Of all Obama’s symbolic snubs, his refusal to attend ceremonies celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall is the most shameful. The events of 1989 (both of June and of November) make up the greatest symbolic moment in the post-War world, and the Wall the most horrific symbol of the communist tyranny that murdered more than 60 million people, and tortured, enslaved, censored and brutalized many millions more. Against the horrors of communism, the United States stood as a witness on the side of humanity—flawed, aspiring, just humanity—the humanity that spoke in the words of Robert Jackson at Nuremberg, when he called the Nazi leadership “symbols of fierce nationalisms and of militarism, of intrigue and war-making which have embroiled Europe generation after generation, crushing its manhood, destroying its homes, and impoverishing its life. They have so identified themselves with the philosophies they conceived and with the forces they directed that any tenderness to them is a victory and an encouragement to all the evils which are attached to their names. Civilization can afford no compromise with the social forces which would gain renewed strength if we deal ambiguously or indecisively with the men in whom those forces now precariously survive.” The same is true of the legacy of the USSR.
Whatever our imperfections, the United States has tried to stand on the side of democracy against dictatorship. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter sent a delegate to a memorial ceremony commemorating the USSR’s massacre of Poles at Katyn Forest. In 1971, when the United Nations threw the democratic Republic of China out of the United Nations at the demand of the totalitarian People’s Republic of China, American ambassador George Bush walked out arm-in-arm with the Taiwan delegation. When he visited Berlin in 1963, John Kennedy was not afraid to speak for the victims of communist despotism: “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.” When Ronald Reagan went to the Wall, he insisted against the wishes of his state department on inserting into his speech the words “tear down this wall.” These men did not fall for the facile “realism” that proclaims itself too sophisticated and clever for moral issues; they knew that nothing is more realistic than to call things by their right names—to celebrate and cherish and proclaim the goodness of freedom, and to attack the tyrant and the slavemaster with whatever tools one has.
And today, twenty years after the wall came down, and communism’s awful horrors were splattered to the ground for all to see the bloody mess, what does Barack Obama have to say?
