I have in my office a big picture of a small child behind barbed wire, with a soldier anxiously looking over one shoulder as he leans to pick the child up and put him on the other side. It’s a real life photo that I purchased in Berlin and it reminds me of what I can’t take for granted: that I live in a free country. (Human rights tribunals aside, I am free to rail against the pro-abortion status quo, and no one has declared me an undesirable on an official level or put me in prison, or threatened my family because of beliefs I hold, or pulled me in for questioning because of things I’ve said. I understand what is at stake with the HRTs but the reality is there are those who are fighting against them and winning, too.)
I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, really, living in a Communist country, but I do think many underestimate the cruelty–even without murders and jail, etc. That, and they overestimate the role of the Russians in bringing the whole thing down. Toss in a splash of anti-Americanism and we are into full blown historial revisionism territory.
So today’s post offers a link to George Jonas because he really gets it. When the Berlin Wall fell, I remember it well, at least in part because no one in my family believed it would.
Things to be grateful for.
by 
I agree with Andrea that George Jonas (himself a refugee from Soviet Communism) gets it exactly right. What interests me more, though, are all those articles about this 20th anniversary that bemoan the loss of the Berlin Wall and the life it protected. I find it hard to wrap my head around the notion that the life lived behind the Wall and the Iron Curtain was in anyway preferable to the rough-and-tumble of individual freedom. It would be easier, admittedly, if any of the promises made by the Soviet and its puppet governments of an economic and social utopia had been delivered on. But they weren’t.
I mean, how much clearer can the Nanny State mini-tyrants be about their desire to ensure we all live exactly the same life and, if we don’t like it, to have the power to destroy those who would oppose them?
20 years later and the East is back in vogue 🙂 http://fashionableearth.org/blog/2009/11/09/20-jahre/
Thank you for commemorating. For some people it really meant a lot, but (unfortunately) there are still some who do not understand. The history of the Cold War is not important to too many, even if similarities are encroaching upon our free society as we speak.
“Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it.”
Anonymous.
(Unfortunately, the rest of us will go along for the ride, like it or not.)
Thanks!
My personal experience: I was born in 1931, old enough to remember living in Nazi occupied Europe. Although I was a child, I do remember the oppression of the totalitarian state, and have loathed it ever since. (Explains my disdain for (so-called) Human Rights Commissions and its federal Kommissar “FRAU” Jennifer Lynch. And her Ontario counterpart – failed Toronto mayor Kommissar Barbara Hall.)
My wife and I stood at the wall in the summer of ’89, We were behind it in East Berlin for one afternoon, and the feeling of oppression was palpable and reminded us of the war years.
When we watched the wall coming down on TV a few months later both of us were reminded of our liberation in May 1945, and we both cried of emotion, literally.