The reaction to Margaret Thatcher’s death is painfully predictable.
The right is honoring her service in standing up to socialism and communism at home and abroad, while the left is vilifying her for standing up to socialism and communism at home and abroad.As someone else said, Maggie Thatcher p*ssed off all the right people, and I think that is a honorable epitaph indeed. Anyway, look at this, this, this, and this:
The number of people who died trying to cross the Wall is disputed - at least 136 are known to have been killed but victims' groups say the true number is more than 700. The first victim was thought to be Guenter Litfin on 24 August 1961 and the last Chris Gueffroy on 6 February 1989.I also give you one archival photo that has always stuck with me--an East German border guard defecting in 1961, leaping through the 2-day-old Wall as it begins to form first as a barbed-wire barricade:
"We don't have any tolerance for those who nostalgically distort the history of the Berlin Wall and Germany's division," [Mayor Klaus] Wowereit said at the ceremony in front of a small section of the Wall recently rebuilt for posterity.
"The Wall was part of a dictatorship," he said. "And it's alarming that even today some people argue there were good reasons to build the Wall. No! There's no legitimate reason nor justification for violating human rights and for killings."
In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century. The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history.And that's exactly why this history nerd blogs about it. Now go read this.
. . .Indeed, many still subscribe to the essential tenets of Communist ideology. Politicians, academics, students, even the occasional autodidact taxi driver still stand opposed to private property. Many remain enthralled by schemes for central economic planning. Stalin, according to polls, is one of Russia’s most popular historical figures. No small number of young people in Istanbul, where I live, proudly describe themselves as Communists; I have met such people around the world, from Seattle to Calcutta.
We rightly insisted upon total denazification; we rightly excoriate those who now attempt to revive the Nazis’ ideology. But the world exhibits a perilous failure to acknowledge the monstrous history of Communism. These documents should be translated. They should be housed in a reputable library, properly cataloged, and carefully assessed by scholars. Above all, they should be well-known to a public that seems to have forgotten what the Soviet Union was really about. If they contain what Stroilov and Bukovsky say—and all the evidence I’ve seen suggests that they do—this is the obligation of anyone who gives a damn about history, foreign policy, and the scores of millions dead.
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.Hear, hear. See this too.Never has liberation come to so many people all at once — to Eastern Europe’s millions, released from decades of bondage; to the world, freed from the shadow of nuclear Armageddon; and to the democratic West, victorious after a century of ideological struggle.
Never has so great a revolution been accomplished so swiftly and so peacefully, by ordinary men and women rather than utopians with guns.
Yes. This seems obvious, but it's unfortunately not. Read the whole thing.When the Berlin Wall came down 20 years ago, it did not fall from sheer wear and tear of tyranny. People actively chose to destroy it. They tore down that iconic wall not only with pickaxes, hammers and bare hands, but as a culminating act of decades of sacrifice, courage, determination and a complex, globally contested war of ideas.
Many of the vital battles were fought by people living far from Berlin. They were fought by people who persisted in the face of everything from ridicule to misguided Utopianism to violence, imprisonment and the hot wars that flared along the front lines of the Cold War.
The wall itself, built in 1961, stood for 28 years, and was just a small part of the massive iron curtain with which the Soviet empire penned in the people of Eastern Europe. But the wall became a symbol of the far larger divide that split the world for much of the 20th century, partitioning great swathes of the globe into spheres of influence in which the basic trajectories were free vs. unfree, capitalist democracy vs. command-and-control Communism.
Now, the battle over how the GDR is to be remembered — or not — is raging hot. The former cadres would like the GDR to be remembered as some kind of benign leftist social-welfare experiment, idealistic and well-intentioned in looking after people from cradle to grave, if perhaps a tad over-zealous.Memory IS a battleground . . . which means you better go armed with hard facts and evidence, along with a big dose of skepticism for pretty words and shiny rhetoric.Former human rights activists, political prisoners and historians — of left and right — would have it remembered as it was. Then it might serve as a warning to future generations about the dual seductions of belief and obedience.
A growing degree of Ostalgie — toxic, rose-coloured fantasy — infects misrepresentations of the late state.
That John F. Kennedy could go to Germany and be “a Berliner” told you all you needed to know about that Democratic administration. That Barack Obama won’t do so now sadly tells you all you need to know about the current one.Not good. Then again, I've been criticizing Obama's laughable "foreign policy" for a long time. To the Kennedy visit, you can add the Reagan visit with that awesome "tear down this wall!" speech. Like at Jericho, the walls did come tumbling down in 1989 in a massive victory for freedom. I watched the walls fall on TV, and I was just a schoolgirl, but I was so happy I actually cried ... and I'm a heartless warmongering right-wing racist nutjob who hates people and has no soul, remember?
Like President Medvedev and myself, you're not old enough to have witnessed the darkest hours of the Cold War, when hydrogen bombs were tested in the atmosphere, and children drilled in fallout shelters, and we reached the brink of nuclear catastrophe. But you are the last generation born when the world was divided. At that time, the American and Soviet armies were still massed in Europe, trained and ready to fight. The ideological trenches of the last century were roughly in place. Competition in everything from astrophysics to athletics was treated as a zero-sum game. If one person won, then the other person had to lose.O RLY? O RLY? PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFT. Tell me, do you notice anything missing from this account?
And then, within a few short years, the world as it was ceased to be. Now, make no mistake: This change did not come from any one nation. The Cold War reached a conclusion because of the actions of many nations over many years, and because the people of Russia and Eastern Europe stood up and decided that its end would be peaceful.
