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1989: A Pivot Of History

1989 was the year the Berlin Wall fell. I remember exactly where I was when I saw it happen. I had been following the story for a month, of the various changes in the East German Government, and the sudden “vacations” that more and more East Germans were taking in Hungary, who had announced earlier that year that they were no longer guarding their border. I was riding home on BART one night in November of that year when I read that line and thought to myself “If they aren’t guarding the border, then there is no border”. I said it to myself and understood what I meant, and yet, I simply could not accept that the world had changed. You see, “the wall” had always been a part of my life; I was born shortly after it was created. I always thought the wall would go on forever, and that the first signs of World War III would be the Soviet tanks driving through it. The wall marked the beginning of “enemy territory” both as a border and as a way of doing things. They needed the wall to keep people in, not keep people out, its what defined our two sides.

As I walked home that night, November 9th, that thought kept going through my head “ there is no border anymore, how can that be? Surely the Soviets will clamp down on this like they did in Hungary in the 1950’s”. When I made it home, I found my wife sitting in front of the TV, crying.

“Look – Look at what is happening!!!”. She said pointing to the scene on TV. There they were, thousands of Berliners, East and West; crawling over ‘no mans land’, standing on top of the wall with sledgehammers and Champaign breaking it down in full view of and sometimes with the help of the people who once shot you just for trying to cross that same section of land.

“The war is over” I said almost without thinking. “The war is finally over”, and then I broke down and cried. Not the Cold War, Not World War II, but all of it from the beginning of World War I. The “Great European War” that made up the majority of the 20th century was over. My whole life had been spent not only in the shadow of the wall, but in the shadow of a war that started in 1914 and had never quiet finished. It had been the key event in the lives of both my father and my grandfather, and up till that point that war that started in August 1914 had been the historical event that served as the core of my life, but it was to be no more. I felt in just that instant of understanding that a thousand pound weight had been lifted from my shoulders. The burden of the never-ending fight between civilizations had been lifted.

I never expected that it would end that way. I fully expected like millions of other people did, that the great battle between Communism and Capitalism could only end in the deaths of millions, if not billions of people, and with it all life on earth. It was just a matter of time, each day was a gift, and at any moment, it could all end because of a simple misunderstanding or because someone thought for just a second that they could get the advantage over the other. In the twinkling of an eye, a far off civilization in space would see only a wiggle on the face of their telescopic instruments as the bombs fell around our globe and what had once been life on this planet would be gone forever.

In the years before 1989 I watched the two different TV miniseries that gave us a view of what life would be like if the great nuclear exchange ever occurred, or what would it be like to live under Soviet domination in the United States. It was a set of images that none of us needed to see on TV, we knew it already. I knew it because we lived at the edge of a SAC base, and I knew what it meant when the bombers and tankers were scrambled late in the night. Each time it happened, I lay in bed and wondered if there would be a world wake up to.

But when I saw the people on the wall, I knew it was over. I didn’t just see people topping a monument of oppression; I saw a vision of a future I could never before have even hoped to imagine. The nightmare had ended. No one came out and said "The Soviet Union is gone", that Communism had just folded its cards and went home. But we knew. We all knew. They knew.

1989 was an amazing year, but at the time we really didn’t know it. Looking back, we wonder why none of us could then see it for what it was. In June of 1989, We watched an “insurgency” take on a dictatorial militaristic power. I watched unfold, not quite sure what it was I was watching at the time. History is funny that way, you don’t really know its history when it’s happening, it isn’t till you look back that you see it for what it was.

This “insurgency” was in another Communist country. It was in China. It was Tiananmen Square. That year, I watched a man stand in defiance of a row of tanks, with nothing but determination in his heart and a handful of grocery bags. He dared them to run him over. They blinked. I watched the people of China make “the goddess of liberty” and she looked to me a whole lot like the big green French woman who lives in New York Harbor. The message wasn’t for us, but I got the message anyway. These people wanted to be free. They wanted to be human beings, rather than the furniture like property of the communist state. I didn’t have to think twice who’s side I was on or why.

I was in San Francisco at the time. I remember talking to people about what I was seeing in Tiananmen Square. To me, it was all the things the left was talking about. People taking charge of their lives people trying to be free. That was what the people I worked with talked about all the time.

I was wrong. When I said that Tiananmen Square showed that the Chinese government wasn’t really a “peoples revolution” but just another dictatorial power, what I got back was “Tiananmen Square is just like Kent State, look what the US did when it was threatened, were just as bad as they are, who are we to talk”.

My head spun around like the head of a Warner brothers cartoon character would.

I asked them if they honestly thought that the people who ran over civilians with tanks was anything like what happened at Kent State, and they said “yes, of course it was”. I asked them if they thought if the Chinese people who ran over civilians with tanks would be put on trial or get medals and they called me a "right wing crazed fascist sympathizer" and quickly changed the subject, a pattern I would see repeated even today.

You see, I was on the side of the people protesting the abuse of power, willing to putting their lives on the line to make their point, but my colleagues were just on the other side. To them, the “revolution wasn’t the man in front of the tank, it was the state represented by the uniform of the men driving the tanks” that mattered to them.

However, In 1989, Tiananmen happened in June, exposing Communist China not as a people paradise, but just another dictatorship gulag, then the Berlin Wall fell in November; and finally the 'hammer and sickle' came down over the Kremlin a few months later.

That had to have been a real tough year to be a Socialist. I worked with and went to school with a great number of people who really and truly believed in the socialist vision of the world. At lunch, we would discuss the obvious deficiencies of capitalism against what they felt was the righteousness of Socialism; I would even read the “Socialist Worker Daily” as it was sold in newspaper stands throughout San Francisco, and the irony of "buying" the Socialist Daily Worker was never lost on me. To me, “Socialist Worker Daily” was funnier than The Onion but to my leftist friends, it was an authority like the friggin New York Times (which they actually thought of as “right wing”, so it just goes to show you…).

1989 was the year I finally figured out I was playing on a different team. I was obsessed with that picture of the man in front of the tanks at Tiananmen. I had it cut out and put into my desk at work. My leftist coworkers just sneered, but there was a truth in that picture that I could never quite see before. That people will go to extreme ends and take risks just to be as free as I am.

Today, some people think the Iraqi insurgents are like the guy in front of the Chinese tanks. I think they are wrong, I think the insurgents are like the people driving the Chinese tanks in 1989. The insurgents want to enslave their people as if it were a divine right; the Iraqi people just want to live in freedom as I do. When the Iraqis went to the polls in defiance of the insurgents; that was on a par with the man who stood in front of the tanks, only to me it was like 8 million people standing in front of Saddam’s tanks. The Iraqi people dared the insurgents to kill them. And they blinked, and today, the insurgents are negotiating through back channels their terms of surrender.

Because of 1989, I know whose side I’m on and why, but I often wonder if the left really understands whose side they are on or what the cost is in real human terms for their thinking that way. They always make a fetish of “standing up for the little man”, but all to often the left stands for today is tyranny and dictatorship. The left loves a strongman and its no accident all the worlds remaining dynastic dictators are all Socialists.

I also wonder what they will say in 10 years time about the events of 2004. Today, we all, left and right think of the events of 1989 as “a good thing”, but at the time the socialists around the world were pretty dour about the whole thing. I suspect in 10 years we will all look back at 2004 and think of it was a turning point and a “good thing” the left will agree, and go so far as to say it was their idea all along and Bush was really being bi-partisan by following their ideals but that he had to be dragged kicking and screaming into being a “liberator”.

But I know better.

Posted @ February 24, 2005 09:40 PM | History file

Posted by: VietPundit at February 25, 2005 01:58 PM

Posted by: stumpjumper at February 25, 2005 03:14 PM

Posted by: Stuart Berman at February 26, 2005 04:20 PM