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David Harsanyi starts his article on the twentieth anniversary of Eastern Europe’s liberation by telling the story of his parents’ escape. He then discusses the liberation.
…On Sept. 11, 1989, as an Associated Press story from the time relays, “thousands of East Germans, crying, laughing and shouting with happiness, poured into Austria from Hungary early today en route to freedom in West Germany . . . .”
The Hungarian government had opened its border with Austria and allowed citizens from other communist nations to leave. This decision triggered a series of events (from 1989 to 1991) that ended a 40-year war that pitted liberal democracies against communist tyrannies. The lack of blood spilled in this victory was, by any historical standard, an anomaly.
The question today is: Do we give this incredible historical achievement the attention it deserves?
This month is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the most lasting image of victory. Matt Welch of Reason magazine recently pointed out that “November 1989 was the most liberating month of arguably the most liberating year in human history, yet two decades later the country that led the Cold War coalition against communism seems less interested than ever in commemorating, let alone processing the lessons from, the collapse of its longtime foe.” …
In the Telegraph, UK, Nile Gardiner comments on Obama’s “shameful absence from Berlin”.
…It is shameful when the US president can’t even be bothered to show up at a ceremony marking one of the most momentous events of modern times. As Rich Lowry wrote in his column for National Review, “Obama’s failure to go to Berlin is the most telling nonevent of his presidency.” Newt Gingrich put it well when he described Obama’s foolhardy decision as “a tragedy”. Writing in The Washington Examiner, Gingrich declared:
“To commemorate, after all, is to remember. And Americans need to remember, not just that the Wall fell, but why it fell. We need to remember that the Berlin Wall was the symbol of more than just the Cold War, more than just the division of Europe. It was the symbol of an evil ideology that denied human dignity, denied truth, and respected only power. When the Wall fell, truth and human dignity, in a rare moment in the 20th century, triumphed over power. But that victory is not permanent.” …
…The Obama administration has gone to great lengths to avoid doing anything to offend the Russians, as part of its “reset” strategy. This was exemplified by its monumental surrender to Moscow by reversing the American policy of installing Third Site missile defences in Poland and the Czech Republic. In effect, Barack Obama threw key US allies in eastern and central Europe under the bus in order to placate Russian demands. The White House no doubt calculated that Obama’s presence in Berlin would be interpreted by hawks in Russia as provocative triumphalism on the part of the Americans. Embarrassingly for President Obama, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev actually showed up at the Berlin celebrations, while the leader of the free world was nowhere to be seen. …
Toby Harnden is next in the round of criticism, posting in the Telegraph, UK.
There was one world leader absent for today’s commemorations marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Surprisingly enough, it’s President Barack Obama, who found time last year to give a campaign speech there last year, which Der Spiegel summed up as “People of the World, Look at Me”. …
…Marty Peretz is gloomy about what his non-appearance says about Obama’s world view and his approach on Iran. Newt Gingrich calls the failure to go to Berlin “a tragedy”. Paul Rahe at Powerline wonders if Obama is signalling his administration’s intent to enact a “process of turning its back on our erstwhile allies in Europe”. Certainly, he seems to have a prickly relationship with Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Whatever the reasons, it’s another revealing mistake by Obama. This deserved to be marked by more than just a proclamation penned by a staffer:
Rick Richman posts in Contentions on Obama’s video clip sent to Berlin. Apparently the fall of the Berlin Wall was really about Obama.
Last summer, Berlin served as a backdrop for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, as he gave his citizen-of-the-world speech that began by noting that he did not “look like the Americans who’ve previously spoken in this great city.” His speech referred to Berlin as a place “where a wall came down,” without describing how that happened (other than through a world that “stands as one”) — and without mentioning the names of the prior U.S. presidents whose Berlin speeches were part of the reason the wall eventually came down.
Yesterday, the heads of state of Germany, France, England, and Russia stood as one in Berlin, marking one of the most historic days of the 20th century. President Obama chose not to attend and sent a two-minute video instead. In it, he noted that “few would have foreseen [on that day in 1989] that a united Germany would be led by a woman from Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent.”
There used to be a newscaster in Los Angeles whose legendary self-regard generated an oft-repeated description: he thought “the news was there to bring you him.” The fall of the Berlin Wall apparently played a similar role in the history of Barack Obama.
Fouad Ajami reviews the threat that has arisen since the fall of the Wall.
…It would stand to reason that 45 years of vigilance would spawn a desire for repose. The disputations of history had ended, we came to believe. Such was the zeitgeist of the ’90s, the Nasdaq era, a decade of infatuation with globalization. The call of blood and soil had receded, we were certain then. Bill Clinton defined that era, in the way Ronald Reagan had defined his time. This wasn’t quite a time of peace. Terrorists were targeting our military installations and housing compounds and embassies. A skiff in Aden rode against one of our battleships. But we would not give this struggle the label—and the attention—it deserved.
A Harvard academic had foreseen the shape of things to come. In 1993, amid this time of historical and political abdication, the late Samuel P. Huntington came forth with his celebrated “Clash of Civilizations” thesis. With remarkable prescience, he wrote that the end of the Cold War would give rise to civilizational wars.
He stated, in unadorned terms, the threat that would erupt from the lands of Islam: “The relations between Islam and Christianity, both Orthodox and Western, have often been stormy. Each has been the other’s Other. The 20th century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relation between Islam and Christianity.” …
Jay Nordlinger, in the National Review, wrote an article about Charles Krauthammer. Did you know that he used to be a liberal?
…After the defeat of Carter-Mondale, Krauthammer joined the staff of The New Republic. In fact, he started on Inauguration Day, when Reagan and Bush were being sworn in, and the American hostages in Iran were being released. While at The New Republic, he wrote sterling essays of tough-minded liberalism. People of various stripes felt they had to read them, and wanted to read them. By 1984, he was not so Democratic — he did not vote in the election that year. He would have voted for Reagan, in a very tight race: if he had had some theoretical decisive vote. But he stayed home from the polls out of respect for Mondale, now the Democratic nominee. What had caused the shift in Krauthammer’s political thinking? According to him, it was more a shift in the Democrats: They were completely irresponsible out of power. For instance, they promoted a nuclear freeze, and they opposed almost everything that contributed to the Soviet Union’s eventual collapse. There was more, however — more than foreign policy in Krauthammer’s shifting. Like a good many others, he read Losing Ground, the book by Charles Murray about the effects of a welfare state on the poor. “I have a little bit of a science background,” he says with understatement, “and I’m open to empirical evidence.” Murray provided that evidence, convulsively. It is one thing if welfare is failing to help the poor, another if it is outright hurting them. …
…Many Jews, particularly American ones, are nervous or scornful about the support that American evangelicals have shown for Israel. They say that this support is double-edged, or bad news, or embarrassing. Krauthammer will have none of it. “I embrace their support unequivocally and with gratitude. And when I speak to Jewish groups, whether it’s on the agenda or not, I make a point of scolding them. I say, ‘You may not want to hear this, and you may not have me back, but I’m going to tell you something: It is disgraceful, un-American, un-Jewish, ungrateful, the way you treat people who are so good to the Jewish people. We are almost alone in the world. And here we have 50 million Americans who willingly and enthusiastically support us. You’re going to throw them away, for what? Because of your prejudice.’ Oh, I give ’em hell.” …
…In a recent exchange, a Washington conservative said that Krauthammer reminded him of something Edward R. Murrow said about Churchill: “He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.” A great many are doing this, of course, from Rush Limbaugh, with a mass audience, to skillful bloggers with hardly any audience at all. But no one is doing it better than Krauthammer, whose hour is now.
In the New York Post, Michael Tanner gives some of the specifics that we “shall” be forced to do if the House version of Obamacare passes.
President Obama has gone to great pains to deny that his proposed health-care reform is a government takeover of the health-care system.
“Nothing could be further from the truth,” he has said.
Yet it’s hard to see the 1,994-page bill that the House passed last night as anything else. After all, the bill uses the command “shall” — as in “you shall do this,” “businesses shall do that” and “government shall do some other thing” — 3,345 times. …
…To make sure that we obey these “shalls,” the bill would create 111 government agencies, boards, commissions and other bureaucracies — all overseen by a new health-care czar bearing the Orwellian title “commissioner of health choices.” …
Jeff Jacoby, writing in the Boston Globe, has a fascinating fact from the Constitution.
.. the Constitution does not stipulate the number of House members, other than allowing no more than one representative for every 30,000 residents. Sixty-five men were elected to the first House of Representatives, but it was taken for granted that the membership would increase with the nation’s population. …
…the House remains frozen at 435, even as the US population has surged to 305 million. There are now more than 700,000 Americans per House member, which is another way of saying that the average congressional district is home to 700,000 constituents.
…Since every state is entitled to at least one House seat, and since every state cannot be divided evenly into multiples of 700,000, the number of residents in each congressional district varies sharply. At the extremes, Montana’s lone US representative has 967,000 constituents, while the member from Wyoming represents fewer than 533,000. That disparity – more than 430,000 between the largest congressional district and the smallest – means that residents of some states have considerably more voting power in Congress than residents of others. And that, insist the plaintiffs in a lawsuit making its way through a federal court in Mississippi, violates the principle of one-person, one-vote.
The lawsuit argues that only by enlarging its membership to at least 932 – or better yet, 1,761 – can the House return to districts of equal size. Whether the suit will succeed is an open question. But what a blessing if it did! Quadruple the size of the House, and congressional districts would again be small and compact, ideally suited to the retail politics of an earlier era, and more closely aligned with discrete communities and neighborhoods. Enlarge the House, and it would fill with new blood, new thinking, and new energy. Elections would be more competitive, since it would take fewer votes to win. The House would grow more diverse, more lively, more representative. …