The wall came tumbling down

The wall came tumbling down from the files of Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe

Read the Files of Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe

They used to tell a joke in West Berlin:

"What are you going to do when the Wall comes down?"

"Find a tree and start climbing."

"Why?"

"Because there won't be any room to stand in the streets."

Like a lot of jokes told on the front lines of the Cold War, that one contained more than a grain of truth. There really wasn't any room to stand — well, not much — when, on that breathtaking night 10 years ago this week, the Central Committee of the East German Communist Party abruptly announced the end of all restrictions on travel to the west.

Almost at once, a flood of East Berliners came rushing through the gates. By the hundreds of thousands they came, surging all night long and through the next day, making their way to the free world on foot, by car — even by subway.

Overnight, two new openings were carved out of the heavily reinforced concrete of the Berlin Wall, and the Jannowitz Bridge underground station -- sealed off 28 years earlier when the wall went up — was hastily reopened. They were still painting the fare schedule when the crowds came hurtling down the steps for the ride westward.

In the first 48 hours, more than a million East Germans crossed over. Many were keen to see the Kurfurstendamm, West Berlin's glittering shopping boulevard — a paradise unknown in the drab and shortage-plagued East. Traffic came to a halt all over the city. And not only there. At Helmstedt, on the border between the Germanies, cars were backed up for 40 miles; some drivers waited 11 hours to drive across to the west.

But nothing could top the tableaux at the Wall itself. The huge crowds of weeping, laughing, cheering Berliners, filling every square foot of what had been a grim no-man's-land just a day earlier. The exuberant young men and women clambering to the top of the wall to dance and drink champagne.

The welcoming throngs of West Berliners, pounding with glee on the hood and roof of each Trabant that came sputtering through the checkpoints. And everywhere, Germans with chisels and hammers and drills, attacking the wall in joy and in triumph.

Schandmauer, the Germans called it: wall of shame. It had been, literally, a monument to evil — the evil of communism. In the 20th century, no menace ever proved more deadly. Not even Nazism. The Nazis murdered millions, but the communists murdered scores of millions. The Nazis terrorized Europe for seven years; the communist horror lasted for more than 70 years.

No single structure could encapsulate all that the communists unleashed in Europe, but the Berlin Wall communicated with perfect clarity communism's political repugnance: It is a system so hateful that no people would willingly live under it.

John F. Kennedy said it best. "Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect," he acknowledged in his 1963 address in Berlin. "But we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in."

It was an electrifying speech, but ultimately a hollow one. Kennedy, overly afraid of triggering a war with the Soviet Union, had refused to act when the East Germans first began to wall off the western sectors of Berlin on Aug. 13, 1961. (His response was to send Vice President Lyndon Johnson on a morale-boosting visit to West Berlin.) He had no intention of going beyond rhetoric in 1963, either.

Twenty-four years later, a different president delivered an equally electrifying speech at the Berlin Wall. But this was a president who matched words with action.

"As long as this gate is closed, as long as this scar of a wall is permitted to stand, it is not the German question alone that remains open, but the question of freedom for all mankind," declared Ronald Reagan on June 12, 1987. "General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace . . . come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

He wasn't waiting for Gorbachev to accept the invitation. Reagan had come to office believing that the Cold War could be won by applying economic, military, and political pressure to the Soviet Union. In a landmark document — National Security Decision Directive 75 — he had laid out the strategy by which the Soviet rulers would be forced to their knees.

On every front, he bore down. From rebuilding the US military to arming freedom fighters in Afghanistan and Central America, from funding Poland's Solidarity movement to harshly denouncing the crimes of communism, Reagan fought the Cold War to win.

By the time he stood before Berlin's Brandenburg Gate in 1987, the Kremlin was under terrible strain and badly demoralized. When the endgame began in Eastern Europe two years later, Mikhail Gorbachev didn't dare send in the tanks. The Evil Empire was finished.

"As I looked out a moment ago," Reagan remarked on that day in Berlin, "I noticed words crudely spray-painted upon the wall, perhaps by a young Berliner: 'This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality.' Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth.

"The wall cannot withstand freedom."

For a time it was the planet's most visible, most nauseating, emblem of tyranny. Today its shards are sold for souvenirs. The Berlin Wall was massive enough to stop a tank.

But, as Reagan foretold, it could not withstand freedom.

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The malaise has returned

The "Malaise" Has Returned featured on Warning Signs by Alan Caruba at Facts-not-Fantasy

Take Caruba's Warning Signs Seriously

The joke is that Jimmy Carter is happy that Barack Obama has replaced him as the worst President of the modern era.

It is a supreme irony that Obama’s campaign theme was “Hope and Change” when Americans have lost a great deal of hope about their personal futures and the only change they want is to see Obama gone from office.

Elected by a narrow margin in 1976, Carter managed in his one term to see his approval ratings fall to twenty-five percent by June 1979. The lesson Americans have to learn over and over again is that liberal policies and programs don’t work.

In six years, the kind of dependence on the government to take care of people from cradle to grave has left the nation with 92 million unemployed or who have stopped looking for a job, entitled 45 million to food stamps, and there is still talk of a “minimum wage” in the interest of “fairness” that simply kills jobs, especially those that used to be filled by young people just entering the workplace.

The worst part of Obama’s presidency is the lies he tells in the belief, apparently, that most Americans are so stupid they won’t see through them.

On July 15, 1979, in an effort to encourage a greater sense of confidence, Jimmy Carter delivered a speech that became known as the “malaise” speech, but which did not include that word. What it did, however, is double down on all the bad policies Carter had pursued and blamed Americans for not accepting them.

By then the economy was in decline, gasoline prices and interest rates had climbed to record levels, and the voters were understandably pessimistic. Iranians had taken U.S. diplomats hostage and they would not be released until Ronald Reagan took the oath of office.

Carter’s speech began by asking “Why have we not been able to get together as a nation to resolve our serious energy problem?” Quite literally there was no need then or now for an energy problem because, as recently noted by the Energy Information Administration, the United States has enough coal to last more than 200 years!

With the development of hydraulic fracturing, fracking, we now have access to more oil than exists in Saudi Arabia.

Obama literally came into office saying he intended to wage a war on coal and he has; using the Environmental Protection Agency to institute regulations that have led to the closing a mines and the shutdown of coal-fired plants that used to produce 50% of the nation’s electricity; now down to 40%. He resisted allowing the drilling for oil in the huge reserves on our east and west coasts.

He has refused to permit the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. These policies have led to the loss of thousands of jobs during the time that followed the 2008 financial crisis.

In his speech, Carter said, “The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.” We would do well to remember that we have been through periods like this before and corrected course.

In 1980 Ronald Reagan would be elected to replace Carter and America prospered through his two terms, returning to being a major superpower, economically and militarily. That’s what conservatism produces.

Carter, however, blamed Americans for the problems of his times. “Two-thirds of our people do not even vote. The productivity of American workers is actually dropping, and the willingness of Americans to save for the future has fallen below that of all other people in the Western world.”

One of Obama’s earliest acts was to visit foreign nations and blame America for many of the world’s problems. Militarily he pulled our troops out of Iraq and he intends to do the same in Afghanistan. He has cut the military budget to the bone and has now defined its mission as one to address “climate change”, not the enemies of our nation.

Obama spent his entire first term blaming George W. Bush for every problem that he did nothing to correct. Indeed, Obama has never seen himself as the real problem, finding anyone else to blame.

Those Americans watching Carter deliver his speech must surely have cringed as he announced that he intended to set import quotas on foreign energy resources. He said he wanted Congress to impose a “windfall profits” tax on the very energy firms that he wanted to get us out of the doldrums and dependency that was causing the problem.

He wanted the utility companies to “cut their massive use of oil by fifty percent within a decade.” He wanted them to switch to coal and now we live in a nation whose President doesn’t want our utilities to use coal. Why? Despite massive evidence to the contrary, he has advocated “renewable” energy, wind and solar, neither of which can ever meet the nation’s needs.

“In closing, let me say this: I will do my best, but I will not do it alone. Let your voice be heard,” said Carter.

In the 1980 election the voter’s voice was heard. Carter was gone and Reagan was our President. With him came his infectious patriotism and optimism. By late 1983 his economic program had ended the recession he inherited from Carter. A similar program would have put an end to what is now routinely called Obama's Great Recession.

We are at a point not dissimilar from the days of Jimmy Carter and with an even greater sense of dissatisfaction and distrust of Barack Obama.

I reach back in our recent history to remind you that on November 4th in our midterm elections and in the 2016 presidential election we can repeat history by ridding the nation of those members of Congress that voted for ObamaCare and have supported President Obama. We must wait to see who the GOP will offer as a presidential candidate, but we have time for that.

We have time to “hope” for a better future and we have the means to make the “change” to achieve it.

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