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The fall of the Berlin Wall
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AP Photo/Gero Breloer
As Ludwig von Mises would remind us, economics is human action. Twenty years ago today, human action vanquished oppression as the Berlin Wall fell and communism began to fall with it.
To celebrate the incredible event that many thought would never happen, I picked up William F. Buckley, Jr.’s The Fall of the Berlin Wall, who writes about the following events.
Economic and political freedoms are inextricably linked, as Margaret Thatcher pronounced in Poland in 1988, one year before the opening of the totalitarian eastern bloc countries to the West. The struggle between the communist East and the post World War II free West was as much about economic well-being as it was about personal freedom.
It was a struggle that goes back to when Stalin violated the agreements of Yalta and Potsdam by blockading Berlin in 1948. The United States, under President Truman, responded with a courageous airlift. Although the effort was successful, the seeds of repression in East Germany had been sown under the emboldened de facto head, Walter Ulbricht, who, among other things, saw fit to dictate industrial policy.
As the Soviet Union under Khrushchev became more territorial, the US did not know how to react at first. Both President Kennedy and Senator William Fulbright, perhaps unwittingly, conceded the division of Berlin before it happened. Kennedy later realized his errors and the import of Soviet hegemony when in 1963 he gave his rousing “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech:
“There are many people in the world who really don't understand, or say they don't, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin. There are some who say that Communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin. And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin. And there are even a few who say that it is true that Communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress. … Let them come to Berlin.
“Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us."
The heroic escapes by East Germans as Ulbricht was constructing his Wall attested to Kennedy’s keen observation that it was designed only to keep people in … and oppressed. The inventiveness and resolve of individuals seeking liberty for themselves and their families are remarkable tributes to man’s mind and will. But it is man’s sacrificing his own life to help his countrymen attain freedom, as many did, that sings the triumph of the soul.
Scarcity of goods in the East was well known. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 only amplified the failures of socialism throughout the communist bloc.
It was ten years later that private citizen Ronald Reagan decided during a visit to Berlin that the Wall must come down. In 1982, as President, he took a few steps over the border at Checkpoint Charlie in what was to become the daring prelude to the daring in his challenge at the Brandenburg Gate in 1987:
“General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."
This could not have been possible, however, without Reagan’s recognizing the economic fissures inside the Soviet Union and his policy of pressuring the underlying forces throughout his Presidency. Up to that point, the U.S. had depended upon a precarious combination of external resistance and negotiation.
And it would not have been possible without Pope John Paul II and the Catholic Church’s stout opposition to totalitarianism as a violation of human dignity; first by the Church’s opposition to censorship in Poland, and by the Pope’s support of free trade unions in his Polish homeland. Gorbachev respectfully said about the fall of communism, "It would have been impossible without the Pope."
Nobel economist Milton Friedman observed the fall of the Berlin Wall with this warning: “The formerly totalitarian societies have developed institutions, public attitudes, and vested interests that are wholly antithetical to the rapid creation of the basic economic requisites for freedom and prosperity.” He continued with advice for both the newly freed East and the bloated West: “Countries seeking to imitate the success of the West will make a great mistake if they pattern their policies on the current situation in the West. … Only our attained wealth enables us to support such wasteful, overblown government sectors.”
The current situation in the West, twenty years after freedom burst through the man-made barrier of socialism, obliges us to ask: do we have the resolve today to rebuild the political and economic framework that would preserve and sustain freedom around the world?
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