PrintNovember 9, 2009
Obama's Wall
Twenty years ago today, an architectural monument to human enslavement melted before the eyes of the world: the Wall, the horrific complex of barbed wire, mine fields, police dogs, killing zones, and constant military guards was torn down by East Germans who finally saw a chance for liberty.
There was always something surreal about the Wall. After the Second World War, Germany was been bisected into two more or less equal parts. In the east was the Democratic Republic of Germany (East Germany), a collection of former German territories awarded to Poland in Pomerania, Silesia, and the southern half of East Prussia; and in the west was the Federal Republic of Germany, a free democracy cobbled together from the American, British, and French sectors of conquered Germany.
Long before the Wall was built, millions of Germans had left the eastern half of Germany for the west. The Red Army raped almost every female who came into its clutches (a long-ignored atrocity, which still is as unimportant to feminists as the hellish life of women under Islam). Entire factories were moved from Germany to Russia. Totalitarian governments were set up in Eastern Europe, and it did not matter if the peoples had been the victims of Nazism, like Poles and Czechs, or Nazis allies, like Hungarians and Romanians.
Geographically and psychologically, Communism all came together in East Germany. If the Warsaw Pact nations had invaded the democracies of Western Europe, the attack would have come through the Fulda Gap in Germany. In 1948, Stalin blockaded Berlin in an effort to end the Four Power rule by squeezing out the American, British, and French sections of the city. The Berlin Airlift ended that threat; Stalin gambled and lost. Thirteen years later, in 1961, Khrushchev ordered the construction of the Wall, which prevented citizens of Germany from moving from one part of their nation to another. The Communist world acknowledged that given the choice between Marxist paradise and Capitalist hell, people chose the world of freedom in the West.
In the history of the left there have been several signal events that demonstrate both the madness and the malice of supporting Communism. During the alliance between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, Communist organizations went from hating Hitler one day to blaming the British for the Second World War the next.
The genuine partnership of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia involved much more than simple nonaggression. Members of the Bund in America joined the Communist Party on orders from Berlin. The Soviets shipped tons of odious anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda out of Vladivostok to America. Communist-led unions staged increasingly effective strikes on American munitions industries right up through June 1941. Even before the nonaggression pact of 1939, most people grasped that there was no practical difference between the horror of Hitler and the sadism of Stalin.
When the inmates of East Germany tearfully tore down the Wall in 1989, only those who relished human misery could fail to grasp that the sooner Communism ended everywhere, the better for humanity. Yet today the orphans of Orwell's nightmares still lurk in the halls of colleges, the sanctuaries of hate-spewing churches, and the offices of foundations and government. Jeremiah Wright in late September of this year openly praised Marxism. One must presume that Wright also favors Marx's absolute rejection of God; his embrace of any means, however awful, to reach the Marxist utopia; and his profoundly racist views.
In 1995, the FBI revealed that we had been reading Soviet coded messages to their agents in America, and the Yeltsin government allowed Western scholars access to the internal security files of Soviet espionage in America. Then we could understand the true and terrifying reach of Soviet espionage and influence in America. The ideological professors who never found an anti-Communist they didn't hate should have completely reversed themselves. We now had more than just former Communists pointing fingers at men like Alger Hiss; we knew the specific code names given to Soviet agents (Hiss, for example, was "liberal") and we knew the instructions given to Soviet agents like Hiss and Harry Dexter. We knew that the depth of Soviet penetration of America was greater, not less, than most Americans had believed. But the attitude of academia toward anti-Communism did not change at all. Hollywood has utterly ignored the incredible and true story of the vast Soviet penetration of American government and society.
The moral argument for defending Communism, if it ever existed, died long ago. But the left's addiction to Communism, whether it is manifested in a macabre Michael Moore film celebrating the beneficence of Cuban health care or the equally bizarre Marxism of former Obama czar Van Jones, defies any explanation except a willing infatuation with evil. Moore made his film and Jones made his commitment to Communism after the Berlin Wall fell and after the Soviet Union imploded.
This ghastly practical experiment in human enslavement and thought-control is almost a century old. The theory behind it has been debunked just as surely as Nazi racial theories, once within a fashionable milieu of Social Darwinism, have been rightly tarred with not just error but fathomless hellishness.
The Wall is much more than bricks, mortar, land mines, and attack dogs. The left will not surrender Marx, not even two decades after the slaves of East Germany ripped apart the walls of their prison. The Wall is a mental and moral construction within the psyche of those who worship the sin of envy. The Wall allows those to believe a theory justifying this sin no matter how often experiments prove the theory wholly, utterly, and absolutely false.
The Berlin Wall fell twenty years ago, thank God, but the other Wall has survived the fall of the one in Berlin. This surviving Wall proclaims that freedom is an illusion ("Freedom is Slavery," as Orwell says), honesty is worthless, and individual justice is meaningless. This other Wall keeps Obama from doing anything good, but it does more than that: it keeps Obama from wanting to do anything we consider good.
The Zombies of Marx march on deeper into the night.
Bruce Walker is the author of two books: Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie and The Swastika against the Cross: The Nazi War on Christianity.
