless tended to the same end, a realization so commonplace as to have become a cliche: Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Given that, it’s right to wonder, as Matt Welch has done over at Reason, why we don’t talk about it more:
Twenty years later, the anniversary of that historic border crossing was noted in exactly four American newspapers, according to the Nexis database, and all four mentions were in reprints of a single syndicated column. August anniversaries receiving more media play in the U.S. included the 400th anniversary of Galileo building his telescope, the 150th anniversary of the first oil well, and the 25th anniversary of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. A Google News search of “anniversary” and “freedom” on August 23, 2009, turned up scores of Woodstock references before the first mention of Hungary.
Get used to it, if you haven’t already. November 1989 was the most liberating month of arguably the most liberating year in human history, yet two decades later the country that led the Cold War coalition against communism seems less interested than ever in commemorating, let alone processing the lessons from, the collapse of its longtime foe. At a time that fairly cries out for historical perspective about the follies of central planning, Americans are ignoring the fundamental conflict of the postwar world…
A few years back I attended freshman orientation for my elder daughter’s high school classes. The English teacher noted that while Shakespeare, Camus and Salinger were still on the reading list, Orwell had been taken off. No longer would high schoolers read the collectivist allegories of Animal Farm, nor have to imagine the dystopian totalitarianism of 1984.
After all, we’re all free now, and the smothering hand of well-intentioned government is so passé.
Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding. — Justice Louis Brandeis
Never give in–never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. — Sir Winston Churchill
“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”
- James Madison
“There is nothing more corrupting, nothing more destructive of the noblest and finest feelings of our nature, than the exercise of unlimited power.”
- William Henry Harrison
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
“The voice from the telescreen was still pouring forth its tale of prisoners and booty and slaughter, but the shouting outside had died down a little. The waiters were turning back to their work. One of them approached with the gin bottle. Winston, sitting in a blissful dream, paid no attention as his glass was filled up. He was not running or cheering any longer. He was back in the Ministry of Love, with everything forgiven, his soul white as snow. He was in the public dock, confessing everything, implicating everybody. He was walking down the white-tiled corridor, with the feeling of walking in sunlight, and an armed guard at his back. The longhoped-for bullet was entering his brain.”
“He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”
– final words of 1984, by George Orwell.
I have not forgotten.
Subsunk
Well, if the holier-than-thou National Education Association is going to eliminate such absolutely necessary authors as George Orwell and Winston Churchill from our children’s reading lists, as is happening now in England, we’ll just have to smuggle in copies at home and give reading assigments, as a prelude to family discussions. And you, Lex, are very good at leading family discussions at the dinner table. Just as my father was.
It can be dicey. My father was a very controlled man, because he had a temper [which I seem to have inherited], but my brother and I read stuff at an early age — Jan Valtin’s Out of the Night, Hitler’s Mein Kampf — which needed to be discussed *en famille*. Rex, my brother, was very impressed at the age of 12 by Hitler. It’s the only time I ever saw my father close to losing his temper. But he didn’t.
We did have lengthy, and loud, family breakfasts on Saturday.
I miss those so much. And I know you will, when the young ones are out of the nest.
Marianne
I was a freshman in high school and we’d just gotten the new tv’s in the classrooms for ChannelOne. I also had a class called Area Studies. That semester happened to be about Russia and the USSR. Half of the week’s classes were simply watching the news as it seemed that each day a former state or region declared its independence. I remember Belarus, Latvia, Estonia, and many others form. The teacher had to constantly redo his tests to adjust for the influx of countries, but he was always smiling as he did it.
I also remember crying as they showed video of the people of Berlin and West Germany tearing apart pieces of the wall and finding loved ones they hadn’t seen in decades. You see, it meant a little more to me than the average kid in my class. Only 3 yrs previously we had left Germany. We had been stationed at Rhein Main. We had visited Berlin. Unless you stand at the base of that wall and know what’s on the other side, you just can’t really get it.
For all our country’s problems and faults, the average person cannot possibly understand what it means to be completely subjugated to a totalitarian government. Unless they’ve seen it first hand, one cannot imagine the utter despair and devastation that is communism. And honestly, I pray none of ever have any cause to experience that.
I couldhardly believe my eyes Monday night, when I was able to view on PBS (of all places) a segment of “Taking Note” which analyzed Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony. It gave the background of its composition, pointing out that the composer was fighting for his life and yet making a very negative statement about the communist revolution. The films of Russia under Stalin were chilling, and the interviews with musicians who were now in the US and had worked with Shostakovich showed the dark shadow which they could never erase from their faces. This segment should be shown in every school of this nation.
And the commentary on the communist takeover of the arts was also chilling in the echoes we see today in the current administration’s attempt to convert the arts into a propaganda arm — very much like the early period of communism in Russia.
If we forget this very crucial period in human history we are doomed to repeat it.
I have a little piece of The Wall. It’s the only Touristy Kitsch thing I own and it might just be any ol’ piece of concrete, given there’s no Certificate Of Authenticity.
But I like to think it’s real. I also like to think I played a a bit part in bringing that wall down.
I’ll just use this occasion to mention how often I get ticked off by the more mindless among us who criticize our attempts to erect a border fence by disparaging the efforts by saying/whining: “We don’t want to disgrace ourselves by building another Berlin Wall.”–totally overlooking the fact the Berlin edifice was erected by the E. Germans to keep their own citizens IN, while ours is to keep illegals OUT. And as bad as these mindless souls are, the news commentators/moderators, etc., who let this abomination of an analogy pass without calling them on it are even worse.
“I also remember crying as they showed video of the people of Berlin and West Germany tearing apart pieces of the wall and finding loved ones they hadn’t seen in decades. You see, it meant a little more to me than the average kid in my class. Only 3 yrs previously we had left Germany. We had been stationed at Rhein Main. We had visited Berlin. Unless you stand at the base of that wall and know what’s on the other side, you just can’t really get it.”
I agree and I also cried a bit that night. I went to Patch HS in Stuttgart and left in 86 as well. I also went to the stand just right of CheckPoint Charlie. We were also told not to give the bird to the Osties or anything else that could be used as propaganda against the West (of course, most everyone flipped the bird). Thought the chances of having tanks rolling west across Germany was far more likely than any conceivable chance that that wall would come down. The lessons learned at the Wall and trips into East Germany in the mid 80s still give goosebumps.
But therein is the rub. the many people that have seen those lasting impressions, the people that have served in defense of this country, are really the few people when it comes to mapping out or implementing what is “acceptable” education, or health care, or many other threads of the fabric of our American Existence. Too many are never exposed to the forces that have tried to squash independence and free thought? History to repeat? Too many don’t care?
How can we mention the Wall coming down without a nod to Dutch who told Gorbachev to do it, despite every one of his advisors pleading with him not to include “tear down this wall” in his speech.
Yes I remember reading or seeing some documentary where Reagan, in the limo on the way to the speech, said, “well the boys at State are going to be mad at me…” or words to that effect.
Now all the revisionists and apologists are starting to line up and minimize the impact of that speech just as they minimize all the impact that those who stridently opposed communism during the cold war had on ending its grip on millions. Even those at the forefront were surprised as William F. Buckley found out when traveling in Eastern Europe after the wall came down and the Soviet Union dissolved. The words of Reagan and the writings of Buckley and others in national Review and such had made their way behind the Iron Curtain fanning the embers of hope in the breasts of millions who refused to give in to oppression. Buckley was greeted as a hero demonstrating the truth even he had not been sure of: that words spoken and written in opposition of tyranny had made a difference, even as they had been mocked as simplistic and naive by those convinced that accommodation was the best course.
The parallels in our approach with dealing with this eras tyrants are there to be seen, the lessons to be learned, even as, the evidence suggests, we have so soon forgotten them.
OOps Paul … It was Reagan who said “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Heard him say it on the radio. It was a thrill.
Folks say what a great orator Obama is. To me, he’s not, because he lacks the fundamental knowledge of our country’s history — where we’ve been, what we’ve done, what freedoms we must protect. He’s not a patch on Reagan, who was so deceptively simple that the casual observer sometimes missed his oratorical skill.
Marianne
With all due respect Marianne, Paul B is correct, since “Dutch” was Ronald Reagan’s nickname. And I loved that speech.
Um, Marianne, one of Reagan’s nicknames was “Dutch.”
I remember P.J. O’Rourke’s account of the Wall while he watched it being torn down. He, too, broke into tears.
I also remember his conviction that we had the rest of eternity to sweat the “small stuff…” Perhaps that attitude helped reduce vigilance towards the rise of the islamofascists.
I have noticed that if you actually listen, when Mr. Obama speaks, he doesn’t really say anything. It’s just Democratic platitudes, with no substance.
Our very first exchange student came to visit us today. She is from what was East Germany, lived right on the border of Poland. She’s only 22 so doesn’t remember anything, but it will be interesting to ask her if Germans are making a big deal over the anniversary.
Our girl has come to see us after competing, along with other Heidelberg University students, against 112 Universities from around the world. At MIT’s iGEM (international genetically engineered machines competition) which is an international competition in synthetic biology. Not quite sure of the topic, Molecular Biotechnology being just slightly over my head, but they did come in second. Got beat by Cambridge. Dang Limeys.
Stalin proposed reunification 1952. 4 times.
Neat move from Uncle Joe. You must imagine him in a big show-room, selling Soviet-era cars. Would you rather take a new or a used one?
Paul … My apologies. Idaho Joe and Casey are right. Dutch was Reagan’s nickname. I had forgotten that. As my husband says, “memories really crowd us these days, and when we push too much stuff into the front of our brains, stuff falls out the back.”
You just wait, friends. It’ll happen to you too, some day if you’re lucky.
Marianne
“beginning of the end for Communism as an organizing political theory”? Excuse me, but what about China and Cuba?
An utter disaster in Cuba, and for all intents and purposes abandoned in China, in both places maintained only as a fig leaf for unchallenged, single party rule. But not before wreaking China’s economy, causing the persecution of some 36 million people during the Cultural Revolution, of whom as many as 3 million may have died.
These are very simple questions that you’re asking.
Lex, I hate to say you’re not completely correct but I’m pretty sure you are drastically underestimating Mao’s death toll that he unleashed on China from the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution combined. Even the most conservative estimates I’ve heard are over 20 million dead. Maybe not all intentionally executed a la the Holocaust, many just starved from asking peasant farmers to stop farming and try to smelt pig iron and other egregious examples, but dead as a result of disastrous communist/marxist theories nonetheless.
Prowler, the 20 million pluss number is more on the order of what I’ve read over the years, and it was perhaps closer to 70 million. The numbers are staggering, and even if one were to play games with percentages of population, it is still an almost inconceivable number.
Heck, even the Chinese do not know how many he killed, or caused to be killed by his policies or edicts. Probably the largest number of people killed by one person/regime in history. (Too tired/lazy to research it at the moment)
Great Leap Forward indeed.