Today marks the 30th anniversary of one of the
great events of the 20th century: The beginning of the end of Soviet
Communism when the East German border guards started allowing people from East into
West. The Wall had begun to be torn down, and Soviet Communism, which had
murdered about 30 million of its citizens over a 70+ year span, began to fall
as well.
From National
Review:
The irony is that
the Wall’s opening actually came about through a bureaucratic blunder. On
November 9, East German Politburo member Günther Schabowski mistakenly
announced that East Germans would be allowed to cross into West Germany
effective immediately. Thousands of people surged to the Berlin border and
demanded their “right” of exit. The border guards, despite their intensive
training, gave up.
As former National
Review editor John O’Sullivan has noted, “Communism had failed to retain enough
true believers who would murder on its behalf.”
Who brought about
the fall of the Berlin Wall and then the end of the Cold War? The ordinary
people of Eastern Europe, especially those who rose up in protest, deserve
pride of place. But for different reasons, history will record two paramount
figures: Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. Reagan first saw the Wall in
1978, when he told
his aide Peter Hannaford: “We’ve got to find a way to knock this thing down.”
After he became president, he returned in 1982 and enraged the Soviets by
taking a couple of ceremonial steps across a painted borderline. Then, in 1987,
he overruled his own State Department by giving a momentous speech in which he
implored the Soviet general secretary directly: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this
wall!”
Peter Robinson, a
former Reagan speechwriter, tells
the fascinating story of how the president’s entreaty came to symbolize the
desire for freedom in Europe. After Robinson inserted the now-famous phrase
into a draft of the speech, it became a topic of bitter dispute inside the
administration. Officials tried over and over to have the section removed,
judging that it was too provocative and theatrical. White House officials
believed the language would embarrass Gorbachev. A June 2, 1987, memo from a
National Security Council aide called the speech “mediocre” and said it
represented a “lost opportunity.” The edited draft that was attached to this
memo had the entire “tear down this wall” section crossed out.
But Reagan
insisted on leaving his sock-it-to-’em lines in, and they proved a hit with the
many thousands of people who heard it — they cheered for a full 20 seconds.
Many Reagan aides remained unconvinced, but two and a half years later, the
Wall had been entirely swept away.
In less than a year, the two Germanys were united into
one nation for the first time since 1945, and a little more than two years
later, the Soviet Union dissolved.
We went from this…
And this (yes, those are grandparents waving to their grandchildren
across the barrier)…
To this…
And this…
No comments:
Post a Comment