The greatest climactic event of the 20th century occurred 30 years ago Saturday, as thousands of Germans pushed through, climbed over, and began tearing down the Berlin Wall. Human freedom overcame human evil. Human potential was unleashed. Exuberantly but peaceably, the good guys won.
The story needs to be told again and again, because those too young to have lived through the Cold War have trouble feeling viscerally the stakes, the danger, and the drama. A new movie that ran nationwide for one night only this week, The Divine Plan, tells one important part of the history, laying out in fascinating detail how President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II worked together, with far more contact than most people understood, to undermine Soviet communism. A Citizens United movie from a decade ago, Nine Days That Changed the World, also does a masterful job of bringing to life the role faith played in defeating tyranny.
With all due credit to Reagan and Karol Wojtyła, however, and to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, it is worth recalling the much larger honor roll of brave men and women who refused to blink in the face of the most mightily armed repressive empire the world has ever known. Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa of course often and deservedly gets key billing, along with all the Polish workers and church officials who defied vicious crackdowns to keep their movement going.
But here’s a shout-out, too, to intellectuals who wouldn’t be silenced: Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright and statesman; anti-Soviet dissidents Natan Sharansky, Andrei Sakharov, Yelena Bonner, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn; and British-American historian Robert Conquest chief among them.
The mujahedeen in Afghanistan — true patriots and even freedom fighters, most of them, rather than the precursors of Taliban and al Qaeda that mistaken history describes — bled the Soviet Union for a full decade. Congressmen such as Charlie Wilson and his colleagues helped keep them afloat. In Central America, the United States wisely provided both arms and humanitarian assistance, but it was the people of El Salvador and Nicaragua who fought back the communist menace, sometimes standing in lines to vote for hours as snipers fired at them.
Lesser-known figures such as American anti-communist adventurer Jack Wheeler rode with the mujahedeen and helped train Nicaraguan rebels, eventually helping formulate what became known as the Reagan Doctrine of not just containing but actually rolling back international communism. William Casey’s CIA pushed freedom throughout the world, in ways and at risks most will never know.
Other world leaders stared down massive protests in their own countries to stand with Reagan against the Soviets, especially Helmut Kohl of West Germany. Even socialist François Mitterrand of France supported Reagan’s deployment of missiles to counter a huge Soviet nuclear advantage. Meanwhile, at just the right time, the communist-lite leader Mikhail Gorbachev, ideologically still deluded but with a very real humaneness, took power at just the right time to pull his nation back from the nuclear brink.
The list of heroes could go on and on. It even included rock stars such as Billy Joel, who railed at Soviet repression even as he played concerts in Russia, and Bruce Springsteen, who played a “Rocking the Wall” concert in East Berlin while urging “that one day all the barriers will be torn down,” played important roles in giving a taste of freedom to those in Soviet-dominated lands.
What should not be forgotten is just how necessary their heroism was. Forgive the citation of one more movie, but the late William F. Buckley said in his last-ever public speech that The Lives of Others, about life in East Germany under communist domination, should be required viewing in every American high school. The film reminds us that not just in gulags where perceived “troublemakers” were sent but in everyday life: The repression was severe; the fear was palpable; the attempted destruction of the human psyche was pervasive.
And there stood the Berlin Wall. Both the real presence of brutality and the era’s most chilling symbol of mass enslavement, the wall was the physical, concrete portion of the figurative Iron Curtain. Also featuring extended barriers of metal-mesh fences, trenches, and 259 vicious-dog runs, and guarded by 186 observation towers manned by machine-gun-toting soldiers, the wall was a monstrosity. As long as it stood, freedom and faith both groaned in chains.
The joy that greeted the wall’s fall, not just on-site but around the world, remains almost indescribable. These poor words can’t do it justice. The whole world, though, should learn its lessons. Human nature rejects oppression. Humans must have the chance to strive. God-given liberty cannot forever be denied. Sometimes, though, it takes monumental courage and extraordinary will, by leaders and workers and millions of believers, for freedom to flourish as it rightly should.
