Obama doesn’t want to celebrate the anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s beneficient self-destruction in 1989 for several obvious reasons:
- One, during the Cold War he was more concerned about the evils of helping the Contras and the El Salvadorans than with the much greater evils inflicted against Europeans by the Soviets and their lackeys.
- Two, his fundamental perception of the world is narrow, parochial, self-obsessed and black-obsessed, and thus has little use for highlighting the Cold War and the West’s triumph.
- Three, he will be a bit player rather than the main attraction. Unacceptable.
- Four, his present-day inability to lead Europeans, treat them as important to us and our destiny, will show that the promise of greater respect and influence around the world post-Bush under Obama is a chimera.
The fall of the Berlin Wall is a very meaningful event for me. In 1989 I was in high school and studying German. I was fairly in tune with current affairs. I strongly supported the United States and its principles of freedom over communism. I admired our military strength. I rejected the false equivalence of the two sides so often spouted by half-witted social studies teachers and news broadcasters.
On the day the wall fell, we took the day off of class to discuss the meaning of events. It was an exciting time and a tangible symbol of the victory of the freedom-loving West over the backwards, inefficient, and often murderous regimes of the Warsaw Pact. Ronald Reagan fought this fight, along with Maggie Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, and thousands of American servicemen who fought communism in Korea, Vietnam, Central America, and as a deterrent force in Western Europe. Reagan led the charge when dominant “sophisticated” opinion was that rapprochement and accommodation to the Soviet system were inevitable and desirable.
Obama and his team were on the wrong end of this fight. Outside of a few hawkish Southern Democrats, the mainstream Democratic Party proffered a policy of military weakness and moral confusion. John Kerry, Mondale, and Dukakis with their opposition to MX Missiles, arming the Contras, and standing up to the Soviets make this plain.
Obama wrote his college thesis on nuclear disarmament; other papers of his suggest he went for the totally naive liberal idea of unilateral disarmament–the so-called “nuclear freeze.” Thank God we didn’t freeze our arms, nor did we freeze our moral resolve. We won. They lost. And as a consequence civilization and the Christian religion have been restored in Eastern Europe and Russia. Thanks for nothing Obama.
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“And as a consequence civilization and the Christian religion have been restored in Eastern Europe and Russia.”
The restoration of Christianity is true to a limited (and perhaps superficial) extent in Russia, but not in the former Warsaw Pact satellites. Even Poland is significantly less religious than it was before the collapse of Communism. The secular Western European value system has rapidly filled the vacuum left by Communism. Unless something dramatic happens, Islam will soon be the religion with the most actual believers in Europe.
I will, however, agree that the collapse of Communism restored Western civilization to central Europe. The question is how authentic this civilization is in the absence of any religious animus, and how durable it will prove in the face of future challenges. Probably not very.
So I guess my point is that although the defeat of such an evil system is indeed cause for celebration, the West may have won its victory only to enjoy its twilight years. Since those twilight years are still quite comfortable, I guess we should be happy for that.
I know Orthodoxy is undergoing major renaissance in Russia and when I went to Poland (admittedly ten or so years ago) it seemed like Catholicism was still very vital. Maybe less so in Czech Republic, which borders krautland.
It may still be vital in Poland, the question is which way it is trending, and that is towards secularism. Look at what’s happened to Ireland.
You may be right about Russia, I just don’t have a good sense of whether it is just state propaganda masquerading as religion or a genuine revival of religious feeling among the populace.
Once the Wall came down, there should’ve been numerous hangings of the heads of all the Soviet puppet governments in Eastern Europe. Communism has never been held to a full accounting of its crimes. That has let far too many socialists off the hook for the various genocides that have been perpetrated in the name of a worker’s paradise.
The EU is the new USSR. So much for the renaissance of religion and civilization.