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Twenty-four years ago today my wife and I arrived home from buying software for our Commodore 64 (Yeah, it is that long ago.) and watched stunned after we turned on the tv as we saw East Germans dancing on top of the Berlin War, tearing into it with sledge hammers.  It is hard to convey to people who did not live through the Cold War how wonderful a sight this was. Most people at the time thought the Cold War was a permanent state of things. Not Ronald Wilson Reagan. He knew that Communism would end up on the losing side of history and throughout his career strove to bring that day ever closer. His becoming President so soon after John Paul II became Pope set the stage for the magnificent decade of the Eighties when Communism passed from being a deadly threat to the globe to a belief held only by a handful of benighted tyrannical regimes around the world, and crazed American professors. In most of his movies, the good guys won in the end, and Reagan helped give us a very happy ending to a menace that started in 1917 and died in 1989. 
Here is an interview Sam Donaldson did with Reagan immediately after the fall of the wall:
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The thirst for freedom that the hand of God places in each human soul can be held down by force for a time, but it never can be killed forever.
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Twenty-four years…
The link below is to a July 4 2011 article written in the Spectator Coffee House blog by Colleen Graffy to mark the unveiling of the Grosvenor Square statue of President Reagan.
I wrote then:
“Regarding the Wall and with due apologies for any perceived crudity. In company with several German, Dutch and American colleagues I had the very great pleasure of p*****g on the rubble within hours of its fall. I am not ashamed to say that I wept constantly during those blessed days. As I recently mentioned somewhere hereabouts, I have a lump of the accursed thing in my study at home with a wee NATO flag stuck in it.”
President Ronald Reagan 1911-2004
Karol Józef Wojtyła, Blessed Pope John Paul Magnus 1920-2005
Baroness (Margaret) Thatcher of Kesteven 1925-2013
All gone now.
God be good to them…
Forgot the link!
http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2011/07/stand-up-for-freedom-and-freedom-will-stand-up-for-you-eventually/
I will never forget the sight of the Berlin Wall coming down. I was working on DC at the time and went to my grandmother’s home in Washington, PA for the weekend. I saw the whole thing on TV and it was amazing. Every network was covering the event….but the NBC station in Steubenville, Ohio showed a tape delay broadcast of the Steubenville High School football playoff game.
I never have forgotten that.
And the fight continues in every generation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg8vJBqgEHE
Amazing point in history, like many I remember clearly watching it all unfold on tv, I was building bookshelves at the family cottage and they came tumbling down (like the Wall)—directly on my head 😀
Hopefully the architects of the destruction of Communism, mentioned in Kennybhoy’s post, will pray for us. Because the same stupid ideas just keep popping up.
I wasn’t old enough to remember it coming down, and it sure wasn’t mentioned in school, but my folks’ general reaction at any mention of it spoke volumes when I was a kid.
The next time a liberal friend scoffs at Pres Reagan’s “evil empire” speech refer him to Ta-Neshi Caotes of the Atlantic writing about postwar Europe:
At the same time as the Achille Lauro incident, my father and I were on a month-long Battlefield Tour in Europe, which would eventually take us through West Germany (how weird that looks now,) Austria, Czechoslovakia and East Germany.
Having stood on both sides of the Berlin Wall, I remember kicking myself for not grabbing the first plane over and joining in the party when the Wall was coming down. I kick myself even harder today. The ability to speak of those events in the first person would bear incredible weight these days, when so much of what we see transpiring in this country becomes redolent of those tyrannical systems brought down just a generation ago.
To this day, I imagine myself deplaning, small overnight case in hand, hailing the first cab I see and simply saying “Die Mauer, bitte, und schnell.”
Interestingly, communism or socialism really isn’t dead. It represents the ideals of many still. They imagine it is the way of progress or its goal.
Mr. Colli9ns –
I think nobody ruled through fear the way Stalin did. Stalin could never have been anything in politics except what he was. Stalin needed enemies. He never wanted friends. Of course, FDR thought he could be friends with Uncle Joe after Hitler invaded, but Stalin considered him to be a useful idiot.
Stalin had a special hatred for Poles, as Stalin was a Red Army officer in the Polish Bolshevik War of 1920-21 (and a lousy one at that).