The Fall of the Berlin Wall, 20 Years Later

By Nicholas Stix

Twenty years ago, East German border guards permitted young East and West Germans to destroy the Berlin Wall.

The fall of the “Die Mauer,” simply “the wall,” as every German speaker on either side of it referred to it, announced that the 20th century’s most aggressive, most murderous, imperialist power, the Soviet Empire, was dying, and that East Bloc Communism’s days were numbered.

Although the “Domino Theory” was supposedly invalid, the fall of East Germany set the dominoes a fallin,’ leading straight to Moscow.

The theory offered by Republicans and conservatives as to why the Soviet Empire fell, has been that the Soviets were bankrupted by the arms race that Ronald Reagan undertook. The communist Left never liked talking about their comrades’ shortcomings, so they typically either ignore the subject, or perversely give the Soviets’ last dictator, Mikhail Gorbachev, credit.

I have a different take on things. I don’t think that the border guards, who over the course of The Wall’s 28 years of existence had slaughtered so many seeking to flee Communism’s tyranny, held fire due to anything Ronald Reagan had done, but rather due to a vacuum of power on their own side.

Octogenarian East German dictator Erich Honecker was ailing and out of the loop, and rather than give direction, Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev was busy being … an international celebrity.

Gorbachev, the former KGB chief, had initiated a policy of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring, reform).

This was the perfect policy for a man who wished to be toppled from power, but Gorbachev wished to be loved, and to remain in power. A Russian leader can be loved by the Russian people, but Gorby was confused, as to what it took to earn their love.

Gorbachev was playing up to the leftwing Western media, who loved him, but he was the dictator of the USSR, not of ABC/CBS/NBC. And as Russian history shows, the Russian people love a tyrant who joyously crushes and murders not only the opposition, but his own, most loyal supporters, as well. In this, the Communists had maintained a national tradition. (In the chapter on Russian history, in his work The Unsleeping Eye: Secret Police and Their Victims, my colleague, historian Robert S. Stove, paints an indelible portrait of the Russian way of leadership.)

And so, Gorbachev was taken for a wimp, and swept out of power. His vanity wasted a hard-won legacy of over 50 million murders, and 72 years of totalitarian terror.

But that legacy lives on … in America!

In America, Republicans were so busy celebrating their “victory” over Communism, that they failed to see that communism—small “c,” since the Moscow-based Party no longer directed action—was becoming ever more powerful in their own country. As time passed, they variously failed to notice what was happening, ignored it, and helped in the takeover, by stabbing in the back those who were fighting the good fight. Even today, Republicans’ most momentous concerns are: 1. Pocketing a little graft; 2. Getting invited to their enemies’ cocktail parties; and 3. Securing sinecures and speaking fees.

Thus it is that today the White House is under occupation by a man who, like Hitler, may not be a citizen of the nation he rules; like Lenin and Stalin, rules under a fake name; and whose political beliefs are a melange of genocidal black supremacy and communism.

Happy anniversary!