Fall of the Berlin Wall - 20th Anniversary

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

While it's a day for celebration, it's also a day for reflection, a reminder that freedom-loving people still must fight to be free and overcome tyranny.
Melanie Phillips offers perspective and some words of warning.

Twenty years ago today, supporters of freedom and human rights cheered and wept for joy as the Berlin Wall was torn down by jubilant young Germans.

To so many, that heady day seemed to herald the emergence of a better world. The spectre of communism had finally been laid to rest. Liberty had triumphed over tyranny.

The end of the Cold War even led some to proclaim that this was 'the end of history' - which was to say that liberal democracy was now the dominant and unchallengeable force in the world.

However, the 9/11 attacks on America tragically proved this to be absurdly over-optimistic. The eruption of radical Islamism revealed that, while the West may have been rid of one enemy in the Soviet Union, another deadly foe had risen to take its place. So much is, sadly, all too evident.

But what is perhaps less obvious is that communism did not just vanish in a puff of historical smoke. The Soviet Union was defeated and fell apart, for sure. But the communist ideology that fuelled it did not so much disintegrate as reconstitute itself into another, even more deadly form as the active enemy of western freedom.

Soviet Communism was a belief system whose goal was to overturn the structures of society through the control of economic and political life. This mutated into a post-communist ideology of the Left, whose no-less ambitious aim was to overturn western society through a subversive transformation of its culture.

...[T]he truth is that to be hostile to the western nation is to be hostile to democracy. And indeed, with the development of the EU superstate we can see that the victory over one anti-democratic regime within Europe - the Soviet Union - has been followed by surrender to another.

For the republic of Euroland puts loyalty to itself higher than that to individual nations and their values. It refused to commit itself in its constitution to uphold Christianity, the foundation of western morality.

Instead, it is committed to moral and cultural relativism, which sets group against group and guarantees supreme and antidemocratic power to the bureaucrats setting the rules of 'diversity' and outlawing all dissent from permitted attitudes.

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.

In 1987, speaking at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin, Ronald Reagan declared:

We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace.

There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

When the Berlin Wall did fall, it seemed like a new era of liberty was at hand and that the world was really closer to peace.

But 20 years later, we still face threats to our liberty, from terrorists and from those "cultural commissars" obsessed with restructuring Western society into a "post-democratic, post-Christian, post-moral universe."

It seemed like 1989 marked the beginning of real hope and change. A better world seemed possible.

I guess it was naive to think that the major threat to peace was crumbling and that no one would stand in the way of freedom, that liberty would be embraced by all and evil had been defeated.

An important lesson: Enemies of freedom don't always use walls and guns to confine and control and oppress.