Marking Two Decades After the Berlin Wall

Throughout the world, students of history and politics will today muse about the collapse of the Berlin wall and the ultimate collapse of communist rule in eastern Europe. The world will today mark two complete decades since then and a preponderant number of the world's population does not only have an idea about the difference, but many more seem to have forgotten what the age was like. I am unable to recount what it was like principally because I was yet a minor and had not developed an acute sense of what the events meant for human history in addition to the fact that I am not a citizen of Europe.

My ideas about the communist experiment that was undertaken most prominently in eastern Europe come from my reading about a decade ago of two important but nevertheless very different books. My understanding of socialism and its effects on the people who lived under it were was made quite clear by reading the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago. While I had not completely defined a coherent political philosophy then, I concluded that ideology informed the society that did that to other human beings was unacceptable and inhuman. Later, I came to read Friedrich von Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and came to understand an argument stating why socialism inevitably leads to the quest to dominate people and to coercion at all costs. Granted that von Hayek makes some bold claims that were not to bee, the general diagnostics and the reason that centralized planning is doomed to failure is stated as clearly as one can demand.

And this brings me to M. Tupy's essay here in which he writes about the meaning of the collapse of communism in eastern Europe. Having lived as a child and seen communism come towards it collapse as predicted by von Hayek, the essay tells stories from a perspective that I rarely encounter. It is pleasing to see that after a few decades of being subjected to life in communist paradise, even those who know no alternative, like Tupy's aunt, understood that the system cannot be good for most.

And so to my mind, one does the cause of human freedom greater service by circulating stories such as Marian Tupy's and Adriana Lukas here that would be recorded by a mere heated debate and vituperation that characterizes most debates about communism. It is just so true that all are deserving of freedom but freedom is not free.