Posted on 02/19/2003 12:07:28 PM PST by mrustow
http://ToogoodReports.com/ Call me a Cold War sentimentalist — but smile when you say it. I never felt so alive, as when I was passing through Checkpoint Charlie at the Berlin Wall, my heart in my throat, between free, West Berlin, and its garrisoned sister city in the East. And how I lived, with a few American dollars in my pocket, on the other side of The Wall. Two weeks ago, on Joe Millionaire, I saw golddiggers and the ditchdigger spend nights in the sort of four-star hotels I once stayed in. In June, 1989, just months before The Wall fell, I ate chateaubriand in, and stayed at the Hotel Gellert, Budapest's most luxurious digs. The Gellert even had pissoirs fit for a king. Our room had a balcony overlooking the Danube. (I also got awoken from my dreams the next morning, at 6 a.m., by the screeching of streetcar wheels.) The Germans have a phrase, "wie Gott in Paris leben" — to "live like G-d in Paris." Today, with the influx of dollars in the East, and attendant inflation, I could sell my wife and son to slavers, and still couldn't afford the fare to Budapest, and a night in the Gellert. Alright, so maybe you're no beef eater, the Danube is only the title of a banal waltz, and as far as you're concerned, Germany is just "Old Europe." But you too have reason to miss The Wall. With America poised to send hundreds of thousands of men in harm's way in Iraq, it is understandable that there should be a heated debate as to the merits of going to war, even if most commentators are now resigned to war. And yet, much of the debate has been dominated by false historical assumptions. The truth is not only intrinsically valuable, but in matters of war and peace, of great utility. People usually seek to explain the fall of the Soviet Union and the East Bloc, via either of two competing theories. A theory popular in the U.S., especially among Republicans, holds that Ronald Reagan's 1980s arms buildup forced the Soviets to compete with us, a competition that eventually exhausted their economy, and caused their system to collapse. By contrast, the theory of choice among many American leftists and foreigners is that the Soviet Union and East Bloc were brought down by a bloodless, popular revolution – what fans (among them, journalist Paul Berman) of Czechoslovakian dissident playwright and contemporary President of the Czech Republic Vaclav Havel and his group, Charter 77, called the former Czechoslovakia's "Velvet Revolution." During the 1980s, Ronald Reagan engineered the biggest peacetime arms buildup ever. On June 12, 1987 in West Berlin, he told the Soviet premier – thanks to speechwriter Peter Robinson – "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" And beginning in June, 1989, less than six months after Reagan handed over the reins of power to George Herbert Walker Bush, the world saw the biggest liberation, in terms of sheer numbers, in history. What's not to like? If the conventional wisdom in the U.S. is correct, and Ronald Reagan's arms buildup caused the collapse of the Soviet Union, then Reagan must get both the credit and the blame for today's world order, or lack thereof. With all due respect, however, I don't think he deserves either. Reagan cared deeply about the millions oppressed by Soviet totalitarianism, but he did not cause The Wall to come down. Alternatively, we are to believe that, inspired by a group of poets and artists who signed petitions and wrote editorials, in 1989, the Czechoslovakian people "shouted down" their communist rulers, and young East Germans simply decided to tear down the Berlin Wall. So, for 44 years, the Czechoslovakians and East Germans (not to mention all the other nationalities who suffered under the boot of Soviet terror) had needed only to mass in the street, and start shouting! Think of all of the missed opportunities! Such silliness will not convince any sober person above the age of consent, much less anyone familiar with the history of Soviet communism. It was Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev that caused The Wall to fall, but not because Ronald Reagan had succeeded in converting him to the cause of freedom, and not because Gorbachev sought to end the Soviet Union and the East Bloc. Rather, Gorbachev was a vain, confused man. Dreaming of being a beloved dictator, he sought to be both the dictator and the liberator of his people. As Stalin, Hitler, and Mao had already shown, however, the way to become a beloved dictator, is through murdering millions of one's own people, and terrorizing the rest. Most of the citizens whom a tyrant has not yet murdered, will learn to fear him, others will learn to love him, and some will feel both emotions for him. Witness the nostalgia for the "certainty" and "security" Stalin supposedly provided that is still widespread in "free" Russia, and the former Soviet Republics and East Bloc nations. Gorbachev was a tyrant who stopped tyrannizing. In a tyranny, such a man is soon out of a job, if not dead. Gorbachev expected the Soviets to embrace him as their leader. Instead, they no longer recognized him as leader, but as the cause of a vacuum in leadership. Soon enough, Gorby was an ex-leader. In 1991, his resignation as Premier of the Soviet Union was redundant, since as many observers have commented, he was the ruler of a nation that no longer existed. Gorbachev is lucky to still be alive. Had any other Soviet leader been in power on November 9, 1989, the East German border guards would simply have shot all of the protesters who massed at The Wall. But Gorbachev's confusion had spread west, and immobilized the East German apparat, as well, and so instead of shooting demonstrators, the East German authorities opened the border crossings. In the summer of 1989, East Germans engaged in mass demonstrations, action that would have been suicidal before Gorbachev. They also began leaving the country by the tens of thousands for Hungary, which they could use to enter free, neutral Austria. (It did not help that the Soviets' man in East Berlin, Premier Erich Honecker, was then ailing, but the role of the East German premier was to follow orders. The Soviets always called the shots, when it came to the border.) Hungary had long had a unique status as the freest country in the East Bloc, where some people had private property, and as a result, the standard of living was the highest in the communist world. During the early 1980s, while visiting East Berlin, I recall a pervasive climate of fear. In September, 1980, wandering through a pedestrian tunnel, two machine gun-wielding, East German "Vopos" ("Volkspolizisten" – people's police, though they looked more like soldiers than cops) stopped me. "Ausweis, bitte!" one commanded me. (Papers, please!) The point was to intimidate me – and it worked. By contrast, the first time I visited Budapest, in spring of 1982, I was wandering around with a map, obviously lost, when two machine gun-wielding, Hungarian policemen stopped me. These guys, however, were trying to help. I tried to communicate with them, but they spoke neither German nor English, and my Hungarian was limited to "please" and "thank you," and "yes" and "no." Before I'd gotten very far, a forty-something Hungarian couple barged in, and started telling jokes and yucking it up with the policemen. I wandered away, without them even missing me. In East Germany, the locals did not yuck it up with policemen, and foreigners did not wander away from the police unnoticed. (Between 1980 and 1989, I visited East Germany and Hungary three times each.) Oddly, even Gorbachev has supported the popular revolution theory. In November, he told the Berliner Morgenpost (my translation), "Basically, the entire development showed that the Honecker Regime had blown any credit it had with the people." So, it was all a legitimacy crisis? So, Stalin enjoyed great legitimacy with the Soviet people, as did Honecker and his predecessors with the East German people in earlier years? Only if legitimacy comes out of the barrel of a machine gun. If my interpretation is correct, liberty arose in Eastern Europe, and chaos elsewhere, as a fluke. Am I knocking Reagan? Not at all. But even hindsight is often blind. While those who identify themselves as conservatives are the first to speak of "the law of unintended consequences" regarding their opponents' proposals, many of them put on blinders when it comes to their own plans. It was the fall of the Soviet Union that opened the Pandora's Box of Islam, and led directly to today's world, in which America finds herself beset by enemies, particularly Islamic terrorists. As the saying goes, be careful what you pray for, because your prayers just might be answered.
To comment on this article or express your opinion directly to the author, you are invited to e-mail Nicholas at adddda@earthlink.net .
Pure squandry by the disciples of Lenin. And they haven't gone away. Eventually they recognized their failure with a strong, united, and technologically superior West to feel threatened by the communist empire. When it failed, they executed a scheme to take covert charge of the 'popular revolution' and still are pulling strings today. The real engineers of the Fall, manipulated many things to make the fall look spontaneous, and 'natural' but the strings were a little too blatant. Reagan does deserve credit for defending us, getting SDI going under the bitter circumstances of an anti-defense Congress, and forcing the Soviets into this gambit. And for whatever freedoms the spin-off state's citizens now have. The Russians meanwhile are slowly but surely fastening the manacles back in place, as their Press is muzzled and controlled once again.
Personally, I continue to feel that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher won the Cold War. Gorbachev lost.
But the day they started tearing it down, I told my wife, we won world war III, but world war IV will be fought in the middle east.
My view of Islam was filtered through the rantings of Yassir Arafat, but I was certain he had a vast hoard behind him, all aimed at Israel.
That doesn't make them right.
Many ex-Soviet officials beg to differ -- just kidding, that's for the other guy. When I posted this article, I knew some FReepers would fail to appreciate it, but that's ok. It's a free country.
I'd like to borrow a line from my objectivist friends - when your conclusions point to something this unsatisfactory it's time to "check your premises." "Fluke," after all, is merely a term for something you cannot explain. Liberty in Eastern Europe is not a fluke, it was an ideal tenderly preserved through times of outrageous oppression, nurtured carefully by its adherents on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and allowed to flower in the muck that was the chaos of post-Gorbachev Europe. The conditions that led to this chaos were legion, with more causes and actors than will ever be known, much less listed here. But the goal was always there, and reaching it was not by accident.
Reagan deserves credit for inspiration if for nothing else. His principal function was not to spend the Soviet Union into extinction, it was to raise morale and to remind us that the ideals that had been deliberately marginalized and dismissed during the practiced cynicism of the Carter years were, in fact, real, and their proponents sincere, and most of all, that they were attainable. It is that last that socialism and its proponents have never been able to offer, attainability, and they have, by way of compensation, substituted a contrived world-weariness that held that because their ideals were unattainable all ideals were so, that because their ideals were merely buttons to push to manipulate a desired mass reaction, that all ideals were that as well. It was Reagan who reminded us that this was not the case. He meant it, and between us all, East and West, we proved him right.
Huh?
Pure squandry by the disciples of Lenin. And they haven't gone away. Eventually they recognized their failure with a strong, united, and technologically superior West to feel threatened by the communist empire. When it failed, they executed a scheme to take covert charge of the 'popular revolution' and still are pulling strings today. The real engineers of the Fall, manipulated many things to make the fall look spontaneous, and 'natural' but the strings were a little too blatant.
"They"? "Strings"? "The real engineers of the fall"? Have you taken your meds today, buddy?
Maybe not, but you must agree that they offer a more qualified opinion than the tourist who wrote this article:)
Budweiser.
Good article.
Glad you liked it.
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