It was twenty years ago today that the Berlin Wall fell.<\/p>\n
It’s hard to remember at twenty years remove that it, and the Communism it represented,\u00a0didn’t just <\/em>get swept away in a wave of small-l liberal euphoria.\u00a0<\/p>\n Dinesh D’Souza, in his excellent bio of Reagan, notes that between 1980 and 1983, the experts were united in their belief that the “Second World”, Communism, was here to stay.\u00a0 Make no mistake, people had recovered from the spell of Walter Duranty long enough to know that the Soviet system was cruel and corrupt gangster-run autocracy even worse than Chicago.\u00a0 The publication of The Gulag Archipelago <\/em>and other releases from the samisdat <\/em>media, and the flood of people who fled Germany from 1948 through 1961, popped the bubble of acceptability that had accompanied travesties like Stalin’s “Man of the Year” awards in 1939 and 1942, and Stalinism’s embrace by “intelligentsia” throughout the West (including the early version of the Minnesota Democratic Farmer\/Labor Party).\u00a0\u00a0 The stories of the thousands of heroic Soviet-bloc citizens who risked death and imprisonment fleeing their foetid, starving, lumpen homelands inspired many a young patriot in the day.<\/p>\n But while the bloom was long off the rose of western acceptance of Communism, the number of western intellectuals who seriously believed in 1980 that the decade would see the fall of the Berlin Wall and, in short order, communism itself would have fit in a single room at a Ramada Inn.\u00a0<\/p>\n There had been resistance, of course; in Budapest and Gdansk in 1956, Prague in 1967, Gdansk again in ’71 – all put down with ruthless brutality by the authorities, including the Soviet military.<\/p>\n And so I’m not aware that anyone held out that much hope for change in 1979 – thirty years ago – when Lech Walesa, a young electrician in Gdansk, led a pro-democracy union strike in Gdansk.\u00a0 The movement had traction, of course – it swept Poland, and threatened to spin out of control; the Polish Army under General Wojciech Jaruzelski staged what amounted to a last-ditch military coup to bring down the government\u00a0and declare martial law to quell the strikes, siccing “ZOMO” thugs (no, it’s not Polish for SEIU)\u00a0on the protesters and strikers.\u00a0 Jaruzelski was reviled around the world for the action – although there is evidence that history has misjudged the General, that he acted as did many in the Polish Army, as a Polish patriot, to prevent a Soviet invasion, which would have been much, much worse).<\/p>\n And indeed, had the status quo ante <\/em>held sway after 1980, nothing much would have happened.<\/p>\n But in 1980, the election of Ronald Reagan signalled an end to detente<\/em> – the diplomatic legitimazion of the Soviet gangster regime.\u00a0 Reagan jacked up the rhetoric war, and <\/em>the civil support for trade unionists behind the Iron Curtain (with considerable help from Margaret Thatcher, the Pope and, speaking of strange bedfellows, Lane Kirkland of the AFL-CIO), as well as building up the US military from its post-Vietnam nadir (although to be fair Jimmy Carter had realized the problem, and taken a few of the necessary high-level steps to start facilitating this).\u00a0\u00a0 The rhetorical confrontation peaked at Reagan’s classic Brandenburg Gate speech in 1987…<\/p>\n