Jules Crittenden coins it VEE Day – Victory in Eastern Europe Day.
20 years ago today the Berlin Wall came down and Germany was reunited.
Libertas dug up this remarkable video on this historic event:
But, today the Western World again faces grave threats on its freedom. This time many of these dangerous forces come from within.
In America cap and trade legislation, socialized health care, record deficits, record unemployment, government takeover of banks and car companies, record spending, a collapsing economy, a democrat-media complex, anti-American forces in education and Hollywood…
There are a number of threats facing America today.
Melanie Phillips added this today, “We were fools to believe that the fall of the Berlin Wall killed off the far left.”
The end of the Cold War even led some to proclaim that this was ‘the end of history’ – which was to say that liberal democracy was now the dominant and unchallengeable force in the world.
However, the 9/11 attacks on America tragically proved this to be absurdly over-optimistic. The eruption of radical Islamism revealed that, while the West may have been rid of one enemy in the Soviet Union, another deadly foe had risen to take its place. So much is, sadly, all too evident.
But what is perhaps less obvious is that communism did not just vanish in a puff of historical smoke. The Soviet Union was defeated and fell apart, for sure. But the communist ideology that fuelled it did not so much disintegrate as reconstitute itself into another, even more deadly form as the active enemy of western freedom.
Subversive
Soviet Communism was a belief system whose goal was to overturn the structures of society through the control of economic and political life. This mutated into a post-communist ideology of the Left, whose no-less ambitious aim was to overturn western society through a subversive transformation of its culture.To grasp the extent to which this has in fact taken place, we have to go back in time to well before the moment the Berlin Wall fell. The collapse of communism was actually a slow-burning process. Its moral and political bankruptcy became obvious decades before that glorious Berlin day in November 1989.
For many communist fellow travellers, the scales fell from their eyes when the Hungarian uprising was crushed in 1956. Others, over the years, lost faith not just in communism but in its less radical sister, socialism, as their core tenet of ‘equality’ proved itself in a myriad different ways to be the enemy of freedom and justice, with market forces appearing to carry the torch of liberty instead.
But as communism slowly crumbled, those on the far-Left who remained hostile towards western civilisation found another way to realise their goal of bringing it down.
This was what might be called ‘cultural Marxism’. It was based on the understanding that what holds a society together are the pillars of its culture: the structures and institutions of education, family, law, media and religion. Transform the principles that these embody and you can thus destroy the society they have shaped.
The Berlin Wall may be gone but socialism never died.
Maybe that explains why President Barack Obama will not be in Berlin today.
