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E-PrinceThe Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago this week. It concretely divided East and West, and now it figuratively divides our generation from our parents’. Yet one suspects that many college-age American students remained unaware of the anniversary. For such ...(back to the article)
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I am somewhat conflicted about the status of the Berlin Wall as the symbol of communist oppression in the popular imagination. My reservations have to do with the underappreciated fact that the Wall was actually one of communism’s smaller crimes. Between 1961 and 1989, about 100 East Germans were killed trying to escape to the West through Wall. The Wall also trapped several million more Germans in a repressive totalitarian society. These are grave atrocities. But they pale in comparison to the millions slaughtered in gulags, deliberately created famines in the USSR, China, and Ethiopia, and mass executions of kulaks and “class enemies.” The Berlin Wall wasn’t even the worst communist atrocity in East Germany. As historian Norman Naimark has documented, Soviet occupation troops in East Germany raped some 2 million German women, executed thousands of political prisoners (only a minority of whom were Nazis or guilty of war crimes), and imposed extensive forced labor on much of the population. It is true, of course, that German troops committed comparable, and sometimes even greater, atrocities in the USSR. But the one set of wrongs in no way justifies the other. Forced labor and concentration camps continued on a substantial scale even after the Soviets established an “independent” East German state in 1949.
It is important to remember the Berlin Wall and the lessons it teaches. But doing so is only one small part of the task of rectifying the longstanding neglect of communist crimes.
And yet in academic circles one can still proudly call oneself a communist.
the berlin wall came down so that socialism could flourish throughout the world
This is a really bad article Brian. You start off with broad generalizations that don't even have any relation to the wall and embarrass yourself.
"Now, it’s only the subject of historical or political discussion." The Soviet Union is completely irrelevant, yes, I am sure many scholars here at Princeton agree with this.
"Anything the United States did abroad, it did in a strictly bipolar world." Yes, the Cold War was the pressing issue, but the world wasn't completely bipolar. But then, I too enjoy ignoring such minor things as China, France, India, Japan etc.
"The presence of Soviet communism even reached into domestic politics, on issues like economics or civil rights." - Joseph McCarthy.
"The cause of freedom, though, remains a pressing one from North Korea to Iran to Burma. The leaders of our parents’ and grandparents’ generations understood the implications of an evil regime like the Soviet Union, but we can’t entirely understand it the same way they did without the foil of Moscow." - Brian's Axis of Evil.
"President Obama’s foreign policy approach of heavily criticizing America sharply breaks with a tradition of foreign policy that stressed what America could do." - Rush Limbaugh
"Our generation can feel free to ignore the questions that occupied presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to George H.W. Bush only because Soviet communism is dead." - So the Soviet Union didn't exist before FDR or are we just talking about the Cold War?
On top of these blunders, Brian, you've ignored the most obvious thing: the Russian Federation. In fact, you didn't even mention it once. I'll just leave you with that, because it is just so inept.