…And the guns shot above our heads
And we kissed as though nothing could fall…
—Heroes, David Bowie
—Ronald Reagan, 12 June 1987
And The Berlin Wall fell on 09 November 1989.
It had stood for twenty-eight years, the construction of it having begun on 13 August 1961, an ugly scar the Soul of Europe that bisected the city of Berlin, Germany.
The Wall was also a festering wound on the body of Western Civilization that never stopped causing pain and reminding The West of it’s duty…and it’s failure to prevent the descending of the Iron Curtain over half of the continent.
It fell, not because the USSR allowed it to — although they could have used their troops to try to prevent it — no, the Communists did not try to prevent it because they had been made decrepit by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II [now 'Saint' and 'The Great']. Mikhail Gorbachev had been rendered impotent and the Politburo’s puppets in Eastern Europe feared for their sniveling, bureaucratic, banally Evil hides.
It was a moment of grand triumph for The West, brought about by the courageous efforts of a few Cold Warriors who refused to give in to the Fifth Columnist Traitors, Fellow Traveling Nihilists, and relentlessly stupid Dupes in their midst.
This great Victory was squandered, smothered underfoot by the jackboots of Western fools marching towards The Age Of Leftist Hegemony. The West won The Cold War, but lost The Peace to the Barbarians inside it’s gates.
I was born in 1961, not too long after the construction of The Berlin Wall began; I was as old as she was. I will never forget everything The Wall stood for. As I age and as more and more of those who lived during it’s existence die off, I fear all that will be forgotten.
East German Peter Fetcher lies dying
after he is shot by the Stasi for trying
to escape to Freedom in West Berlin.
Today marks the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It did not fall, of course. It was felled. It was felled by ordinary East German men and women who decided they were not willing to spend the rest of their lives in a large prison pretending to be a nation. On the other side of the wall – the free side – far too many westerners were indifferent to the suffering of the east. As I put it in my new book:
The presidents and prime ministers of the free world had decided that the unfree world was not a prison ruled by a murderous ideology that had to be defeated but merely an alternative lifestyle that had to be accommodated. Under cover of “détente”, the Soviets gobbled up more and more real estate across the planet, from Ethiopia to Grenada. Nonetheless, it wasn’t just the usual suspects who subscribed to this feeble evasion – Helmut Schmidt, Pierre Trudeau, François Mitterand – but most of the so-called “conservatives”, too – Ted Heath, Giscard d’Estaing, Gerald Ford.
…
There were three key figures who stood against the détente fetishists, and in large part against the disposition of western electorates. Their names were Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II – all heroes in Eastern Europe to this day, yet, as Richard Fernandez notes, all absent from the coverage of today’s observances. The A-list guest is Mikhail Gorbachev, whose plan was to preserve Soviet Communism by putting a cosmetic gloss on it. Today, the old passivity has returned: The Wall “fell”.
…
…Here, from his Brandenburg Gate citizen-of-the-world speech in 2008, is Obama’s characterization of what happened a quarter-century ago:
People of the world – look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.
No, sorry. History proved no such thing. That’s comforting pap, but it’s not what happened. In the Cold War, the world did not “stand as one”. One half of Europe was a prison, and in the other half far too many people – the Barack Obamas of the day – were happy to go along with that division in perpetuity. And the wall came down not because “the world stood as one” but because a few people stood against the pap-peddlers. The truly courageous ones were the fellows like Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel and a thousand lesser names, who had to stand against evil men who would have murdered them if they’d been able to get away with it. That they were no longer confident they could get away with it was because a small number of western leaders had shoveled détente into the garbage can of history and decided to tell the truth. Had Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and John Paul II been like Helmut Schmidt and Francois Mitterand and Pierre Trudeau and Jimmy Carter, the Soviet empire would have survived and the wall would still be standing.
…
Reagan and Thatcher won the war. Obama and Schröder and the like inherited the peace. Which is why today’s anniversary has that strange, passive, evasive quality. Or as Obama would put it:
There is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.
Generally speaking, when the world “stands as one” it’s in the cause of inertia: Right now, the world stands as one in feeling it’s no big deal if Iran goes nuclear, or Putin gobbles Ukraine, or the Islamic State starts head-chopping its way into Jordan, or members of certain unspecified multicultural communities plot to kill the Queen. The alternative to waiting for the world to “stand as one” is to stand up yourself, and stand for something. And now as in the Eighties there are few takers for that.
Both in foreign matters and domestically.
We need more Outlaws, like Reagan and Thatcher, Walesa, Havel, and Wojtyła in this New Dark Age.
Warsaw, Moscow, Budapest, Berlin, Prague, Sofia and Bucharest have become stages in a long pilgrimage toward liberty. It is admirable that in these events, entire peoples spoke out – women, young people, men, overcoming fears, their irrepressible thirst for liberty speeded up developments, made walls tumble down and opened gates.
—Saint Pope John Paul The Great
-From that Richard Fernandez post Mr. Steyn refers to:
If the media is trying its level best to avoid talking about what the fall of the Berlin Wall was about and how it came to be, then they’re doing a good job. We are left with the bare event and its consequences. But of song and lay there is none, for the bards have fallen silent on the subject. Not that the heroes of old mind. Ronald Reagan once said “there is no limit to the amount of good you can do if you don’t care who gets the credit”. If one cares not for glory or tale, the deed is enough.
Yet some things still remain in their absence. For example there is in Air Force tradition of the Missing Man Formation. A finger four “flown with the second element leader position conspicuously empty … the flight approaches from the south, preferably near sundown, and one of the aircraft will suddenly split off to the west, flying into the sunset.”
In the Missing Man it’s not the aircraft we see that are important, but the one we can’t see. This is the poem that is traditionally associated with the ceremony.
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds – and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,
I’ve topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untresspassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.
And they soar far aloft, chasing the shouting wind, too far for even memory or forgetfulness to mar.
Dead solid perfect, Richard, beautiful.
The world is full of lesser lights
And full of lesser men
Who fly their paper ego kites
Denying where and when
The history of the time was changed
By greater men than they
And so their galas are arranged
As taking place today
Where mum’s the word on who did more
Demolishing that wall
No mention made of Reagan nor
Of Maggie or Pope Paul
-The Atlantic has up a very good slideshow here on The Berlin Wall.
-I’m looking over the wall and they’re looking at me…
-We could be heroes, just for one day…
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