As befits the capital of Europe’s most prosperous nation, Berlin continues to grow. A new luxury condominium complex is planned along the Spree River. Alas, construction requires knocking down part of the original Berlin Wall.
The development would remove only a small section of the 1400 yards remaining, but emotions run high. Protestors have gathered and one demonstrator complained: “This is history, and it belongs to us Germans. The whole world knows this.”
At least it should.
It is difficult to measure the human cost of communism. Nazism, with its genocidal attempt to eliminate an entire people, holds a special horror. But communism afflicted more nations and killed even more promiscuously. The Black Book of Communism numbers the murdered at more than 100 million. Communism continues to inflict varying levels of hardship, oppression, and death in the few remaining, though wavering, acolytes: China, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam. Only North Korea remains pure, and completely murderous.
The Berlin Wall symbolized the horror of totalitarianism. What kind of a system imprisons its people? On June 12, 1987 Ronald Reagan stood in front of the Brandenburg Gate and said: “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!”
But Berlin’s moment had not yet arrived. Even though Mikhail Gorbachev pushed glasnost and perestroika in the Soviet Union, what President Reagan had called the Evil Empire still loomed over Europe. When 1989 dawned communism obviously was exhausted, but few realized that the system was on its deathbed.
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