Thirty-five years ago, the son of a great historian helped make history when he asked the question that triggered the demolition of the most grotesquely expressive artifact of the Cold War.
My friend Daniel Johnson, son of the author of Modern Times and then a reporter for London’s Daily Telegraph, flew to Berlin on November 9, 1989. East Germans were engaging in mass protests against their oppression while others were fleeing the oxymoronic German Democratic Republic through a newly opened border with Hungary. Chaos reigned, and the East German regime held a televised press conference to try to get the situation under some sort of control. The communist party spokesman, Günter Schabowski, began by announcing that the party’s central committee had decided that East Germans could both travel and emigrate to the West, which had been forbidden since the Berlin Wall was built in 1961.
The questions came flying from the reporters: When would this take effect? Did this new regulation apply to Berlin, divided by the Wall for almost three decades?
Schabowski lurched beyond what he was supposed to say and responded, yes, the new rule was in force immediately, and yes, it seemed to apply to Berlin. Fluent in German, Daniel Johnson then posed the question that helped change the world: “Herr Schabowski, what will happen to the Berlin Wall now?” Schabowski, who hadn’t been told what to say if this came up, hesitated for a few seconds and then changed the subject.
But to those present and those watching on TV, “the pfennig [penny] dropped,” as Johnson later wrote. If there were free travel and emigration to the West, what was the point of the Wall? It was finished, and in a few hours, jubilant East Berliners, having watched this in amazement on their TVs, had taken sledgehammers to the obscenity that had long divided their city, and that over 100 people had died trying to get across, under, over, or around. In the early hours of the next morning, East and West Berliners were dancing in jubilation atop Die Mauer (the Wall) in front of the Brandenburg Gate. (The mind-boggling scenes on NBC that night and over the next days were made possible because producer Maralyn Gelefsky had somehow, amidst the chaos, found a cherry-picker from which mounted cameras could display the jubilation below.)
The auto-liberation of east-central Europe had begun in earnest in June 1989, when semi-free Polish elections returned anti-communist Solidarity candidates to all the contested seats in the Polish parliament–which, three months later, elected Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a longtime Catholic intellectual activist become Solidarity leader, prime minister. Other dominos in the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact system began to fall, and then came the night of November 9-10, 1989, when the breaching of the Wall by celebrating Germans made what came to be known as the Revolution of 1989 irreversible.
It took another two months to complete the job, but when the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia put Václav Havel in that country’s presidency on December 29, 1989, it was well and truly finished. Over the next two years, brave souls in Lithuania, Ukraine, and elsewhere completed the dismantling of history’s greatest tyranny when their declarations of independence dissolved the Soviet Union.
The Revolution of 1989 was a unique experience in the bloody history of a century in which mass violence was the typical means of effecting great social change. Romania excepted, the revolution was nonviolent, and even there, the violence was constrained.
Why was that the case?
Because a revolution of conscience had rippled through east-central and eastern Europe in the 1980s. People determined to “live in the truth” rather than submitting further to the communist culture of the lie created an effective, nonviolent resistance movement, inspired in no small part by Pope John Paul II’s history-bending pastoral pilgrimage to Poland in June 1979. That movement had its martyrs–Blessed Jerzy Popiełuszko in Poland, Jan Potocka in Czechoslovakia–but its strength of conviction ultimately proved stronger than the truncheons, water hoses, and even tanks of the various community regimes. (The rich spiritual and moral texture of those years is brilliantly captured in the documentary produced by the Knights of Columbus, Liberating a Continent.)
Speaking to the United Nations in 1995, John Paul II credited the Revolution of 1989 to those who had been willing to “take the risk of freedom.” It was not a freedom of license that he praised and which those nonviolent revolutionaries had lived, but a freedom of living in the truth–the truth about the human person, human community, human origins, and human destiny. There are crucial lessons in that for us today.
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We read: “It was not a freedom of license that [John Paul II] praised and which those nonviolent revolutionaries had lived, but a freedom of living in the truth–the truth about the human person, human community, human origins, and human destiny. There are crucial lessons in that for us today.”
And, in his day, St. Augustine also warned us that real freedom “cannot be reduced to a sense of choice: it is (instead) freedom to act fully. . .” And, to resist what he termed “fantastica fornicatio”… The prostitution of the mind to its own fantasies, whether it be communism, or now gender theory and the abortion culture—or ultimately the interior “sense of choice” prior to any concrete action transposing the will toward evil in place of knowledge of the good (pride: the primal sin “original” to ourselves).
Wonderful reflection, as always, Mr. Weigel, on this of all days.
Particularly since Paul Johnson is one of my favorite historians.
I’ve never heard the story of his son’s role in the destruction of the Berlin Wall.
And yet, as Solidarity participant and political philosopher Ryszard Legutko describes in “The Demon in Democracy”, those heady days were soon eclipsed by the new totalitarianism of ideological liberalism, permitting no competition under the guise of “Democracy”.
The yoke of Western “liberalism” is harder to bear than communism was at times.
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/cardinal-parolin-congratulates-trump-urges-him-to-work-for-defense-of-life-and-world-peace/
When it comes to Truth and Love, one cannot claim That Truth and Love falls somewhere between two extremes, for The Truth Is, Perfect Love does not divide, it multiplies, as in the Miracle of The Laves and Fishes.
“The yoke of Western “liberalism” is harder to bear than communism was at times.”
This is because first principles matter, and when we no longer recognize that it Is God , Who Endows us with our inherent Unalienable Right to Life, to Liberty, and to The Pursuit of Happiness, and to secure these rights, “Governments are instituted by Men, deriving their just (according to what is morally right) powers from the consent of the governed…”, and desire to render onto Caesar or oneself, what belongs to God(with the capital G), anything can become permissible, including the destruction of a beloved son or daughter residing in their mother’s womb.
And thus with any form of liberalism sans God, one can easily become a slave to sin, as immoral acts become permissible, which is consistent with any ideology that denis God Is The Author Of Love, Of Life, And Of Marriage, not Caesar, King John, or John Locke.
“When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God, as the image of God at the core of his being. The defence of the family is about man himself. And it becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappears. Whoever defends God is defending man.” – Pope Benedict’s Christmas Address 2012
Only someone unfamiliar with the horrors of communism would make a statement like that. Read Alexander Solzhenitsyn for some good examples.
These thoughts beg the question as to what actions we may need to take to protect our freedoms in the coming days now that the election is over.
People need to be vigilant. The progressives you support have been guilty of undermining our Constitutional rights and freedoms for years at this point. People have finally had enough and have held your progressive politicians accountable. Our freedoms are far more sound right now than they would be had the election turned out differently.
The election of Trump heralds the hope that the evil democrat NWO war with Russia will be ended.