On November 9, 1989, when young Germans started tearing down the Berlin Wall, it truly seemed like the end of an era. Liberty had defeated communism.
By its very nature, communism is a horrible and violent system of government. It cannot be tamed.
There's no such thing as a 'cuddly commie.'
Communism: The Promise and the Reality
Communism was the most cataclysmic social experiment of the century—a mass movement whose ideals promised hope to millions but whose methods claimed millions as its victims. Now, at the end of the century that it transformed, the time has come to document Communism's rise and fall.
In Communism: The Promise and the Reality, ordinary people describe how and why they were mesmerized by the promises of Communist regimes. With those regimes collapsing around the world, they are now able to speak openly and with perspective ...
These witnesses participated in the most dramatic moments in the history of Communism—from the Bolshevik assault on the Winter Palace to the smashing of the Berlin Wall; from Mao's Great Leap Forward to Castro's invasion of Cuba; from the Tet Offensive to the Gdansk Shipyard strike. They also beheld the response to revolution—the crushing power of American and Soviet forces, the international arms build-up, the threat of nuclear weapons.
Their voices speak of Communism's horrors, but they remind us that there was hope—for education in Ukraine, self-determination in post-colonial Vietnam, land ownership in Cuba, religious freedom in Afghanistan ...
Remembering the Victims of Communism
Twenty years ago today, the Berlin Wall was breached and Soviet communism, at long last, entered its death spiral.
After claiming approximately 100 million victims in the 20th century,communism was dismissed to the ash heap of history. But those who suffered under its boot heel have largely been confined to the history books when not forgotten altogether.
But. Did communism really die?
We were fools to think the fall of the Berlin Wall had killed off the far Left. They're back - and attacking us from within
Twenty years ago today, supporters of freedom and human rights cheered and wept for joy as the Berlin Wall was torn down ...
[L]ess obvious is that communism did not just vanish in a puff of historical smoke. The Soviet Union was defeated and fell apart, for sure. But the communist ideology that fuelled it did not so much disintegrate as reconstitute itself into another, even more deadly form as the active enemy of western freedom.
Subversive
Soviet Communism was a belief system whose goal was to overturn the structures of society through the control of economic and political life. This mutated into a post-communist ideology of the Left, whose no-less ambitious aim was to overturn western society through a subversive transformation of its culture.
To grasp the extent to which this has in fact taken place, we have to go back in time to well before the moment the Berlin Wall fell. The collapse of communism was actually a slow-burning process. Its moral and political bankruptcy became obvious decades before that glorious Berlin day in November 1989 ...
The Wall, the Fall, and the Enablers of Communism
Cal Thomas recently dusted up a number of said popular-culture and MSM nimrods:
When the wall fell, leftists could not bring themselves to admit they had been wrong, much less apologize for their misplaced faith. So they did what they do best: They made excuses.
Thomas lists some examples collected by the Media Research Center of how "the pre-Fox, pre-talk-radio liberal media were the handmaidens of one of the greatest totalitarian evils to strike the planet."
In 1987, before the wall collapsed, CBS anchor Dan Rather said, "Despite what many Americans think, most Soviets do not yearn for capitalism or Western-style democracy."
Strobe Talbott, then of Time magazine and soon to be an influential member of the Clinton administration, wrote on Jan. 1, 1990, "[Soviet leader] Gorbachev is helping the West by showing that the Soviet threat isn't what it used to be, and what's more, that it never was." How is it possible to simultaneously have been a threat, but not a threat? The millions who died in gulags, starved to death or were assassinated might have a different interpretation of Russian history under communism.
Ted Turner, the former CNN mogul, is always good for an outlandish quote, and when it came to Soviet Russia, he offered a cornucopia of self-deluded statements, none better than this one: "[Mr. Gorbachev is] moving faster than Jesus Christ did." But Time magazine bested him with this howler when it described Mr. Gorbachev as both "the communist pope and the Soviet Martin Luther."
Here's the March, 1990 issue of The Free Market:
A Radical Prescription for the Socialist Bloc.
Gradualism, and piecemeal change, is always held up as the sober, practical, responsible, and compassionate path of reform, avoiding the sudden shocks, painful dislocations, and unemployment brought on by radical change.
In this, as in so many areas, however, the conventional wisdom is wrong. It is becoming ever clearer to East Europeans that the only practical and realistic path, the only path toward reform that truly works and works quickly, is the total abolition of socialism and statism across-the-board.
For one thing, as we have seen in the Soviet Union, gradual reform provides a convenient excuse to the vested interests, monopolists, and inefficient sluggards who are the beneficiaries of socialism, to change nothing at all. Combine this resistance with the standard bureaucratic inertia endemic under socialism, and meaningful change is reduced to mere rhetoric and lip service.
The fall of the Berlin Wall
President Obama isn’t traveling abroad to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago today.
Of course not. There’s nothing in it for his Chicago cronies.
Per usual, the shameful New York Times hires a guy who's trying to revive communism (and it's evils) to write their opinion page.
New York Times “Celebrates” the Fall of the Berlin Wall
In a way, I always knew it would happen. I knew that, come November 9, the left-leaning NYT would publish an article focusing on the supposed crisis of capitalism rather than the end of communist dictatorship. Still, I was not prepared for Slavoj Zizek’s op-ed entitled “20 Years of Collapse.”
First, a few words about the author — a Marxist philosopher from Slovenia. Generally ignored or ridiculed in Slovenia, Zizek is considered (by some) to be the new messiah of leftist thought in the West. Why did the NYT chose to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the collapse of communism with Zizek’s call for “socialism with a human face,” rather than an op-ed by someone like Vladimir Bukovsky, a former Soviet political prisoner tormented for years by the communists, is anyone’s guess.
But, it is the substance of Zizek’s article that is so misleading. The article makes absolutely no mention of the economic progress made in Central and Eastern Europe. Yet, as the World Bank and even the United Nations tell us, incomes in the region have substantially increased and so has school enrollment. People live longer and healthier lives; environmental quality has much improved.
Zizek mentions communist oppression, but nowhere does he mention that 100 million people have died in the pursuit of communist utopia. Contemporary Marxists either ignore the astonishingly high number of victims of communism or try to minimize it. That is understandable. No matter what the (real or imagined) problems with capitalism are today, no sane person would be willing to embrace an alternative to capitalism that has a habit of resulting in a mountain of corpses.
Of course guardian.co.uk, has jumped on the communist bandwagon too.
East Germans lost much in 1989
There is a very revealing article in the Guardian (natch) called 'East Germans lost much in 1989'. The 'money quote' (in GDR Marks of course) is:
On 9 November 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down I realised German unification would soon follow, which it did a year later. This meant the end of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the country in which I was born, grew up, gave birth to my two children, gained my doctorate and enjoyed a fulfilling job as a lecturer in English literature at Potsdam University. Of course, unification brought with it the freedom to travel the world and, for some, more material wealth, but it also brought social breakdown, widespread unemployment, blacklisting, a crass materialism and an "elbow society" as well as a demonisation of the country I lived in and helped shape. Despite the advantages, for many it was more a disaster than a celebratory event.
Yes it is hard to not shed a tear for all those unemployed Stasi and blacklisted apparatchik that made the whole system possible. I have long suspected the real reason the wall was built was to keep out the waves of oppressed Western workers who were flooding into the socialist worker's paradise and threatening to overwhelm the system.
But mom ... all the cool kids are doing it.
Communist consumer goods make comeback
Once the butt of jokes the world over, communist-era East European goods from sweets, to rustic washing machines and clunky cars are all the rage again.
As the world prepares to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, souvenirs such as portraits of Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu are now avidly sought at markets. In Belgrade, cafes are named after Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito or even the Soviet KGB secret police.
Irony: U2's 'Free' Concert At The Berlin Wall, Blocked By A Big Wall
[A] rather ironic situation of a "free" concert put on by the band U2, at the remains of the Berlin Wall in order to celebrate the demise of the wall... but MTV decided to put up a big temporary barrier around the event so those who didn't have free tickets could not even see the event. Yes, they erected a special "wall" to block out a free concert about The Wall.
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