The Fall of the Wall

Widowed a little over a year, I went to Washington, D.C., a political appointee in the first Bush administration. In so doing, fulfilled a dream I had since childhood when I worked in John Kennedy's campaign for President. and was inspired by his "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country"  In college,  I decided to major in government in college with a focus on foreign policy which in those days was all about the Cold War.  The stories of the brutalities in the Soviet Union and in China were horrific and forever inoculated me from leftism and from romantic ideologues who excused the cruelty and the brutishness of these regimes because their grand utopian ends justified any means.

I couldn't have imagined that 1989 would be a "year of miracles"  with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Iron Curtain across Eastern Europe.  Watching the news and seeing the euphoria of hundreds of thousands of people as they fled West was amazing, profoundly moving and exhilarating.  The long war won without a shot being fired because it was an evil empire rotten through and through.

For Christmas that year, I was given a piece of the Wall as a souvenir.  I held it in my hands, then burst into tears, thinking of all the people who had died in gulags and camps and by disastrous government policies that caused wide spread famine.  100 million victims.

Roger Kimball in Tyranny Set in Stone

Was there ever a more fitting monument to tyranny than the Berlin Wall? Conceived in desperation, this brutal barrier was erected in 1961 by the state not for the protection but for the incarceration of its citizens. Hold fast to that thought. The Berlin Wall was the stuff of gritty spy novels, the literal instantiation of Winston Churchill’s “iron curtain,” which in 1946, with characteristic prescience, he saw descending across Central and Eastern Europe.
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What, finally, brought down the wall? The candidates for that honor are many, from the impersonal operation of History to the people-power of movements like Solidarity and the spiritual leadership of Pope John Paul II. Among Western academics, the role of Mikhail Gorbachev enjoys pride of place. His mantras of glasnost and perestroika (“openness” and “restructuring”) became favored terms in English. In the late 1980s, Gorbachev, the true-believing Communist, was the hero. Never mind that he wished to salvage the Soviet empire: he spoke to the hearts and minds of the Western intelligentsia in a way Ronald Reagan never did. Reagan, after all, had the temerity early on in his tenure to describe the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” How the liberal establishment recoiled from, how it ridiculed that phrase. “The Western diplomatic firmament,” William F. Buckley Jr. recalled in 1990, “shook with indignation.”

Natan Sharansky, the Soviet dissident who became an Israeli politician, was confined to an eight by ten foot prison cell at the time  and later wrote

My Soviet jailers gave me the privilege of reading the latest copy of Pravda. Splashed across the front page was a condemnation of President Ronald Reagan for having the temerity to call the Soviet Union an "evil empire." Tapping on walls and talking through toilets, word of Reagan's "provocation" quickly spread throughout the prison. We dissidents were ecstatic. Finally, the leader of the free world had spoken the truth--a truth that burned inside the heart of each and every one of us.

John O Sullivan on Freedom's Triumph

Until 1989, Europe and the world were divided between freedom and communism. These two systems were in constant conflict, militarily, economically and ideologically even if their struggles were kept in some kind of stable equilibrium by the nuclear balance of terror. Most observers thought this Cold War was a permanent fact of life.

Ronald Reagan disagreed. He told friends his view of the Cold War was "We win, they lose."

This process began even before Reagan's election: In 1979, Pope John Paul II visited his native Poland and was greeted by a nation united with him against an isolated communist government.

It gathered steam when Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl were elected in America, Britain and West Germany on conservative platforms of installing US missiles in Europe to match the Soviet SS-20s. By 1984, the missiles had been installed in the face of a vast, Moscow-inspired "peace" campaign. At that point, we'd won; they'd lost.
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There was a natural outburst of rejoicing throughout Europe — more from ordinary people on both sides of the Iron Curtain than from their cautious governments. In its 70-plus years of power, Soviet communism had murdered tens of millions of people; penned millions more in slave camps; corrupted those beyond its raw power; ruled through terror, censorship and lies; launched World War II jointly with the Nazis, and concealed its criminal rule behind a Potemkin façade of social idealism and scientific advance.

Wall St Journal, From Truman to Reagan, the benefits of moral clarity

Yet if the West's stand in Berlin demonstrates anything, it is that moral commitments have a way of reaping strategic dividends over time. By ordering the airlift in 1948, Harry Truman saved a starving city and defied Soviet bullying. As importantly, he showed that the U.S. would not abandon Europe to its furies, as it had after World War I, thus helping to pave the way for the creation of NATO in April 1949.

By holding firm for 40 years, Truman and his successors transformed what was supposed to be the Atlantic alliance's weakest point into its strongest. To know what the West stood for during most of those years, one merely had to go to Berlin, see the Wall, consider its purpose, and observe the contrasts between the vibrant prosperity on one side of the city and the oppressive monotony on the other.
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"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle," George Orwell once said. That is what the heroes of 1989 did with unblinking honesty and courage for years on end until, at last, the Wall came tumbling down.

David Pryce Jones in Remembering the Fall of the Berlin Wall suggests that the events that night in Berlin began with an unintended impression given by an East German official at a press conference and a frantic telephone call by a border agent that went unanswered.

Honecker would have had no scruple about giving orders to fire on the crowd, and nor would Erich Mielke, brutal head of the Stasi. Egon Krenz likes to boast that as prime minister he killed nobody but this was because he lost the chance to do so. Plans for armed repression certainly existed. Instead, as often seems the case at historic turning points, accident took over. Gyula Horn, on behalf of the Hungarian Communist party, decided to open the Hungarian section of the Iron Curtain. To a certain extent, the Hungarians wanted to make life difficult for the Soviets, but more generally, they hadn't perceived that from that moment East Germans would come and go as they pleased in huge numbers. The moment the Soviet bloc was no longer a properly controlled entity the Berlin Wall became a relic.
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Günter Schabowski was the East German Politburo member who had the task of explaining to the world's press this sudden and unexpected breech in the Soviet empire. He had drawn the short straw. Maybe he was even an honest man, as such types go. Once he was no longer a Communist apparatchik, he took a job as a lowly journalist in Rothenburg, an unspoilt little town in West Germany, and there I interviewed him. At the outset of his famous press conference, he was to say, he had had no intention of declaring that the Berlin Wall was now open. But the questions threw him off balance, (Daniel Johnson, son of Paul Johnson, was one of the questioners) and he misspoke — as politicians like to put it — giving the unintended impression that people could indeed now cross the Wall freely.
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Within a short time, the picks and jack-hammers were out and cheering people were dismantling the Wall. In another interview, I questioned the Stasi officer who had been on duty that night at the crucial point. When Schabowski's press conference brought the demonstrators charging towards him and his men, he would willingly have opened fire but needed the order to do so to cover himself. His urgent telephone call to his superiors for instructions went unanswered.

What is the likelihood that this was deliberate rather than incompetent? So this officer and his bewildered Stasi men were overrun with their weapons in hand, and so Schabowski played the sort of minor role on whom the plot turns that Shakespeare loved to write about, and so Gorbachev was as surprised as the rest of the world to be granted the great good fortune of entering the history books as the man who freed millions from Communism.

Such is history,