Dear friends,
Here is a post from a blog (which I keep as a diary hoping to nurture it to be big and substantial enough one day for wide dissemination):
[12] News from Absurdistan - The German Revolution of 1989
http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?p=59007#post59007
In a recent post to the Ron Paul Forums (see above for the link or click on the post's headline), reference is made to the German Revolution, suggesting that a small movement can take on tremendous momentum to bring about a sea change all of a sudden. Fair enough.
However, the Ron Paul movement is a completely different animal compared to the German Revolution of 1989 which toppled the wall that severed East and West Germany.
The Ron Paul movement is a force seeking and understanding freedom in the libertarian sense of the word. It is grounded in the traditions of a country that was founded to ensure that its citizens would live in freedom. These traditions are deep-seated in the American mind, and the decline of an utterly corrupt political system in the entire West and, of course, in the USA, gives impetus to hidden legacies - of freedom, in the USA, of super-statism in Europe.
My entire blog is about the unhappy fact that freedom is not even remotely understood in Germany.
The German Revolution of 1989 was an uprise, whereby people marched away from one kind of socialism hoping to arrive at another form of socialism, supposedly of a better sort (notice the strong support for Communist politicians in East Germany; as pointed out previously, Germans always hope for a better socialism).
One would be amiss to discount the courage of hundreds of thousands of Germans taking to the streets all over the GDR in 1989. But it would be equally ill-advised to mystify the events.
The tough resistance work had been done in other countries of the Warsaw Pact (notably in Poland and Afghanistan).
Approximately a year before the Mauer ("The Wall") actually fell, I made a winning bet to that effect. Why had I been so "daring"? Why did I seem to know? Well, as will transpire in a moment, I was not the only one at the time who began to sense that the GDR regime was finished.
Consider two rooms separated by a door guarded by a vicious Schäferhund. People in room A want to cross into room B, but the Schäferhund discourages them to even try. Get rid of the Schäferhund. What do you think will happen?
It may have taken a lot of courage for a lot of Germans to take to the streets in 1989, but 40 years of subservience and compliance with the regime do not exactly suggest that they would have done this if they had not reckoned, as I had, that the seminal job had been done by some one else and that risk had declined to a tractable level. After all, the Schäferhund had been removed.
When Gorbachev, on a visit to East Germany, stated unequivocally that his tanks would no longer protect the Communist regime in Berlin, the "Revolution" had become a foregone conclusion - roughly a year before Communism collapsed in Germany. It was just a matter of time that people would dare a passage through the open door.
