1989 happened because 1979 made it so
Indeed, the line between 1979 and 2019 is also clear. — De Souza
The coverage of the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which occurred earlier this month, was disappointing. Much of it made it seem as if the wall just fell down, like a weathered old barn. But it did not fall down; it was torn down. Little coverage seemed interested in why and how.
The error was made in high places. Before the anniversary, Germany’s foreign minister, Heiko Maas, put out an official statement in which he paid tribute to the Gdansk shipyard workers and Prague’s Charter 77. But mostly he offered Euro- speak about multilateral efforts to combat climate change.
Maas, like so many others, did not acknowledge that the key turning point in the Cold War, the events that made 1989 happen in the way that it did — non- violently through a moral revolution — began 10 years earlier in 1979.
In 1979, St. John Paul II visited Poland. In 1979, Margaret Thatcher was elected prime minister of the United Kingdom.
The former marked the acceleration of a revolution of the spirit, a moral defiance of the suffocating atheism and materialism that Moscow imposed throughout the evil empire.
America’s leading Cold War historian, John Lewis Gaddis, wrote that “when John Paul II kissed the ground at the Warsaw Airport on June 2, 1979, he began the process by which communism in Poland — and ultimately everywhere — would come to an end.”
The Yale professor is not Catholic, by the way. It’s not a case of special pleading. What happened that June day?
A million Poles gathered in and around Warsaw’s Victory Square for a public Mass — unthinkable in communist Poland except that it could not be denied to a Polish pope. As John Paul preached the true story of Poland — a history of a people formed by their faith — a rhythmic chant went up, over and over: “We want God! We want God!”
Communism was killed in Poland that day, but the evil empire was a fearsome thing and it took 10 years before the burial would take place. In 1989, Poland — and East Germany, and Hungary, and
Czechoslovakia — would be freed. Two years later the Soviet empire itself would be no more, and Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Ukraine would join the free nations of the world.
Thatcher represented the stronger international resolve which brought pressure to bear on communism from without. Along with President Ronald Reagan, she strengthened the NATO alliance against the Soviet Union, and challenged Soviet expansionism around the world.
John Paul represented the pressure exerted on communism from within, from the enslaved peoples of the Warsaw Pact who declined to any longer co- operate in their own oppression.
It is certainly true that eventually communism would have collapsed from its own contradictions. But a lot of suffering and bloodshed would have accompanied a decades- long rotting out. 1989 happened because 1979 made it so.
Indeed, it is possible to look at a contrasting possible history if we take into account another titanic figure of 1979, Deng Xiaoping. Like John Paul, Deng took office in 1978, but it was in 1979 that he began his liberalizing economic reforms, lifting a few fingers of the dead hand of totalitarianism from the Chinese people.
Deng saved China for the communist party by jettisoning parts of the communist project. He kept though the preferred option of the tyrant — brutal repression of the people. So in June 1989, while Poland was enjoying its first free elections, the Chinese communists unleashed the army in Tiananmen Square to massacre their own people.
China did not get in 1979 a Thatcher from without or a John Paul from within. It got Deng, which is why 1989 was different in Beijing than it was in Berlin. Indeed, the line between 1979 and 2019 is also clear. The Soviet Union no longer exists to suppress the human rights of its citizens. Meanwhile, China is operating concentration camps on a massive scale for its own Muslim citizens, and brutalizing democracy protesters in Hong Kong.
The commemorations of the Berlin Wall, in forgetting 1979, demonstrate not only a lack of proper understanding of 1989, but even 2019. The year 1979 brought us great champions of freedom, and new kinds of tyrants. In addition to Deng in Beijing, the Ayatollah returned in 1979 to Iran, but that history of tyranny belongs in another column.
By all means, celebrate 1989. But remember 1979, too.