VEE Day
It’s Victory in Eastern Europe Day. Though I kind of like the sound of “VUSSR Day.” In Ivan’s face. PO Putin a little … for a change.
Obama of course couldn’t make it to the festivities. It’s an awkward one for him, given the recent retreat in the face of neo-Stalinism, and the fact that he’d have to give credit to one of his predecessors, or maybe sit and listen while others do … it will be interesting, to see if Ronald Reagan does get any official nods.
Twenty years ago today, the Berlin wall came down. It was a fact of the first three decades of my life. I was just one year old when they started slapping down the mortar and laying out the minefields. I even knew about it as a child, this horrible scar across Europe, beyond which basic freedom ended and the nightmare began. It was the very real bogeyman of our time, horrible totalitarianism, 1984 made manifest several decades ahead of schedule, and the threat of nuclear annihilation that was a part of it, such that, in the first grade in Alameda, California, we practicised duck-and-cover as well as earthquake drills. Nothing quaint or or historic about it then.
I never believed, as I became aware of the world around me in my teens and 20s, we would see the end of it in our time. Here’s Reagan speechwriter Anthony R. Dolan at the Wall Street Journal on the power of “Four Little Words” … you remember them: “Tear down that wall” … and the earth-shaking ideas they represented as well as the action that backed them. So simple, so logical, yet no one had thought to speak them before. And so bizarrely controversial.
The popular myth is that the wall kind of toppled over by itself, with a little push from people power. That of course ignores not only the prior 44 years of Cold War … interspersed with several hot ones that cost us tens of thousands of American lives … it also ignores the massive military buildup of the 1980s, the encouragement of liberation movements behind the Iron Curtain, the tough engagement with old-school Soviet leaders and, not least, the cordial engagement with a Soviet leader who realized it was time to throw in the towel. An atmosphere was finally created in which people felt like the could challenge the wretched, murdeorus regime with impunity, and they did.
Here’s Ross Douthat at NYT, who was not yet 10 when that happened, not only thinks the wall was shoved over by German flower children, but that Islamo-facism and other threats to our free society are not that big a deal. Never mind the End of History, he’s fast-forwarded to the post-post-9/11 world.
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.
…
Twenty years later, we still haven’t come to terms with the scope of our deliverance. Francis Fukuyama famously described the post-Communist era as “the end of history.” By this, he didn’t mean the end of events — wars and famines, financial panics and terrorist bombings. He meant the disappearance of any enduring, existential threat to liberal democracy and free-market capitalism.
…
Yet nobody seems quite willing to believe it. Instead, we keep returning to the idea that liberal society is just as vulnerable as it was before the Berlin Wall came down.
He goes on to suggest that concerns about loss of freedom domestically are no big deal. You know, I agree that the United States will survive the Obama era just like it survived the Bush one. Not because people aren’t paying attention and voicing alarm, though. (At least during the Bush era, they didn’t come under high-level government attack for doing so.) I hate to keep being ageist, but along with that lefty dingbat Matthew Yglesias, Douthat is turning into a great example of the hazards of hiring not-quite-30-year-olds to do your deep thinking for you.
OK, palate cleanser. Melanie Phillips at the Daily Mail: “We were fools to think the fall of the Berlin had killed off the far Left. They’re back, and attacking us from within.”
… as communism slowly crumbled, those on the far-Left who remained hostile towards western civilisation found another way to realise their goal of bringing it down.
This was what might be called ‘cultural Marxism’. It was based on the understanding that what holds a society together are the pillars of its culture: the structures and institutions of education, family, law, media and religion. Transform the principles that these embody and you can thus destroy the society they have shaped.
…
When the Berlin Wall fell, we told ourselves that this was the end of ideology. We could not have been more wrong.
The Iron Curtain came down only to be replaced by a rainbow-hued knuckle-duster, as our cultural commissars pulverise all forbidden attitudes in order to reshape western society into a post-democratic, post-Christian, post-moral universe. Lenin would have smiled.
Yeah, Lenin would have got a giggle out of the schoolchildren singalongs about Obama, too. By the way, unlike Douthat, Phillips thinks the many, many thousands of Americans, Britons, Australians, Spaniards, Iraqis, Afghans, Paks, etal, murdered by Islamic terrorists are a big deal. Given the kowtowing to Islamic fundamentalism in Europe, an existentially big deal. Heck, given the fact that 12 people just got murdered and all our political leaders can do is yap about diversity and a non-existent backlash, I’d say we have an existential threat here, too.
In other commentary, here’s Polanski apologist Anne Applebaum at the Washington Post yapping on somewhat incoherently in Berlin. The vapidity kicks off early:
Here in Berlin, there are conferences, books and dignitaries in abundance: Everyone who is anyone is in town, from Mikhail Gorbachev to Hillary Clinton …
The president of the United States isn’t anyone? Her main point seems to be that the wall coming down was good for Eastern Europe, and her deep-history point that the last 20 have been some of the best of the last 300 is well taken. A heavily Berlin-centric view downplays the economic turmoil and the Balkan wars that were the wracking labor pains of freedom, however. While she spanks Berliners for thinking the post-wall prosperity was a foregone conclusion, she wastes no space mulling whether the fall itself was foregone, failing to note how all that cafe and bookshop attendance was facilitated. She notes that American diplomats initially rebuffed Poland’s desire to join NATO, but fails to note that more recently, Poland’s desire to be more deeply integrated into a western defence network was thrown under a Russian bus.
There’s one other thing that isn’t getting any mention today. VEE has yet to be followed by VPRC day, the anniversary of freedom’s failure at Tiananmen Square last June being no cause for celebration.
Surber’s got Reagan vid and Palin words re the wall.
HotAir’s got Reagan and falling wall vid.
Malkin, hurtfully, of course he’s not going: “There’s nothing for America to apologize for there today.”
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Posted by Jules Crittenden at 8:46 am on Monday, November 9, 2009
4 Responses to “VEE Day”
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November 9th, 2009 at 7:42 pm
Now Jules, even Anne the blind pig finds an acorn every so often. He’s not called President ZerO! for nothing.
November 10th, 2009 at 2:24 am
To spare you charges of agism, it’s more accurate to think of Douthat et al as successful products of American education. Tedious drivel couched in very _smart_ rhetoric and style. That’s the failure of educators’ success.
With this in mind, it’s hard not give Phillips her point on the cultural angle, although it’s impossible to imagine all the cultural and political Deep Thinkers with such destructive motives. Even Ward Churchill takes himself too seriously to sustain such cynicism. No. These people think thet’re advancing the scope of human knowledge. In their own eyes, they’re permanently giving humanity lessons.
Her larger point–that Communists didn’t die with the liberation of E Europe–is quite valid but the threat isn’t a lot of deep thinkers confusing everyone (as irritating as that is). It’s from the global warming movement, human rights orgs, indiginous people’s rights orgs, anti globalization fanatics, tmwenty-first century socialist Bolivarians, and so forth.
November 10th, 2009 at 8:23 pm
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