20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall

Here are my thoughts on the subject, that I wrote ten years ago in an editorial for the National Post (and that was polished up by my editor, the great John O'Sullivan). I suppose the one thing I'd write differently today is to note that China, in fact, is the most murderous regime the world has known. But the Soviet Union is in second, ahead of Hitler's Reich.

I've put the most important paragraph in bold. Here it is:

Evil, unavenged

Ten years ago, the most murderous dictatorship the world has known was brought to its knees without a shot. Forty-four years of Cold War came to an end when the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989. All through that summer and fall refugees from communism had been flooding through the escape hatch to the West left open by Hungary. Regimes in the Communist satellites had simply faded away one by one in a series of moral revolutions. The doomsday scenario -- an all-out confrontation between the Communist Warsaw Pact and NATO -- never even looked like happening. Communism died like an elderly patient in a geriatric ward -- of opportunistic infections following a massive stroke.

How was this extraordinary collapse brought about? The demoralized, self-doubting America of the 1960s and '70s had been unable to stop a Soviet Union so outwardly sure of itself. As late as the early 1980s the Soviet Union was pursuing an expansionist policy in Afghanistan, southern Africa and central America. It took the political leadership of president Ronald Reagan and and the spiritual example of Pope John Paul II to begin the unravelling of the Russian empire. Mr. Reagan's military and industrial expansion exhausted the weaker Soviet economy as it struggled to match the West weapon for weapon; the Pope's historic visit to Poland rekindled a spiritual fearlessness that official atheism had not been able to extinguish. But the crucial factor was that after years of accommodating leadership, the West was finally led by people who treated communism as an evil but temporary fraud on mankind.

"This wall will fall," Mr. Reagan had prophesied when he visited Berlin in 1987. "It cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom." Two years later, economically stressed, geographically overextended, militarily outmatched and morally rebutted, the Soviet Empire imploded.

Ten years after liberation, however, the truth about Communist oppression is disappearing from public consciousness. Where post-war Germany was de-nazified by the Allies, and where Europeans were deprogramed of Hitler's imprint, no such purification of Eastern Europe has occurred. Most of the architects of the Gulag remain at large, and only tentative steps have been taken to call them to account. By a topical coincidence Egon Krenz, the last Soviet satrap of East Germany, has just been sentenced to prison for his role in killing political dissidents. But Mikhail Gorbachev has called for past atrocities to be ignored: "We should put this all behind us. We should look to the future instead of holding witchhunts."

There is never a case for witchhunts, since witches do not exist. And it may well be that, in the interests of social peace, we do not wish to sentence either former Communist leaders or humble torturers to the long sentences to which we still sentence elderly Nazis. Perhaps the worst punishment we should impose would be to compel the Communist murderers among us to visit the mass graves of their victims, tour the camps where slaves were worked and starved to death, meet their surviving victims and beg their forgiveness. Maybe, however, some custodial sentence should be imposed for what was, after all, mass murder that continued until well into the 1980s. All these are matters to be considered without rancour and in a spirit of seeking truth and justice.

What cannot be permitted is that these crimes against humanity should be thrust down the memory hole because they embarrass former Communist leaders like Mr. Gorbachev and President Boris Yeltsin or the Western politicians who treated Communist collective dictatorships as "normal" or even "progressive" regimes. Our failure to examine the Communist past has fostered a moral climate in which the ideologies that justified dictatorship and terrorism are again presenting themselves for approval. Only the other day the Italian prime minister said he was proud of having been a Communist -- proud, that is, of having given ideological aid and comfort to genocidal regimes that murdered innocent people in the tens of millions. And "post-Communist" parties in Western and Eastern Europe win respectable numbers of votes in elections and even enter governments.

Ten years after the Berlin Wall came down, we still need a Nuremberg trial to achieve justice for the victims of communism. If we do not get one, their murderers will enjoy a retirement -- and the accomplices of their murderers a future -- that they do not deserve.