Wednesday 11 November 2009

The Flame Snuffed Out By Freedom

Peter Hitchens writes:

Actually I am tired of all this fake joy. When the Berlin Wall went up, the 'Free West' did precisely nothing, just as it had done precisely nothing when the Red Army put down the East Berlin workers' revolt of June 1953, precisely nothing when the Red Army crushed the Hungarian uprising in 1956, and just as it would do nothing when the Warsaw Pact invaded what was then Czechoslovakia in 1968. It would later do precious little when the Polish state moved against Solidarity in the early 1980s. In fact, apart from some brave freelance activity by a few committed conservatives, notably Roger Scruton (of whom more later), nobody really did very much at all to give practical aid to the forces of liberty in the Soviet sphere of influence. Speeches about ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ and ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down that wall’, were just rhetoric for home consumption.

Why was the piety a fake? Why is our joy at reunification largely synthetic (while that in Germany is real, but accompanied by severe mixed feelings)? Because the Cold War was largely about our accepting Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, in return for peace, stability and prosperity on our side of the fence. Who, of those millions who benefited from this deal, can say he would personally have opted instead for frequent war and everlasting tension, given the choice? We supported change over there only when the Kremlin gave us permission to do so. West Germany was actually rather annoyed by the Polish wave of revolt because at one stage it threatened their curious tango with East Germany, a forgotten era when East German leaders were welcomed in Bonn with all the panoply accorded to normal heads of government, huge subsidies flowed quietly eastwards into the puppet state, and political dissidents were bought for hard cash, straight out of East German prisons.

This was the same era when Western leftists often made excuses for East Germany. Jonathan Steele's book Socialism with a German Face is worth obtaining for an insight into this era. Mr Steele is, in my view, a fine and courageous foreign correspondent, whose professionalism and bravery I witnessed and admired when we were both working in the old USSR. And I think he was expressing the honest feelings of many western leftists when he wrote that book. I'd even agree with them, that there were admirable aspects of East German society, as many former East Germans will now tell you. The trouble is that the price paid for them was much too high, and that the East German system, which is well described in the book Stasiland and the film The Lives of Others, was cruel, often to the point of being actively murderous, intrusive, corrupt, wholly dishonest and power-worshipping.

Well, there are lots of governments like that, and ours is slowly but alarmingly turning in that direction. Would that have happened if the Cold War had continued to keep the domestic left out of political office, and if the warning of the real existing Big Brother state over there had continued to exist? I wonder. I have often thought that the best solution for East Germany would have been for it to be taken over by Disney, and run as a vast theme park in which people could see the otherwise unbelievable operation of socialism in action. I saw East Germany at first hand, and even I find it difficult to believe what I know to be true. How will the next generation learn from this awful mistake? They won't credit that it actually happened.

What's more, the new liberated territories in the old Warsaw Pact zone are in many cases a severe disappointment to those who hoped and worked hardest for change. As Roger Scruton wrote recently, and very movingly, in The Times (in an article entitled ‘The Flame that was snuffed out by Freedom’), many of the East European dissidents were highly moral and courageous beings wedded to truth, principle and high culture. And they suffered in many unpleasant ways.

As Scruton notes, ‘There was a heavy price for opposing communism, and only a few were brave enough to pay it...

...The people that I met were imbued with a more than ordinary gentleness and concern for one another. It was hard to earn their trust but, once offered, trust was complete. Moreover, because learning, culture and the European spiritual heritage were, for them, symbols of their own inner freedom, and of the national independence they sought to remember, if not to regain, they looked on those things with an unusual veneration. As a visitor from the world of fun, pop and comic strips I was amazed to discover students for whom words devoted to such things were wasted words, and who sat in those little pockets of underground air studying Greek literature, German philosophy, medieval theology and the operas of Verdi and Wagner.’

When the oppressor left, Scruton hoped that such people would be in power. Alas. ‘For a while, I believed that the public spirit that had reigned in the catacombs would now govern the State. It was not to be. Having been excluded for decades from the rewards of worldly advancement, our friends had failed to cultivate those arts — hypocrisy, treachery and real-politik — without which it is impossible to stay in government.

‘They sat in their offices for a while, pityingly observed by their staff of former secret policemen, while affable and much travelled rivals, of the kind with whom German Social Democrats and French Gaullists could both “do business”, carefully groomed themselves for the next elections.’

Read the article to see his explanation of the extraordinarily rapid triumph of the European Union, which has become the new power in this region. I have a great deal of admiration for Roger Scruton and some others known to me who, unrecognised here, took considerable risks in those sinister places to try to bring freedom. All I did was observe, at no risk to myself. But I share his sadness at the lost opportunity. The hopes that flared like fireworks in the autumn of 1989 fell all too swiftly back to earth.

1 comment:

  1. Interesting reading. But what I miss in the discussion about the fall of the Berlin Wall and Iron Curtain is the reality nowadays in the former eastern bloc. On the one hand, people are happy that they have freedom and democracy but according to surveys still many people say that their economic situation was better before than it's now. I think that the euphoria from the 1989 has absolutely disappeared. And moreover, it's sad that many people in e.g. Russia yearn for the old communistic times.

    Best regards,
    Jay

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