I was 12 when the Berlin Wall came down, and I’ll be honest with you, I cried. In an instant, the world’s geography was altered, families were reunited and a country became whole again. The images of people tearing at the wall with their bare fingers were so powerful, they are still what comes to mind whenever I think of that day. I remember the first time I truly understood what East Germans were willing to risk for freedom. That people were willing to die to be free had never seemed as real to me as it did in Mrs. LeMay’s third grade class. And once I realized what was at stake for the people of East Germany, I understood what all this freedom vs tyranny business was all about.
I never understood the argument for Communism when all Communist countries had to use force to keep their subjects from fleeing en masse. You don’t risk your life to flee a People’s Paradise.
April, that was beautiful.
From an old Oxford Commie who shed more light on the evil empire than anyone else with the possible exception of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:
There was a great Marxist called Lenin
Who did two or three million men in
That’s a lot to have done in
But where he did one in,
that grand Marxist Stalin did ten in.
- Robert Conquest
Apparently German Chancellor Angela Merkel felt that praise for the liberation of eastern Europe should be directed in another direction.
We all know it was the Beatles. It has to be true because I just saw it on PBS.
And Stalin only killed 10 million? The mean estimate is 20
million. The top goes to roughly 60 million. In either case he is eligible for an Al Gore Lifetime Achievement Award for Global Warming Potential Reduction.
Russia (formerly the more assembled USSR) of late is better for the wear, but they’ve still got authoritarian impulses, and dammit if we in the West, with America lagging the Eurotrash somewhat, are determined to follow suit in our own bizarre multi-culti and paeans to government ways.
Now that force is apparently on the rise even here, what with penalties, fines, and threats of prison time for a brand new legion of untold numbers of people who might not want to be shanghaied in a nationalized health service, is there an “in-between” zone of freedom vs. coercion that is just as bad as plain jane Stalinism?
We might not have the breadlines and firing squads. I’m not that melodramatic.
But can our own brand of Stalin-Lite, on the half-shell, be far behind?
This time, however, no walls are needed to retrain us.
Huxley’s Brave New World, in distinction from Orwell’s dystopian vision, had one more accurately fashioned for the Modernist and Post-Modernist pieties of the West; we won’t have to think about fleeing, cuz we’ll learn early on to love our servitude and distractions and small liberties while the larger ones are stipped from us.
Besides…
There’s nowhere else to go…
Well said.
It frustrates and irritates me to see the degree to which our forbearers the English have become content with life on the dole, and the sinking lack of energy, motivation, and self-respect on the part of many of the regular people. The utopian vision has provided services, but at a cost too great to bare.
Frederick Douglas, when asked what should be done for his people then recently freed from slavery, replied simply “Leave us alone.” That is a wise attitude, reflecting a greater confidence in the human spirit then is seen today toward any of us by our own government and much of the ruling class. It turns out the help the government professes to offer is anything but.
Or as one French industrialist once said, “”laissez-faire nous”
“Leave us alone”
Ironically, the very source of the phrase from the original French not something often heard from that land.