[Rhodes22-list] History - Commies - Politics

[Brad Haslett]

More June history, as if Tiananmen and D-Day wasn't enough.  Tomorrow is the
twentieth anniversary of "the speech".  No love lost for commies in this
household!  One of us has some real world experience.  Brad
*
Hitting the Wall*
Reagan's prophetic Berlin speech, 20 years later.

*Monday, June 11, 2007 12:01 a.m.*

Rip Van Winkle has nothing on Jan Grzebski, a Polish railway worker who just
emerged from a coma that began 19 years ago--just prior to the collapse of
communism in his country. His take on how the world around him has changed
beyond recognition comes at an appropriate time. It was 20 years ago
tomorrow that Ronald Reagan electrified millions behind the Iron Curtain by
standing in front of the Berlin Wall demanding: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down
this wall!"

Mr. Grzebski is, of course, thrilled to see the wife who cared for him and
the 11 grandchildren he didn't even know he had. But he is also shocked at
how his homeland has changed. "When I went into a coma, there was only tea
and vinegar in the shops, meat was rationed, and huge gas lines were
everywhere," he told Polish TV. "Now I see people on the streets with cell
phones and there are so many goods in the shops it makes my head spin. What
amazes me is all these people who walk around with their mobile phones and
never stop moaning. I've got nothing to complain about."

His real-life story could have been taken from the plot of "Goodbye Lenin!,"
a popular 2003 German film in which a teenager desperately tries to hide the
fall of communism in East Germany from his mother, a party loyalist, to
prevent her from dying of shock as she recovers from a coma.

 While the Cold War may be a topic of cinematic bemusement, it also remains
serious business for those who will gather for two events this week on
opposite ends of the country. Tomorrow the Young America's Foundation will
hold a conference on the Berlin Wall's collapse at the Reagan Ranch in
California with Peter Robinson, a Reagan speechwriter. On the same day in
Washington the official Victims of Communism Memorial (
www.victimsofcommunism.org) is to be dedicated.

The memorial is a 10-foot bronze replica of the "Goddess of Liberty" statue,
which Chinese dissidents erected in Tiananmen Square before tanks crushed
both it and their movement in 1989. The statue's inscriptions will both
mourn the "more than 100 million victims of Communism" and call for the
freedom of "all captive nations and peoples." Marking the bipartisan nature
of the U.S. effort during the Cold War, the site on Capitol Hill was donated
through a bill signed by President Clinton, and the keynote address will be
made by Democrat Tom Lantos, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee
and a native of Hungary who escaped the Holocaust thanks to Swedish diplomat
Raoul Wallenberg.

Several participants in the ceremony come from Eastern Europe, which is
marking the communist period with the opening of new museums in Berlin and
Budapest. They are thrilled that one of the most popular current films in
Europe is "The Lives of Others," a psychological secret-police thriller by
first-time director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. In February it won the
Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film.

The movie, set in East Berlin in 1984, tells the story of how the Stasi, the
feared secret police, spies on and ruins the lives of an actor and actress.
Whereas Hitler's Gestapo policed 80 million Germans with 40,000 employees,
the Stasi kept 17 million people in line with some 100,000 intelligence
officers. In addition, it employed 1.5 million informers, which meant every
seventh adult was submitting reports on friends, colleagues and even
spouses.

The movie is a tour de force and is now showing in select U.S. cities.
Columnist William F. Buckley, himself the author of a book on the Berlin
Wall, saw it last month and wrote that "the tension mounts to heart-stopping
pitch and I felt the impulse to rush out into the street and drag passersby
in to watch the story unfold." After watching the film, Mr. Buckley turned
to his companion and simply said, "I think that is the best movie I ever
saw."

The film itself signals some of the reasons for why communism was in crisis
in the 1980s. Official corruption had reached stultifying levels. The
technological revolution threatened to leave centrally planned economies
permanently behind. And, as columnist John O'Sullivan has noted, "Communism
had failed to retain enough true believers who would murder on its behalf."

In East Germany, the party bosses delayed reforms, allowing anger among
their own citizens to build until, by 1989, a full 5% of East German adults
had taken the risk of being branded disloyal by requesting exit visas. That
summer Hungary began allowing East German tourists to slip through to the
West, and the genie was out of the bottle. Yet even toward the end the
experts thought Marxism-Leninism would stay in place. Many citizens thought
so too. "Most Germans themselves are convinced that the prospect of a single
Germany is a fantasy," wrote journalist Peter Wyden weeks before the wall
fell.

 For different reasons, history will record two paramount figures who helped
sweep communism into the ash heap of history: Ronald Reagan and Mikhail
Gorbachev. Reagan first saw the Berlin Wall in 1978, when he told his aide
Peter Hannaford, "We've got to find a way to knock this thing down." After
Reagan became president, he returned in 1982 and enraged the Soviets by
taking a couple of ceremonial steps across a painted border line. Then, in
1987, he overruled his own State Department by giving the momentous speech
in which he implored the general secretary directly to tear down the wall.

Reagan liked to refer in his speeches to the "tide of history," and that
idea must have been on Mr. Gorbachev's mind two years later when he visited
East Berlin and informed the comrades there that they needed to change. He
told reporters who asked about the wall, "Dangers await only those who do
not react to life." The signal was sent that Moscow would no longer prop up
a corrupt system.

The Berlin Wall's fall was both a vindication of the West's refusal to
kowtow to the Soviets and a tribute to the spirit of dissenters behind the
Iron Curtain. Today pieces of the wall exist as mere souvenirs on
mantelpieces. Sadly, today Russia itself is slipping back into
authoritarianism.
It shouldn't surprise anyone that Russia has resisted efforts to erect
memorials about the communist era. In 2005, Vladimir Putin, Russia's
autocratic president, let slip in a speech that "the collapse of the Soviet
Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century." Under Mr.
Putin's leadership, Russian officials are conspicuously re-creating some of
the institutions of oppression. Their frosty silence about three-quarters of
a century of communist oppression does not augur well for Russia's future.