Berlin Wall Season: Not important enough to Obama

German newsmagazine Der Spiegel notes that US President Barack Obama shelved apparent plans to attend the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, of which Toby Harnden at the Daily Telegraph said:

Perhaps Obama felt that celebrating the role of the United States in bringing down the wall would be a bit triumphalist and not quite in keeping with his wish to present America as a declining world power anxious to apologise for sundry historic misdeeds.

Hilary Clinton stood in his place, alongside Angela Merkel, Mikhail Gorbachev, Lech Walesa, Kofi Annan, Gordon Brown and Dmitri Medvedev.

Apparently the leader of the world's largest economy, strongest military power and free world throughout the Cold War didn't think it mattered enough.

Harnden notes Obama IS travelling to Norway to pick up the Nobel Peace Prize. Of course Obama has been to Berlin before. He did a campaign speech there before he was elected, which was seen as rather unusual given he was standing for election as President of the United States, not Germany, Europe or the world. Der Spiegel sarcastically referred to that speech as "People of the World - Look at Me". Noting that foreign press (as in non-American) were explicitly excluded from the press conference following that effort.

So on that note, and to follow Harnden's efforts, how about some words from some US Presidents who really did have an idea freedom...



(and though he called himself a doughnut accidentally) JFK was prescient and proud of what the US was standing for, back then.

Berlin Wall season: Stasi, UK style

The East German Stasi had the stereotypical German efficiency and thoroughness, for noting down every last detail in its surveillance operations. There was one Stasi officer for every 166 citizens, compared to one Gestapo officer for ever 2,000 under the Nazis.

So is it not notable to see the report today in the Daily Telegraph that while the UK government is abandoning a central database to gather details of ALL telecommunications traffic in the UK (all calls made, all SMS, all emails, all internet browsing) it is to legally require all telecommunications carriers and internet service providers to hold such information. Effectively privatising state surveillance functions, imposing a cost on them all.

Who will be able to access this?

653 central and local government bodies will be able to do so. All local authorities, Police, emergency services, prison governors.

Who won the Cold War?

Berlin Wall Season: Stability vs freedom

David Aaronovitch in the Times writes about those who comfortably live in the West and celebrate the "stability" of tyrannies.

I've seen this view before, "who are we to judge Iran", or "Cuba has the best health outcomes in Latin America" (because you can believe statistics from dictatorships), or "maybe they aren't ready for freedom yet" being one of my favourite "patronise the people who aren't free" phrases.

He damns both a book, and a forthcoming documentary series, both sourced from the BBC, for taking the view that maybe it's "for the best", for example making the absurd conclusion that because Cuba seems better off that Haiti, economically, then obviously Cuba has the better system. Ignoring, of course, that Haiti spent not far short of two generations under murderous dictatorships (which Mother Teresa happily provided succour) and has not recovered.

His conclusion of this moral relativism is damning:

if we shape the imagined world to the necessities of this “realism” by deploying the relativist declension: it isn’t so bad, we aren’t so much better, it may be what they want, their politics are intractable, fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

And behind the new curtains of iron or velvet, the oppressed come to curse us for our complacency, damn us for our hypocrisy and lose hope in the possibilities of liberty.

For indeed, so many thought we would all have to live with the USSR and its satellite autocracies forever, when all it took was persistence, patience, hope, connections between the oppressed and friends in the West, to gradually pull more and more at what was binding together the corrupt edifices of totalitarianism, and they all came crumbling down.

Nothing terrifies the power holders in Beijing, Havana, Tehran, Minsk, Moscow, Pyongyang, Damascus, Malabo, Rangoon, etc. more than the knowledge that what keeps this from happening is the triumph of the fear they spread and the apathy it induces. At a certain point, the fear subsides, the apathy is overwhelmed, and the time comes for people to stare the cold dark machines of murder, called governments, in the eye and say, no more.

The only certainty is it is a matter of when, not if, and whether the response is a gun or surrender.

Berlin Wall Season: Victims and Victors

The end of World War 2 was meant to be a victory of liberation from the hellfire of war on the European continent, and from the militaristic and genocidal tyranny of the Nazis and their allies in Italy, Croatia and elsewhere. For half of Europe it meant peace but only between states, not within. The United States initially took a fairly benign view of the Soviet Union and the Red Army’s presence across the east, Winston Churchill’s famous warning of an iron curtain being draped across Europe went largely unheeded, until the blockade of west Berlin made Stalin’s intentions too obvious to miss.

From then until 1988-1990, it was thought that the Cold War would go on forever, dictatorships always seem like that. So brutal and violent are the means to maintain control, it seems difficult to believe any could fall from that, but they did. There had been several attempts, most notably in East Germany in 1953, Hungary 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, to break from the cold bloody brutal reality of “really existing socialism”, all suppressed by the Red Army with the imperial cruelty from the dark ages.

However, once the USSR had opened up, Gorbachev had relented and let the rotten system be exposed for what it was, let people criticise and change, it became clear that none of the regimes in the east could cling to anything other than the lies and fear that were the currency of their trade. The loss in lives was not high compared to the mass murder of the Soviet Union, China or the Khmer Rouge, but the loss in life is incalculable. The lives stunted by socialism, the fear, the subterfuge, the destruction of ambition, and the corruption of talent. The talented either had to sell out to a system that wanted them to be slaves, fear for their very lives or flee. The broad masses need do little other than shut up, be obedient, and be grateful for having bread, a home and a job, for they were being constantly told how things were worse in the west, yet could hear and see for themselves a different story on illegally received TV and radio broadcasts.

The hypocritical vacuous United Nations which would speak endlessly about colonialism, be criticism South Africa for apartheid, and hounding Israel about the Palestinians, was compliant and tolerant of the evil empire’s tentacles directly controlling half of Europe. An empire that claimed it would economically and technically bury the west. A claim that is so laughable today it staggers to think of those who believed it could be true, right through the 1970s.

It was an experiment that failed every test it put forward for itself. Not only were the economies a failure, and totalitarianism placing the entire population in fear of the state, but it did not deliver the socialist goal of equality. For in every single state that claimed to be socialist, it delivered an elite living in luxury, enjoying large homes, security, overseas travel, goods and most of all, knowledge of the outside world. A vile repulsive grouping of supreme mediocrities, who lived the lives of the rich and wealthy, happily ready to gun down those who may threaten their “really existing socialism”.

The profit motive had been abandoned, commercialism almost completely extinguished, people working for the common good, and everyone in fear, whilst those in charge were corrupt and willing to spill blood to preserve what they had. One wonder why those who damn capitalism today don’t look to see that efforts to enforce a collectivist mindset become fertile fields for authoritarianism and corruption.

So today I begin a series on all of the countries stunted and corrupted by Marxism-Leninism in Europe. I do so in the order of those liberated. In that I will briefly describe how the regime came about, the perhaps most notable points in its history and how it all folded. It is history that children should all learn. For what the lesson should be is how entire countries became beholden to systems that made so many compliant, and willing to go along with it all. For as we all now, all it takes for evil to flourish is for good people to do nothing.

Berlin Wall season

As the existence of the Berlin Wall had a significant impact on how I thought of freedom, as a child, this week I will be writing of the Wall, the countries behind the Iron Curtain and the events of 1989 and beyond that have changed Europe and the world for the better.

To start, here is Christopher Hitchens in Slate about what to learn. Take this piece, which may ring a distant bell in our ears:

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. Such sentimental piffle—which got a good airing in that irritating movie Good Bye Lenin!—would not long survive a reading of another new book: Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, by Victor Sebestyen. Making effective use of archives opened since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Sebestyen describes the day in late October 1989 when the head of State Planning in the German Democratic Republic, Gerhard Schürer, presented the party leadership with the unvarnished economic news. "Nearly 60 per cent of East Germany's entire economic base could be written off as scrap, and productivity in mines and factories was nearly 50 per cent behind the West." Even more appalling was the 12-fold increase in the GDR's national debt—a situation so grotesque that it had been classified as a state secret lest loans from Western creditors dry up. "Just to avoid further indebtedness," wrote Schürer, "would mean a lowering next year of living standards by 25 to 30 per cent, and make the GDR ungovernable." So 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.

or how about this wonderful quote:

they wanted the unexciting objective of "normality"—a life not unlike that of Western Europe, where it was possible to express everyday criticism, register a vote, scrutinize a free press, and become a consumer as well as a producer. These unexciting demands were nonetheless revolutionary in their way, which gives you an idea of the utter failure and bankruptcy of the regimes that could not meet them. In 1988, in a public debate with a hack official of the Polish Communist Party, Lech Walesa won over the audience with his simple statement that "Europe moves by car, and we are trying to catch up with them by bike."

The waste of humanity for this 50 years of fear, sacrifice and oppression, the fact half of Europe was freed from one tyranny by another tyranny, and the so easily collapsed system once those with guns got consciences. It is a reason to never forget, and never forget those who so readily apologised for the prison states that are long confined to the slag heap of history.