Nearly everyone is familiar today with President Ronald Reagan's demand, delivered in Berlin in June 1987, that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev "tear down this wall." They may not be aware of his comments during a visit to West Berlin five years earlier.
"At this very moment, the forces of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact are poised only a few miles from here," Reagan said in June 1982. "They aren't there to protect the people of Eastern Europe. The Iron Curtain wasn't woven to keep people out; it's there to keep people in. The most obvious symbol of this is the Berlin Wall. And, you know, if I had a chance, I'd like to ask the Soviet leaders one question ... Why is that wall there?"
He then answered his own question: "They know that freedom is catching, and they don't dare leave their people to have a taste of it."
These words were prescient, and not just in the general sense. The fall of the Berlin Wall,30 years ago took place because too many East Germans got a small taste of freedom.
Of course, the communists had an official explanation for why the wall was there — they referred to it as the "antifaschistischer Schutzwall," or "anti-fascist protective barrier." It is both telling and disturbing that the term "anti-fascist," used for so many decades by communists to justify violence and political repression, is coming back into use today.
In April 1989, the communist government of Hungary quietly removed the electric fence that had long separated that country from Austria, its free and democratic neighbor. Word quickly spread to East Germany, arguably the most repressive communist state in Europe, but also the wealthiest, that people could escape by simply traveling to Hungary through neighboring Czechoslovakia.
The East German regime tried to stem the consequent tide of emigration by closing the southern border. But by fall, the ailing and fiscally failing regime was losing its grip.
Thirty years later, it is hard to believe that the Berlin Wall has already been gone longer than it stood. But its remaining sections, shipped to locations throughout the world, stand as a reminder of what Reagan often said: freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.
All it will take for fascist or socialist tyranny to return is for one generation to forget the lessons of the past, or to decide that the burdens and risks and responsibilities of freedom are too great to bear, and that bureaucrats in some distant capital should be given the power to direct our lives. May that never happen in the lifetime of anyone who reads this.