Week in...
Kicking off today with a celebration of the defeat of communism. For those who have forgotten, or for those who would like to forget that they once supported it, communism suppressed freedom of speech, religion and movement, and it specialized in mass murder, famine, bureaucracy, staged trials, brutality and boredom.
Part of today's revelling will be dedicated to recalling the dominant intellectual idiocy that ended abruptly on 9 November 1989: that East and West were morally equivalent. Another fallacy cruelly exposed two decades ago was that communism was here to stay. And, the fall of the Berlin Wall made prophetic the presidency of Ronald Reagan who demanded at the Brandenburg Gate in 1987, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"
But before we get carried away by today's joy, we should spare a thought for the North Koreans, Cubans, Vietnamese and Chinese trapped in their socialist paradises. Their plight reminds us that this is also the year in which we commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, which, Timothy Garton Ash, writing in the New York Review of Books, says took place "on the very day of Poland's breakthrough in a semifree election." The Chinese communists did what East European despots didn't dare — shoot the protesters.
But Europe's communists did kill and today we should remember the tragedy of Chris Gueffroy, a 20-year-old who tried to cross into West Berlin in February 1989. East German border guards shot him dead. That's what communism was and is. Deadly. Evil.
