On the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, we have many complicated and competing thoughts on our minds that aren’s so easy to distill here.
We would have thought nostalgia would be the order of the day, remembering what it was like twenty years ago when the Wall came down, with one of us here actually in West Germany at the time it happened.
That Christmas, there were chunks of the Wall available for sale in most department stores, with little bits of colorful concrete made into pendants, rings, buttons, etc. Almost all of those were shams, clearly, with people just chipping grafitti-strewn concrete into small bits and trying to turn a profit off the events in Germany. How real parts of the Berlin Wall could get made into jewelry and shipped to a Higbee’s in Cleveland a month later just boggled the mind.
We have many more stories like the above, remembering class assignments in grade school, then high school, talking about German reuinification and what various people we know thought about that at the time…or thought about President Reagan and the role he played in the Wall coming down.
As lifelong Democrats, we would have never given Reagan the credit he deserved back then, but it was indeed Reagan’s strategic genius in weakening the Soviet Union via the 80s arms race that caused the Wall to fall. Whatever you might think about that man — who is still hated to the point of irrationality in Boystown — we won the Cold War under his watch, even if the Wall itself didn’t come down until his successor was in the White House.
And Reagan wasn’t alone in doing his part to chip away at communism and undermine it.
Our thoughts today are on one of our grandmothers, a woman who went to Europe once or twice a year with suitcases filled with Bruce Springstein, Madonna, Bon Jovi and other cassettes, blue jeans, candy bars, and everything else “American” she could think of. She also took thousands of dollars with her each trip…and went to places like Yugoslavia, Hungary, Poland, and Russia itself to give all of it away in her own little rebellious effort to weaken communism in the small way she could.
One of us here accompanied her on a few of those trips, including the last one she took to West Germany before the Wall fell. These weren’t vacations to Paris or London or Rome or anyplace touristy and fun. No, these were trips to gray and drab places where a whole village shared a single telephone and people had so little to eat and nothing to do it was beyond belief.
And then, in would swoop Grandma Erma, world traveler, proud American, with enough money to buy that village’s church the bell it needed but wasn’t allowed any money for…a female Santa appearing in the middle of summer to give the children the chocolate and treats communism wouldn’t let them have…with enough rock music to stir up the teenagers and products like razors and shampoos to make adults swoon.
She did this again and again and again, every year, for something like 30 years…saving as much as she could through the year to “go fight communism” in her own way every summer.
No bullets.
No guns.
No authority from our government.
Just a little old lady with as much luggage as she could carry, taking American good will and consumer goods to as many people as she could personally reach in a few months overseas.
Oh, how our parents hated that she did this, chiefly because she was “giving all of our money away to those people overseas”.
Truthfully, it has taken many years for us to understand what Erma was up to. She got in trouble a few times with the Soviets, and for a few years had trouble getting VISAs because she was bringing too much into their countries. She was never part of any big movement, and there weren’t legions of little old ladies carrying blue jeans into Zagreb, or handing out Wrigley’s gum in Warsaw, but there was at least this one woman that we knew of who wanted to do her part to “show them”, “show communism”, “show the people over there that they don’t have to keep things the way they are”.
When the Wall came down, we remember Erma being so happy, but unsurprised, because she knew it had been weakening for years, that it had been undermined from without and within.
What Reagan was doing geopolitically worked in tangent with what the media and dominance of American movies, music, and pop culture was doing in other spheres, and underneathe all of this was what average, normal citizens were doing in their own ways to undermine the Soviets in the small ways they could.
There was Erma on her trips…but there were also Americans writing letters into Eastern Europe…American radio piped in…American cassettes and movies smuggled across borders.
All of it worked to bring the Soviet Union down.
We wish today we could only sit here and think of Erma’s adventures through Communism, but we realize with great, abject horror that what she did to the Russians, in her own small way, is actually what’s being done to America and Western Europe by Muslims today.
We are probably passed the point of no return with this as well, we hate to say.
The terrorist attack on Ft. Hood by Islamist Army major Hasan is telling not just in the act itself, but in the reaction of America’s media to it.
Liberal education has, over the last 30 years or so, created two generations of “highly educated” elites who now have dhimmihood programmed into their DNA. Subversively, our “multicultural at all costs” education system (particularly higher education) has taught millions of people that “American is bad, foreign is good”.
No matter how many people Muslims kill in the name of Allah, liberals teach they “are misunderstood”. Muslims’ victims are always wrong for “setting them off” or “being in the wrong place at the wrong time” when a Muslim was “upset about something or stressed out”.
It’s absolutely insane.
Every individual out there who tries to pretend the West is not under constant daily assault from the Muslim world contributes to a larger dysfunction that feels a great deal like Romans in the time of Romulus Augustus who deliberately ignored the barbarians at their gates. They were tired of being an Empire, tired of all the burdens of being a world power, tired of living up to everything their forebears had accomplished.
The “enlightened” in their midst said the Goths and Gauls weren’t so bad…that they should be accommodated, not resisted.
Eventually, Roman legions weren’t comprise of actual Romans anymore, but were made up of foreigners with no allegiance to Rome itself. So, when it came time to fight against barbarians of shared cultural heritage, whose side do you think the fell on?
What happened at Ft. Hood is stunning because we had no idea Liberalism infected the military, too.
An institution that won’t allow gay men and women to serve openly has policies in place that DEMAND the promotion of Muslims to high, sensitive ranks to meet “diversity” quotas. That’s terrifying because evidence is emerging from Ft. Hood that clearly shows many people saw the danger in this Islamist, but the politically-correct codes in place prevented anyone from stopping his rise in rank. Someone whose primary allegiance was to Islam, if not directly to Al Queda, was given over six figures a year and placed in a sensitive position within our own military, despite repeated indications of how much he hated this country.
That’s CHILLING.
It should be a wakeup call for all of us, too, but it won’t be.
You are not allowed to criticize Muslims in this country. You are forbidden to state the obvious about them. If you see Muslims jumping up and down cheering when Americans or Israelis are shown on TV being killed, you’re called a RAAACIST or racial-profiler for making any note of it at all.
Muslims might be just 4 million strong in this country, but they are masterful PR mobilizers who know exactly how to play the Liberal MSM. Every attack a Muslim commits on US interests at home or abroad is a new excuse for Muslims to claim they are victims.
It’s like the Tim Burton movie “Mars Attacks!” where the Martians roam the streets with death rays, blasting anything that moves, while playing a record that says, “We come in peace!”.
It really does feel like Muslims in the US are doing what Erma did to communism in the 70s and 80s…as individuals, not being directed by anyone, they are just doing whatever they can to weaken the US from within. Erma achieved her aims by traveling abroad and giving away the things Communists wouldn’t allow their people to have…as a way of making them hungry for change, for everything they couldn’t get at home.
Today, Muslims in the US increasingly rise up and demand ignorance from the MSM and public at large. The aim is to force so much political correctness and so much fear of calling Muslims out on anything, that they can just operate with impunity and get away with whatever they want.
In London, Muslims have managed to force Shari’a law into the British legal system. In the Netherlands, Muslims control what can and cannot be said in editorials and what cartoons can and cannot be drawn. In France, Muslims control many neighborhoods and suburbs, forever threatening to riot and bring cities like Paris to their knees over one perceived threat to Islam or another.
Europe truly feels like a lost cause and is already a de facto caliphate. By the time Europe’s liberals wake up to this, they’ll more likely than not find their own throats slit.
America is about 15-20 years behind Europe in all of this, but this is where we are headed too.
Just look at the mad rush to apologize to the Muslim community for that fact that Hasan indeed was a terrorist who attacked an American military base, the largest in the world. Liberals in the media are going to great lengths to delude themselves and viewers on this. Lest they offend all those wonderful Muslisms out there…the people who sit quietly on their butts while Islamists like Hasan attack the West with abandon.
If Muslims really are such wonderful, misunderstood Care Bears who really love America, then where is the collective outrage from them that people like Hasan commit murder in the name of Islam?
Their role after an attack seems to be merely to stand up and decry any negative portrayals of Islam that emerge after Islamists murder in the name of Allah.
And they are very good at playing their parts, fulfilling their roles.
Very good at forever undermining resistance to the Muslim takeover of Europe and America.
It’s been twenty years since the Berlin Wall fell, since longterm efforts to undermine the Soviet hold on Europe paid off, since large scale government strategy and the unsanctioned, grassroots efforts of individuals combined to break allegiances and loyalties in Soviet-controlled states so their governments would collapse.
Twenty years’ from now, will there be celebrations in Riyadh and Tehran over the Fall of the Statue of Liberty?
Somehow, it’s not that hard to imagine our current president, Dr. Utopia, attending a celebration like that…when he refused to go to Berlin this week to commemorate the Fall of the Wall.
November 10, 2009 at 10:16 pm
Oh yes it is outrageous. The mysogynist Muslims are ghastly. They never ever condemn the fellow jihad terrorists. They never say anything. Except play the victim card. The U.S. borders should definitely be shut forever to any muslim. I guess the ones who are already here are here. We can’t send them back, that would be pretty extreme. But NO MORE!! I’ve completely had it with them. The ones in America should convert to Christianity and assimilate. I don’t even care if people call me racist. Frankly nobody cares anymore. And where are the feminist women in all of this? They keep plenty quiet about these muslim dudes, I tell you. Why aren’t they shooting off their mouths? Which is all they did during the Repub years. The feminists have completely dropped the ball and voted for Obama of all people. And now they just sit and watch in horror at all of the crap that’s going on. I left the democrat liberal party last year, and have never been happier. The Republicans are far nicer and smarter and less racist and less sexist than the liberals. Who knew? They really don’t care what people do, as long as folks are hardworking and decent. That’s what I’ve found. And they give a lot more to charity.
I love hillbuzz, you guys are great writers, keep up the brilliant work.
November 11, 2009 at 8:14 am
Political correctness is endangering this country and people need to do a quick, hard rethink.
Which muslim that you pass on the street hates America, hates women? Can you pick one from the other? I can’t and I am not willing to take the chance on being wrong. For this reason, I believe all muslims must be made to wear American garb (most especially the women) and women must be allowed to worship in their mosques alongside the men. Muslims must be required to live by America’s laws and traditions and they may not try to make us bend to theirs. That means, in part, they must obey our laws against discrimination against women.
Their mosques must be monitored for what they are preaching and someone other than the FBI, which has proved itself incompetent and too cautiously PC, must arrest, prosecute and depot or imprison those plotting acts of terrorism.
Muslims don’t like these rules? They are free to leave America.
I do not apologize for any of these feelings!
November 10, 2009 at 10:44 pm
Not too long ago, I had come across a blog that was run by a former muslim. This was someone who had grown up in that culture, and was radicalized. Since his coming out, he has created space to invite debate with those who believed as he formerly did. Some of these “discusions” were very heated between both sides. One of the things I learned and has since made a permanent mark within me was the absolutely horrendous dress codes they have for their women. The purpose of their covering, as I had learned, was so that there can be no part of them that can cause arrousal in another man. In fact, the woman’s private parts are not compartmentalized. Instead, because she owns the private parts and that her body is totally interconnected, therefore, she must be completely covered. While that notion was abhorrent to me, it could not be match by the notion that none of them men in that culture can ever be held accountable for controlling his own urges! I am a firm believer that God made man and women, and that we are unique in that we have means to control our urges so that we are not animalistic. I am also one who believes that we are each responsible for our own actions. To say that a certain woman is responsible for your arrousal and that you must beat her and subject her to acts that are too violent to speak of gives me cause to say that the man needs to be put down as he’s beyond hope of civilization. The other day I was thinking that Star Trek’s Klingons were pretty unciviized, but in comparison to the muslims, the Klingons are most likely to hold high tea!
November 11, 2009 at 3:13 am
Kudos to Grandma Erma for reaching out to the oppressed peoples under Soviet domination in Cold War Europe.
Since you are re-assessing previous administrations in light of what has been going on here for the last 2 years, I hope you will permit me to broaden your educational horizons by sharing some once-secret historical info. The kinds of things Erma did had been going on for decades, on a massive scale, since the establishment of CIA in 1947. Food, clothing, books, audio and video cassettes, tv’s, vcr’s, copying machines, printing presses, and much more were smuggled into Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union by many anonymous CIA agents and sub-agents – sometimes using specially-configured vehicles to conceal their cargo. On occasion, things and people were also smuggled out of those areas, into the west.
All of these activities were funded by CIA, and constituted only one aspect of our broader overseas anti-communist covert action operations during the Cold War. I know because I managed those operations during the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations.
When the Berlin Wall came down 20 years ago, my colleagues and I wept for joy at the liberation of people some of us had worked so hard to sustain through the darkest days of gulags, secret police raids and beatings, show trials and sentencing of “enemies of the state,” and so on.
One of the pillars of our “Shining City on a Hill” back in those days was our fearless free press – the envy of the world. Now, if I really want to know what’s going on in Washington, I have to read the British press on-line. Sad commentary on how far U.S. journalism has fallen.
Obviously, I also enjoy reading Hillbuzz. Keep up the good work.
November 11, 2009 at 8:25 am
I would have loved to have met Grandma Erma! What a cool woman. It is no wonder you guys seem to hold women in such high regard.
November 11, 2009 at 8:44 am
Obama’s refusal to acknowledge this event in person was the straw that finally made my died in the wool Democrat mother in law see Obama unfavorably at last! Hope every former Obama supporter has their own “sentinel event” of mental clarity about this dangerous administration. Obama sent a clear message of support to those who would like to destroy Free countries by his absence.
November 13, 2009 at 8:59 pm
I agree with all of the above comments!
I am so disgusted by the media’s coverage of the Ft. Hood shooter. They are calling him a suspect and reporting on his condition as if he deserves our sympathy! As if there weren’t dozens of witnesses to the shooting! As if the investigators haven’t discovered that the shooter planned to do this! As if he isn’t bragging about it and how proud he is to have helped the jihad! If a Russian had attacked on a military base on American soil in 1955, he would have been executed on the spot.
Frankly, I am disgusted by the fact that a man who has killed Americans is being treated like he just bought flowers and a pair of diamond earrings for Mrs. Obama.
Two of my friends were stationed at Ft. Hood just months ago and that could have been them who got killed. Political Correctness, along with a pansy of a President, are going to cause the downfall of America…a downfall that even Vladimir Putin couldn’t have cooked up.
Muslims in the Middle East, who have grown up in countries that don’t have great education systems, know enough about world history to copy the subversive tactics America used to undermine the Soviet system. Americans, on the other hand, who are educated in one of the best school systems in the world, don’t even know enough about history to realize that Obama’s system of appeasement is not going to work. It didn’t work for Woodrow Wilson before World War I; it didn’t work for the Allies before World War II; and it will not work against countries in South America, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe…not even for “The One.”
I am glad that there are some people around, especially you, HillBuzz, who continue to see beyond the curtain (pardon the pun) that the MSM puts up using pc language and good-looking news anchors to distract everyone from the truth.
You guys rock, and I loved what you had to say about Pres. Bush and his media-less trip to Ft. Hood!