Lessons of the Berlin Wall, 20 years later
Examiner Editorial
November 9, 2009
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| Spectators watch as giant, painted styrofoam dominoes topple along the route of the former Berlin Wall near the Brandenburg Gate on November 9, 2009 in Berlin, Germany. The approximately 1,000 dominoes, painted by schoolchildren and artists all over the world, are meant to symbolically represent the end of communist rule across Eastern Europe and are the highlight of celebrations in the German capitol marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. (Photo by Carsten Koall/Getty Images) |
Chris Gueffroy's name is a mere footnote now, but Gueffroy has the dubious honor of having been the last of the hundreds of people killed while attempting to cross the Berlin Wall separating communist East Germany from the free sector of the city. Gueffroy was shot 10 times in a maze of concrete and razor wire, just a stone's throw from freedom.
Gueffroy's life is lost to history now, but we do have one small clue as to what kind of man he was. "In his passport photo, he wore a small hoop earring, an act of nonconformity in a country that prized conformity above all else," Michael Moynihan said in a recent article for Reason magazine.
Nine months after Gueffroy's death, and 20 years ago Monday, the Berlin Wall fell. The world rejoiced and millions were set free -- but in the two decades since, the world has also moved on. When we finally peeled back the Iron Curtain, we found an inhuman cultural landscape rife with brutal totalitarianism, rampant poverty and death on a scale unprecedented in human history. Stalin alone killed some 40 million people in the Soviet Union, wrapping his capricious whims in the ideological camouflage of communism. It was a belief system based on the worship of totalitarian state power, negation of the individual and the denial of economic reality. It's hard for many people to accept the fact that mere ideas can be so poisonous.
Incredibly, some still swallow this poison. More than a few among the cultural and academic elites in the West defended and enabled communist tyranny. They haven't gone away, despite the horrors exposed after the fall of the Wall.
The Berlin Wall may be rightfully confined to the ash heap of history, but the specter of communism remains. Left-wing American politicians still regularly travel to Cuba to kiss Fidel Castro's ring, and Hollywood regularly portrays Che Guevara as an iconic rebel with the glamour of James Dean rather than as the sadistic butcher that he was. Our own government is so indebted to the Chinese communist government that our leaders are often too timid to condemn that regime's continuing human rights abuses.
But no matter how distant a memory the Berlin wall has become, we should always remember the Chris Gueffroys and the estimated 100 million people killed by communist regimes, as well as the millions more that still live in fear. And we should be mindful of them always, not merely pause in memoriam once every 20 years.
