What
the Dismantling of the Berlin Wall Means 30 Years Later
And the Return of
War-as-the-Answer
You know, it’s strange.
There are certain moments that you and everyone in your generation never
forget. For instance, I can tell you exactly where I was – eating a 25-cent
hamburger in a diner that might have been called the Yankee Doodle in New
Haven, Connecticut – when a man stuck his head in the front door and said,
"The president’s been shot." That, of course, was John F. Kennedy on
November 22, 1963, and I have little doubt that, if you asked just about anyone
else my age, they’d have a remarkably specific memory of that moment, too.
But here’s the strange
thing that TomDispatch regular and former Boston
Globe columnist James Carroll brought to my mind with today’s piece on
what may qualify as the single most important historical event of my life: the
dismantling of the Berlin Wall. I have no idea what I was doing or where I was
that November 9th in 1989 when I first heard that the forever structure
dividing East from West that symbolized the two-superpower world of the Cold
War was coming down. I have just vague memories of TV images of crowds surging
and the wall being whacked at by people with sledgehammers.
And that should qualify as
odd indeed. After all, my life was, in a sense, an artifact of the Cold War. I
still remember photos of
grim-faced Korean War G.I.s in Life magazine when I was only six or
seven. I remember the duck-and-cover moments under my desk in
school, preparation for the potential nuclear obliteration of my city, when I
was just a few years older. I remember sitting in a car on the evening of
October 22, 1962, with the radio on, and hearing the
still-living John F. Kennedy alert the nation that the Cuban Missile
crisis was underway and say that "we will not prematurely
or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the
fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth; but neither will we shrink from
that risk at any time it must be faced." I think I tasted those very ashes
then and felt I was a goner, that my specific world might blow sky-high. I
remember being out in the streets amid masses of antiwar protesters in the
Vietnam War years and wondering how all this would ever end. And so it went
until that day in 1989 when, suddenly, to the utter shock of every last pundit,
wise man, official, and politician in Washington, that wall began to be torn
down and the Soviet Union’s end came into sight.
What a moment, as Carroll
makes so clear today – and how strange that it and the hopes that went with it
disappeared into the maw of the American national security state and its endless wars. ~ Tom
November Hopes Mislaid
By James Carroll
Some anniversaries are less
about the past than the future. So it should be on November 9, 1989. In case
you’ve long forgotten, that was the day when East and West Germans began
nonviolently dismantling the Berlin Wall, an entirely
unpredicted, almost unimaginable ending to the long-entrenched Cold
War. Think of it as the triumph of idealistic hope over everything that then
passed for hard-nosed "realism." After all, Western intelligence
services, academic Kremlinologists, and the American national security
establishment had always blithely assumed that the Cold War would essentially
go on forever – unless the absolute malevolence of Soviet Communism led to the ultimate
mayhem of nuclear Armageddon. For almost half a century, only readily
dismissed peaceniks insisted that, in the nuclear age, war and
endless preparations for more of it were not the answer. When the Berlin Wall
came down, such idealists were proven right, even if their triumph was still
ignored.
Yet war-as-the-answer
reasserted itself with remarkable rapidity. Within weeks of the Wall being
breached by hope – in an era that saw savage conflicts in Central America,
the Philippines,
and South Africa transformed
by a global wave of nonviolent resolution – the United States launched Operation Just
Cause, the invasion of Panama by a combat force of more than 27,000
troops. The stated purpose of that act of war was the arrest of Panama’s
tinhorn dictator Manuel Noriega, who had initially come to power as a CIA asset.
That invasion’s only real importance was as a demonstration that, even with
global peace being hailed, the world’s last remaining superpower remained as
committed as ever to the hegemony of violent force.
Who Ended the Cold War?
While President George H.W.
Bush rushed to claim credit for ending the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s Mikhail
Gorbachev was the lynchpin of that historic conclusion. It was he who, in the
dramatic autumn of 1989, repeatedly ordered Communist forces to remain in their
barracks while throngs of freedom-chanters poured into the streets of multiple
cities behind the Iron Curtain. Instead of blindly striking out (as the leaders
of crumbling empires often had), Gorbachev allowed democratic demands to echo
through the Soviet empire – ultimately even in Russia itself.
Yet the American
imagination was soon overtaken by the smug fantasy that the U.S. had "won"
the Cold War and that it was now a power beyond all imagining. Never mind that,
in 1987, when President Ronald Reagan issued his famed demand in then
still-divided Berlin, "Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall," the
Soviet leader was already starting to do precisely that.
As the wall came down, the
red-scare horrors that had disturbed American dreams for three generations
seemed to dissolve overnight, leaving official Washington basking in
triumphalism. The US then wrapped itself in a self-aggrandizing mantle of
virtue and power that effectively blinded this country’s political leadership
to the ways, the Cold War’s end had left them mired in an outmoded, evermore
dangerous version of militarism.
After Panama, the self-styled "indispensable
nation" would show itself to be hell-bent on unbridled – – and
profoundly self-destructive – belligerence. Deprived of an existential enemy,
Pentagon budgets would decline oh-so-modestly (though without a "peace
dividend" insight) but soon return to Cold War levels. A bristling
nuclear arsenal would be maintained as a "hedge"
against the comeback of Soviet-style communism. Such thinking would, in the
end, only empower Moscow’s
hawks, smoothing the way
for the future rise of an ex-KGB agent named
Vladimir Putin. Such hyper-defensive anticipation would prove to be, as one wag
put it, the insurance policy that started the fire.
Even as the disintegration
of the once-demonized USSR was firmly underway, culminating in the final
lowering of the hammer-and-sickle flag from the Kremlin on Christmas Day 1991,
the United States was launching what would prove to be a never-ending and
disastrous sequence of unnecessary Middle Eastern wars. They began with
Operation Desert Storm, George H.W. Bush’s assault on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in
1990. In American memory, that campaign, which crushed the Iraqi autocrat’s
army and forced it out of Kuwait, would be a techno-war made in heaven with
fewer than 200 US combat deaths.
That memory, however, fits
poorly with what was actually happening that year. An internationally mounted
sanctions regime had already been on the verge of thwarting Hussein without the
U.S.-led invasion – and, of course, what Bush the father began, Bush the son
would, with his 2003 shock-and-awe recapitulation, turn into the permanent
bedrock of American politics.
As the 30th anniversary of
the end of the Cold War approaches, it should be obvious that there’s been a
refusal in the United States to reckon with a decades-long set of
conflagrations in the Greater Middle East as the inevitable consequence of that
first American invasion in 1990. Above all, Desert Storm, with its monumental
victory parade in Washington D.C., brought the Pentagon’s Cold
War raison d’être back from the brink of obsolescence. That campaign
and what followed in its wake guaranteed that violence would continue to occupy
the heartlands of the US economy, its politics, and its culture. In the process,
the world-historic aspirations kindled by the miracle of the Berlin Wall’s
dismantling would be thoroughly dashed. No wonder, so many years later, we
hardly remember that November of hope – or the anniversary that goes with it.
Out of the Memory Hole
By revisiting its
astonishing promise as the anniversary approaches, however, and by seeing it
more fully in light of what made it so surprising, perhaps something of that
vanished positive energy can still be retrieved. So let me call to mind the
events of various earlier Novembers that make the point. What follows is a
decade-by-decade retracing of the way the war machine trundled through recent
history – and through the American psyche – until it was finally halted in a
battle-scarred, a divided city in the middle of Europe, stopped by an urge for the peace that refused to be denied.
Let’s start with November
1939, only weeks after the German invasion of Poland that began what would
become World War II. A global struggle between good and evil was just then kicking
into gear. Unlike the previous Great War of 1914-1918, which was fought for
mere empire, Hitler’s war was understood in distinctly Manichaean terms as both
apocalyptic and transcendent. After all, the moral depravity of the Nazi
project had already been laid bare when Jewish synagogues, businesses, and
homes everywhere in Germany were subject to the savagery of Kristallnacht,
or "the night of broken glass." That ignition of what became an
anti-Jewish genocide took place, as it happened, on November 9, 1938.
The good-versus-evil absolutism of World War II stamped the American imagination so profoundly that
a self-righteous moral dualism survived not only into the Cold War but into Washington’s
twenty-first-century war on terror. In such contests against enemies defined as
devils, Americans could adopt the kinds of ends-justify-the-means strategies
called for by "realism." When you are fighting along what might be
thought of as an axis of evil, anything goes – from deceit and torture to the
routine sacrifice of civilians, whose deaths in America’s post-9/11 wars have
approached a total of half a million.
Through it all, we were assured of one certain thing: that God was on our side.
("God is not neutral," as George W. Bush put it just
days after the 9/11 attacks.)
From Genocide to Omnicide
But what if God could not
protect us? That was the out-of-the-blue question posed near the start of all
this – not in August 1945 when the US dropped its "victory weapon" on
two cities in Japan, but in August 1949 when the Soviet Union acquired an
atomic bomb, too. By that November, the American people were already in the
grip of an unprecedented nuclear paranoia, which prompted President Harry
Truman to override leading atomic scientists and order the
development of what one called a "genocidal weapon,"
the even more powerful hydrogen bomb. Then came the manic buildup of the US
nuclear arsenal to proportions suitable less for genocide than for "omnicide." Such
weapons mushroomed (if you’ll excuse the word in a potentially mushroom-clouded
world) from fewer than 200 in 1950 to nearly 20,000 a decade later. Of course,
that escalation, in turn, drove Moscow forward in a desperate effort to keep
up, leading to an unhinged arms race that turned the suicide of the human
species into a present danger, one measured by the Doomsday Clock, of the Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists, which was set at two minutes to
midnight in 1953 – and then again in 2019, all these Novembers
later.
Now, let’s flash forward
another decade to November 1959 when the mortal danger of human self-extinction
finally became openly understood, as Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev began
issuing blatant threats of nuclear war over – you guessed it – Berlin. Because
part of that city, far inside Communist East Germany, was still occupied by
American, French, and British forces, it amounted to a tear in what was then
called the Iron Curtain, separating the Soviet empire from Western Europe. With
thousands fleeing through that tear to the so-called Free World, the Soviets
became increasingly intent on shutting the escape hatch, threatening to use the
Red Army to drive the Allies out of Berlin. That brought the possibility of nuclear conflict to the fore.
Ultimately, the Communists
would adopt a quite different strategy when, in 1961, they built that infamous
wall, a concrete curtain across the city. At the time, Berliners sometimes
referred to it, with a certain irony, as the "Peace Wall" because, by
blocking escape from the East, it made the dreaded war between the two Cold War
superpowers unnecessary. Yet within a year, the unleashed prospect of such a
potentially civilization-ending conflict had hopscotched the globe to Communist
Cuba. The Cuban Missile
Crisis of 1962 caused the world to shudder as an incipient nuclear
war between Washington and Moscow suddenly loomed. That moment, just before
Khrushchev and American President John F. Kennedy stepped back from doomsday,
might have changed something; a relieved world’s shock of recognition, that is,
might have thrown the classic wooden shoe of sabotage into the purring engine
of "realism." No such luck, however, as the malevolent power of the
war state simply motored on – in the case of the United States directly into
Vietnam.
By November 1969, President
Richard Nixon’s cynical continuation of the Vietnam War for his own political
purposes had already driven the liberal-conservative divide over that
misbegotten conflict into the permanent structure of American politics. The
ubiquitous "POW/MIA: You Are Not Forgotten" flag survives today as an
icon of Nixon’s manipulations. Still waving over ballparks, post offices, town
halls, and VFW posts across the nation, that sad black banner now flies as a
symbol of red state/blue state antagonism – and as a lasting reminder of how we
Americans can make prisoners of ourselves.
By 1979, with Vietnam
War in the past, President Jimmy Carter showed how irresistible November’s tide
– the inexorable surge toward war – truly was. It was in November of that year
that militant Iranian students overran the American embassy in Tehran, taking
sixty-six Americans hostage – the event that was credited with stymying the
formerly peace-minded president. In reality, though, Carter had already initiated the
historic anti-Soviet arms buildup for which President Ronald Reagan would later
be credited.
Then, of course, Carter
would ominously foreshadow America’s future reversals in the deserts of the
Levant with a failed rescue of those hostages. Most momentously, however, he
would essentially license future Middle East defeats with what came to be known
as the Carter Doctrine – the formally
declared principle that the Persian Gulf (and its oil) were
"vital interests" of this country, worthy of defense "by any
means necessary, including military force." (And of course, his CIA would
lead us into America’s first Afghan War, still in a sense going on some
40 years later.)
Retrieving Hope?
Decade by decade, the
evidence of an unstoppable martial dynamic only seemed to accumulate. In that
milestone month of November 1989, Washington’s national security
"realists" were still stuck in the groove of such worst-case
thinking. That they were wrong, that they would be stunned by the fall of the
Berlin Wall and the subsequent implosion of the Soviet Union should mandate
thoughtful observance of this coming 30th anniversary.
During the late 1980s, a
complex set of antiwar and antinuclear countercurrents seemed to come out of
nowhere. Each of them should have been impossible. The ruthlessly totalitarian
Soviet system should not have produced in Mikhail Gorbachev a humane statesman
who sacrificed empire and his own career for the sake of peace. The most
hawkish American president in history, Ronald Reagan, should not have responded
to Gorbachev by working to end the arms race with him – but he did.
Pressuring those two
leaders to pursue that course – indeed, forcing them to – was an international
grassroots movement demanding an end to apocalyptic terror. People wanted peace
so much, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower had predicted in
1959, that, miracle of all miracles, governments got out of their way and let
them have it. With the breaching of the Berlin Wall that November 9th – a
transformation accomplished by ordinary citizens, not soldiers – the political
realm of the possible was substantially broadened, not only to include
prospective future détente among warring nations, but an eventual elimination
of nuclear weapons themselves.
Yet, in November 2019, all
of that seems lost. A new Cold War is
underway, with East-West hostilities quickening; a new arms race has
begun, especially as the United States renounces Reagan-Gorbachev
arms-control agreements for the sake of a trillion-plus dollar "modernization"
of its nuclear arsenal. Across the globe, democracy is in retreat, driven by
pressures from both populist nationalism and predatory capitalism. Even in
America, democracy seems imperiled. And all of this naturally prompts the
shudder-inducing question: Were the worst-case realists right all along?
This November anniversary
of the dismantling of the Berlin Wall should offer an occasion to say no to
that. The Wall’s demise stopped in its tracks the demonic dynamic set in motion
on the very same date in 1938 by that Kristallnacht. If idealistic hope could
so triumph once, it can so triumph again, no matter what the die-hard realists
of our moment may believe. I’ve referred to that November in Berlin as a
miracle, but that is wrong. The most dangerous face-off in history ended not
because of the gods or good fortune, but because of the actions and efforts of
human beings. Across two generations, countless men and women – from anonymous
community activists and union organizers to
unsung military officials, scientists,
and even world leaders – overcame the seemingly endless escalations of
nuclear-armed animus to make brave choices for peace and against a war of
annihilation, for life and against death, for the future and against the
doom-laden past.
It can happen again. It
must.
James Carroll, TomDispatch regular and
former Boston Globe columnist is the author of 20 books, most
recently the novel The Cloister.
His history of the Pentagon, House of War,
won the PEN-Galbraith Award. His Vietnam War memoir, An American
Requiem won the National Book Award. He is a fellow of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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