The 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall

Ross Douthat, the New York Times' latest designated conservative columnist, has an intriguing piece today, "Life after the End of History":

For most of the last century, the West faced real enemies: totalitarian, aggressive, armed to the teeth. Between 1918 and 1989, it was possible to believe that liberal democracy was a parenthesis in history, destined to be undone by revolution, ground under by jackboots, or burned like chaff in the fire of the atom bomb.

Twenty years ago today, this threat disappeared. . . . .

There will be speeches and celebrations to mark this anniversary, but not as many as the day deserves. (Barack Obama couldn’t even fit a visit to Berlin into his schedule.) By rights, the Ninth of November should be a holiday across the Western world, celebrated with the kind of pomp and spectacle reserved for our own Independence Day.

Never has liberation come to so many people all at once . . .

So why isn't this day celebrated more fervently? Read the whole thing for some intriguing speculations. Glenn Reynolds thinks he knows why, after twenty years, "we still haven't come to terms with the scope of our deliverance". And Tigerhawk has another observation:

Douthat loses me when he goes on to argue that our civilization needs a threat -- I blame politicians, activists, and media organizations who would lose their relevance if people actually concluded that there were no really, really scary threats -- but his basic point is absolutely right: Be it the jihad, Iran, carbon dioxide or "globalization," no threat today rivals the danger of intercontinental thermonuclear war. The small wars of the last eight years notwithstanding, we live in frivolous, happy-go-lucky times compared to virtually the entire period between 1914 and 1989.

That is a scary thing only if you want to be "a great president" (we all remember the disappointment of Bill Clinton that he served in such boring times), change the world, or increase the audience of your media product. We do not savor the victory on this anniversary because it is not in the interests of the chattering classes so to do.

A commenter notes:

On this side of the Atlantic . . . to really feel it I think you had to have come into political awareness in time for the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was in the fifth grade and remember clearly how we were going to escape injury from H-Bombs by diving under our desks. I knew there was a threat of death, sudden and unnatural. I knew that people were plotting for the advantage to do that and get away with it. . .

From Steven F. Hayward, a more comprehensive view of the history behind the fall of the Berlin Wall. Worth your time. A couple of excerpts and some comments below:

"Here we come face to face with the fundamental reason for the collapse of European Communism. For all of the sophisticated “structural” and “materialist” analyses of the Communist world, it comes down to the simple fact that the European Communist rulers—most of them anyway—lost the will to shoot their own people in large numbers. (Not so the Chinese.) This might seem an inevitable consequence of the loss of belief in the Marxist ideology of class struggle, but the will to power of rulers has never been dependent on ideology, and it might have turned out differently. As Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin puts it his concise book Armageddon Averted, the Soviet Union “was lethargically stable, and could have continued muddling on for quite some time.” Moreover, Kotkin argues,

although it had been destabilized by romantic idealism, the Soviet system still commanded a larger and more powerful military and repressive apparatus than any state in history. It had more than enough nuclear weapons to destroy or blackmail the world, and a vast storehouse of chemical and biological weapons, with all requisite delivery systems. . . [W]ith the horrid example of much smaller Yugoslavia’s catastrophic break-up right next door, one shudders to think of the manipulative wars, indeed the nuclear, chemical, or biological Armageddon, that could have accompanied the Soviet collapse.

Kotkin concludes: 'The greatest surprise of the Soviet collapse was not that it happened—though that was shocking enough—but the absence of an all-consuming conflagration.' "

What did this event mean for the West? George H.W. Bush was taken by surprise. Our foreign intelligence has not been particularly good for quite some time. The fall of the USSR also had a dramatic affect on the intellectual world in the West, but secular utopianism still survives:

. . . . it was the end of more than a 20th-century story. Some of the East German protestors in the streets of Leipzig in early November carried banners that read, “1789-1989.” The storming of the Bastille in 1789 could be said to have marked the beginning of utopian revolutionary politics; now the storming of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked its end. As Timothy Garton Ash observed, “Nineteen eighty-nine also caused, throughout the world, a profound crisis of identity on what had been known since the French revolution of 1789 as ‘the left.’” The deep unpopularity of the Communist regimes revealed by the peoples of Eastern Europe in 1989 was an embarrassment to moderate liberals and value-free social scientists who regarded these nations as stable and legitimate forms of governance, and it was a source of faith-shaking crisis for the far Left that openly sympathized with these regimes. On the intellectual level the death of revolutionary socialism has found a successor in “postmodern” philosophy that preserves some aspects of decayed Marxism. But its obscurity limits its power to convince, and as such is unlikely to advance beyond the barricades of academic English departments. Those artificial intellectual walls will take longer to come down.

I have long thought it remarkable how many of the worst tyrants of the 20th century spent time in Paris before starting their careers in tyranny.

As far as "postmodern" philosophy and other remnants of 20th century "leftism" are concerned, I think their danger for the USA lies mainly in their influence over the elite who are often prominent in our public and private institutions.

The ideology of the Right's favorite militantly atheist Marxist, Christopher Hitchens, was influenced by Lenin, Trotsky and others, but he doesn't like Stalin or the Stalinist systems which developed in the USSR and its satellites. Hitchens notes that the leaders of Eastern Europe had pretty much abandoned the "historical wisdom" of Lenin and Engels long before 1989. He points out:

This 20th anniversary has seen yet another crop of boring articles about how so many people, especially in former East Germany, are supposedly "nostalgic" for the security of the old Stalinist system. . . . [but because of economic decay and debt] . . the wall came down just before the hermetic state that it enclosed would have imploded. I doubt that there would have been much "nostalgia" for that.

Andrew Klavan (again): "Free people can treat each other justly, but they can't make life fair. To get rid of the unfairness among individuals, you have to exercise power over them. The more fairness you want, the more power you need. Thus, all dreams of fairness become dreams of tyranny in the end."