On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall Roger Scruton writes
The flame that was snuffed out by freedom
My small contribution consisted of joining like-minded colleagues to smuggle books and printing materials, to organise lectures and to maintain an underground messaging service. The experience taught me a lot about people, and in particular about the transforming effect of sacrifice on the human character. The people that I met were imbued with a more than ordinary gentleness and concern for one another. It was hard to earn their trust but, once offered, trust was complete.
Moreover, because learning, culture and the European spiritual heritage were, for them, symbols of their own inner freedom, and of the national independence they sought to remember, if not to regain, they looked on those things with an unusual veneration. As a visitor from the world of fun, pop and comic strips I was amazed to discover students for whom words devoted to such things were wasted words, and who sat in those little pockets of underground air studying Greek literature, German philosophy, medieval theology and the operas of Verdi and Wagner.
In 1985 the secret police moved against me and I was arrested in Brno; visits to Czechoslovakia came to an end and I was followed in Poland and Hungary. But our team kept going until 1989 when, to our surprise, the catacombs were opened and our friends came pale, staggering and bewildered into the sunlight, to be hailed by the people as the natural trustees of their restituted country. This was a wonderful moment and, for a while, I believed that the public spirit that had reigned in the catacombs would now govern the State.
It was not to be. Having been excluded for decades from the rewards of worldly advancement, our friends had failed to cultivate those arts — hypocrisy, treachery and realpolitik — without which it is impossible to stay in government.