Leading article: A revolution that reshaped our world
The broad hopes of 1989 have been amply fulfilled
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Independent Minds
Twenty years ago, great hopes and great fears swept over the continent of Europe and indeed the wider world. Optimism at the possibility of liberation leapt in the hearts of tens of millions living behind the Iron Curtain. But as Berliners tore down the barrier that had separated them for decades, there were also significant concerns about what would emerge from the rubble.
Would the Soviet Union respond by sending in the tanks? Would there be a tidal wave of refugees from east Germany? There were concerns too of a new German dominance of Europe. We have recently learned that Margaret Thatcher even went as far as to lobby Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, to prevent reunification.
The alarm of Mrs Thatcher and others fed into a larger sense of uncertainty over what might emerge from this bloodless revolution. As this newspaper put in a leading article at the time, "euphoria and trepidation mingle ... nobody knows what reefs may lie concealed beneath the new ocean we are entering".
Two decades on, we might look back and wonder: which emotion was more justified, euphoria or trepidation? And how successfully did we navigate those hidden reefs? Russia, of course, let her European empire expire without a shot being fired. And we can say that the fears about the consequences of a united Germany for Europe have not been realised.
A unified Germany has entrenched its position as a dominant continental power, but it is hardly a malign one. This anti-militaristic democracy is a pillar of the single market and the European Union.
The broad hopes of 1989, on the other hand, have been amply fulfilled. The fall of the Berlin Wall led not only to freedom for eastern and central Europeans, but the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. The end of the Cold War meant that the threat of nuclear annihilation considerably receded. Economic and social progress has flowed from liberation. Eight former Soviet Bloc nations have even joined the European Union. Others aspire to.
The revolution of 1989 helped to kick off a new era of economic advance around the globe. Lately we have suffered a significant setback on that front with the banking crisis and global economic downturn. But that cannot overshadow just how far we have come in setting free the economic potential of the world's population.
But, of course, history is never a bloodless process. Even great advances for humankind such as the end of the Soviet Union tend to have terrible side effects. Brutal ethnic wars broke out in the Balkans as the former communist state of Yugoslavia fragmented. Russia sank into a chaos of free-market gangsterism, a brutal experience which sowed the seeds for its present retreat into authoritarianism.
Further afield, China embraced the market economy, but not democracy. The defining moment for the Chinese people in 1989 was not the fall of the Berlin wall, but the slaughter in Tiananmen Square.
The euphoria of that moment twenty years ago has been vindicated. Few would seek to rebuild that wall. But we cannot afford more than a brief moment of satisfaction. Challenges crowd the scene: climate change, Islamist terrorism, economic dislocation, nuclear proliferation. The world managed to pull one wall down. But many remain.
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Copyright 2009 Independent News and Media Limited
Comments
What the neo-lib-lab writer of this leader calls a "revolution" (much like those CIA-paid mob coups called "color revolutions") was called at the time "winning the cold war." The cold war was a covert and proxy conflict between the Yank bloc and the Soviet bloc, which the Yanks and their vassals won with massive borrowing to fund a massive arms buildup (which borrowing ended up bankrupting them), sponsoring international jihadism (which blew up in their faces and got them bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan), and funding reactionary right-wing forces in Poland, who have turned the country into a basket case and a permanent bellyache for the EU.
The "era of economic advance" is known in the real world as the era of massive unemployment and loss of workers' rights, as the "end of communism" became a starting-gun for a race to relocate capitalist investments from the unionized west to the sweatshops of the east, producing record profits and a massive transfer of wealth from workers to capitalists. Unemployment raged in the EU and the US as jobs went south and east, while the filthy rich blew the profits they made from cutting their payroll costs on toxic assets and futures bubbles. The Yanks and Brits tried to pursue their cockeyed "jobless growth" scam by dishing out free money to dead-broke consumers in the form of loan refinancing through subprime mortgages, thus creating an economic IED that turned their "growth" into a bottomless smoking crater.
the true story is :
1. Extremist terrorist group was called ( Urgen and Lehi) aimed to get rid from the British existence in Palestine and killed Lord Moell to force them to leave.
2. England insisted not to permit the Jews refugees from Poland and other European countries to come to Palestine and returned a ship from Europe to come to Palestine in 1946.
3. Maier made stop eating protesting with other people to force England for a ship loaded with Jews refugees coming from Italy to come to Palestine .
4. The Lehi terrorists wearing Arabs costume exploded King David Hotel to force the British to go out of Palestine and killed 91 people 28 British.
5. To justify this explosion; Lehi claimed that they gave the people in the Hotel a 20 MINUTES notice to leave because they intend to explode it.
6. England denied that notice.
7. Maier assured that a suitable notice was sent to them.
8. England insisted on revenge to chase the terrorist of the explosion of King David Hotel and called this operation (The Shark).
9. In 1948 all the terrorists groups were included in the political wire.
10. After 50 years of this event, England exposed a top secret documentary showing that Shtyr a Jewish group was planning to form a cell in England but stopped to put all its terrorist effort in Palestine .
what an irony...!
It is ironic that after cheering the fall of the wall, USA builds their own wall on the Mexican border and funds the Israeli incarceration of the Palestine people.
East Berlin which was considered austere and decrepid 20 years ago, has now become a tourist destination because of the preserved old buildings.
This sort of international rationalisation tipyfies current international politics. It was not correct for Hitler to kill six million Jews and others: let's not forget the others to which no monuments have been erected, it was not correct for Russia to kill almost three times as many Germans, and it is certainly not acceptable that the world looks on while Israel commits its own genocide in the Middle East. But when you have a moderator like the USA, who exists as a result of the genocide against the indigenous American population, what else can you expect!.
Hopefully Obama might make a miniscule contribution to establishing some kind of morality amongst Americans and their administration. Their foreign policy has caused endless hardship across the world, and endangers our planet.(read the recent bombardment of the moon for starters!)
History, in fact, paints Arabs as liberators of Jewish communities in Jerusalem (638), Spain (711), Palestine (1186), and Germany (1940s).
In South Africa we were at the receiving end of similar sentiments and we're still afloat.
I would suggest that British Leaders, and others elsewhere opine and vote with a true sense of morality.
The interests of no country are best served by throwing morality out with expediency.
Ethics, honesty and a belief in humany are best served by integrity.