Roger Pilon on the fall of the Berlin Wall

The Berlin Wall fell for many reasons, ranging from the internal contradictions of communism to the moral clarity and courage of communism’s opponents.  Above all, however, the Cold War marked a fundamental clash of ideas.  And nothing symbolized that clash more starkly than the Berlin Wall.  It was erected not to keep West Germans out of the “workers paradise” but to keep East Germans trapped behind the wall, many of whom were mercilessly shot as they tried to flee their brutal captors.  What greater symbol could there be of the difference between freedom and oppression.

Yet for all that time there were apologists and temporizers in the West.  “Detente,” “moral equivalence,” “convergence” — “we are now free of that inordinate fear of communism,” President Carter said in 1977, even as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Bukovsky, Natan Sharansky, and others were documenting the horrors of communism.  And only two years before the wall fell, as the Wall Street Journal notes editorially this morning, we heard CBS’s Dan Rather say, “Despite what many Americans think, most Soviets do not yearn for capitalism or Western-style democracy.”

Which brings us to President Obama....  Where has he been on the great human rights issues of our day?  When reformers were being brutalized in Iran, both over the summer and last week, he was slow, at best, to find a voice.  When the Dalai Lama visited last month, Obama declined to see him — the first time, in 10 visits since 1991, that a U.S. president has done so.  He’s had us join the U.N. Human Rights Council, the main mission of which seems to be to criticize the U.S. and Israel while lending credibility to its own oppressive members.  There’s more, but on balance it’s a sorry record.

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