Begin by savoring a clip of President Ronald Reagan's 1987 Berlin address (3:59) (full text) in which he called for Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down that wall!" Then savor the 1963 clip of JFK's "Ich bin ein Berliner!" speech (4:41). (For full text of JFK speech scroll down in this link.) Both were cheered heartily by the Berliners. As LFTC has earlier noted, JFK's translators blew it. In German, "ein Berliner" is a dough-nut, and thus JFK said "I am a dough-nut!" But Berliners, who say "Ich bin Berliner" to indicate residency there, cheerfully let it pass. JFK immediately followed with "I appreciate my interpreter translating my German" and at the end repeated his formulation. JFK did better later on in his speech, proclaiming "Lach sie nach Berlin kommen!"--proper German for the theme of his speech that day: calling to those searching for where the center of the struggle between freedom and tyranny lay by proclaiming "Let them come to Berlin!"
Rich Lowry of NRO explains why Barack Obama is skipping the 20th anniversary celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In a nutshell, 44 is just not, as they say, into it. It's not a "liberal thing": Liberal columnist Pete Hamill recounts his Berlin Wall journeys, then and now. Euro-historian Timothy Garton Ash looks back at 1989 and sees in what he calls Europe's greatest year ever the continent's greatest triumph (freeing Eastern Europe), that year's greatest surprise (China) and tragedy emerging from the chrysalis (Islamism's fatwa against novelist Salman Rushdie, presaging 9/11/2001), all at the same time, in the world's most consequential year since 1945:
In 1989, Europeans proposed a new model of nonviolent, velvet revolution, challenging the violent example of France in 1789, which for two centuries had been what most people thought of as "revolution." Instead of Jacobins and the guillotine, they offered people power and negotiations at a round table.
With Mikhail S. Gorbachev's breathtaking renunciation of the use of force (a luminous example of the importance of the individual in history), a nuclear-armed empire -- which had seemed to many Europeans as enduring and impregnable as the Alps, not least because it possessed those weapons of total annihilation -- just softly and suddenly vanished.
But then, as if this were all somehow too good to be true, 1989 also brought us Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's fatwa on Salman Rushdie -- firing the starting gun for another long struggle in Europe, even before the last one was really over.
Daily Telegraph columnist Janet Daley says the West has failed to learn the economic lesson of 1989, i.e., that Marxism had to eventually collapse but a true capitalist system will endure. A WSJ op-ed explains how Italy's conviction of 23 CIA officers for "rendering" from Italy to Egypt a terrorist wanted in Italy will undermine US-European cooperation in the hunt for terrorists. Thus another 1989 lesson is lost: fight against the common enemy, not among ourselves.
Claudia Rosett explains why Obama's lack of understanding of how & why the Wall was dismantled impairs his ability to cope with today's challenges:
The threats besetting the world today involve essentially the same old conflict: freedom vs. tyranny. Today's variations on the Berlin Wall can be discerned in places where women face the coerced wearing of the veil; in the prison camps and firewalls of China; in the gulag and murderous border patrols of North Korea; in the rising police state in Russia; the missionary thuggery of Venezuela's Chavista "revolution"; the global tentacles of terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and al-Qaida; the security forces that murdered protesters this spring in the streets of Tehran.
Today's Wall looms in such ventures as the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs, both involving not only the potential use of monstrous weapons by murderous regimes, but nuclear extortionist leverage--which these regimes are already using to bring free nations to heel.
In the matter of facing down such threats, the Cold War, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, has plenty to teach--especially to a free world with current leaders too much given to disparaging capitalism and downplaying freedom.
CR adds:
The West has by now traveled a long road--from Reagan, who demanded, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," to Obama, who in Berlin last year recast this piece of history as one big group hug: "A wall came down, a continent came together and history proved there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one."
Unfortunately, it is not the world standing "as one" that brings down such walls. There has always been good and evil. The attempt to straddle such divides, as Washington is now doing with Tehran, is an invitation to be torn apart. The Berlin Wall fell because brave people--on both sides of it--took a clear stand against tyrants and for freedom. That's still how the world works, and America's own fortunes still depend on whether our leaders live up to the principles that brought down the Berlin Wall, or sideline them as yesterday's news.
Here is an NRO symposium (prints 5 pages) on the anniversary. Historian David Pryce-Jones recalls the role accident played in the fall of the Wall. This William Buckley NRO link offers WFB's elegant takes on the event, from his book on the subject.
Ex-Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson recalls the joy in Berlin then, and the inspiration Reagan's call had given to those captive behind the Wall:
Ronald Reagan, I recognized in that Berlin hotel room, had given something to people in the East, something difficult to describe but tangible all the same. In predicting that Communism would end up on the ash heap of history, in describing the Soviet Union as an evil empire--in insisting that the West remained fundamentally vibrant and good, the Soviet Union backward and corrupt--Reagan had spoken the unspeakable. He had done what no one could do. And he had thus created for people in the East a new space for thought and feeling, a new sense of the possible.
Reagan had never been alone in calling for freedom. Pope John Paul II, Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel and others had all denounced the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe, demanding human rights. Yet if an American president could call on the leader of the Soviet Union to tear down the Berlin Wall--if that could happen, if it were true--then what else might prove possible?
Ken Duberstein, then the White House deputy chief of staff, was in the limousine with Reagan as the president drove to the Wall to deliver the address. Years later, Duberstein told me what took place as they arrived. Reagan told Duberstein he was determined to deliver the controversial passage. Then the president smiled. "The boys at State are going to kill me," Reagan said. "But it's the right thing to do."
Alas, 44 seems to listen too much to "the boys (and girls) at State" to reprise with Iran what Reagan did over East Germany. In a touch of pure irony, Reagan's 1987 Berlin call to Gorbachev came on Jun 12--the very date in 2009 that Iran's fraudulent election was held. And 44 responded not like Reagan but like the striped-pants set at Foggy Bottom.
For her part, Angela Merkel expressed her thanks to America Tuesday last week, first at a White House photo op with 44, and then in her address to a joint session of the Congress (the first in over 50 years for a German leader). Here is a neat Merkel quote from the address, for those pressed for time.
My own favorite recollection is another key moment, on October 25, 1989--just 15 days before the Wall was toppled. Soviet spokesman Gennady Gerasimov announced on American TV that Moscow's new policy for Warsaw Pact nations was the "Frank Sinatra 'My Way' Doctrine"--each country could go its own way. This sent a powerful signal to all Berliners. And the rest was, as they say, history--1989 became annus mirabilis for all those who cherish expansion of human freedom within a framework of ordered liberty.
Bottom Line. At the end of his Berlin speech, JFK proclaimed: "All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin." Had President Obama understood either JFK or Reagan, in their Berlin speeches, he today would proclaim everyone a citizen of Tehran, and make Tehran the locus of today's struggle for freedom.
Comments