Emily Sieg, Staff Writer
Ideology: Left | Writing from: Washington, DC
Great men talk about ideas; Mediocre men talk about things; Small men talk about people.
– Admiral Hyman Rickover
Reflecting upon the 20th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, there has been a juvenile tendency by many a Reaganite to cite the former President as the cause of this historic event. This ill-founded belief maintains that Reagan challenged the Soviets like no other American, that he provided the type of leadership and influence in Europe necessary for Eastern revolt and then something to the effect that by yelling at the Wall, he single-mouthedly brought it down.
If we want to speak of people, let us remember the President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, whose programs of perestroika and glasnost initiated reform from within the USSR itself. Or Helmut Kohl, the former Chancellor of West Germany. Perchance even Brent Scowcroft or Hans-Dietrich Genscher. What even of the press secretary Günther Schabowski?
Let us speak of things and of facts. The legacy of rebellion evident in East Berlin was only the child of the Prague Spring in 1968, the Solidarnosc movement beginning in 1980, of the May 1989 opening of the Hungarian border. The citizens of Berlin drew upon the strength of their brethren, who had protested in the streets of Leipzig in September 1989.
In commemorating November 9, 1989, may we realize that revolution stems from the dreams of the men and women who have suffered and yet still have the heart to face their oppressors. The will of people whether in Germany, in Poland or Czechoslovakia or anywhere else in the world is the ultimate, undeniable source of change. Control imposed by an authority, whether of government or otherwise, cannot withstand the movements of entire societies once they begin to take control of their own affairs. The greatest tragedies of history have been the instances when citizens forsake their right to resist, when they resign themselves to the whims of authoritarian forces, when they are satisfied to exist from day to day without the dreams of a better tomorrow.
There is no single explanation for the collapse of the Soviet Union. The arms race between the United States and Soviet Union may have hastened the decline of the USSR, but that aside the communist system could not sustain itself. Individual men may have exerted their most profound influences over the upper echelons of government, but not a single one of them could have acted in complete independence of the others. By whatever means it is possible, the greatest triumphs of man are those moments in which a subjugated society acknowledges its collective right to liberty and emancipates itself from the shackles of its oppressor.
The Fall of the Berlin Wall is one of those moments. November 9th marks the day that ordinary civilians took it upon themselves to change their own tomorrow, the tomorrow of their country, and perhaps even the tomorrow of our world.
Interesting paean to historicism: the denial that any one man in any one place at any one moment, himself, changed history( a post-modernist view of history). All disproved, by the way by David McCullough, in his majesterial “1776″, in which G. Washington, on Christmas night, that year, whipped the hessians in Trenton, thereby diverting history in its flow to create the West.
As much as Gorbachev’s spin machine would like you to think that he lead the Soviets out of their morass, the whole attempt is for it to be anyone other than “that man Reagan” who did it. You’ve got to face it. He did. “Tear down that wall” was an epic utterance.
The lingering mystery is how our own intelligence mislead us to thinking the Soviet Empire was so strong internally, when all it took was the threat of “Star Wars” and a US President telling them to tear down the wall to bring it down. Something was the matter in our intelligence capability to get that one so terribly wrong–and it may still be out of whack!