The Wall Which Fell On Us

by Steve Farrell (Nevada)

Few of us can look back to that day nine years ago today, without musing "and the walls came a tumbling down," as a quarter century old symbol of mass murder, darkness, and slavery, the Berlin Wall, met with bulldozer, wrecking ball, and human hands.

Together they three worked that glorious morn' with triumph in their hearts. Each doing their best, and then some, to knock down, cut up, and slice open a liberating gateway to freedom for those so long locked in by cement and barbwire, machine gun and check points, dictatorship and fear.

Everyone joined in the celebration! Even the worldwide press, with its many pens and voices which had so long held up to our minds and eyes the illusion, locked hands in a joyous solidarity, which no words could possibly capture, as millions of captives were finally set free!

But after the joy, followed a tour into what was, the forbidden zone; it was there that the painful truth brought a discourteous damper to the party. Many previous proliferaters of nonsense, now free to venture into their "utopia" unmasked, were not ready for what lay bare. Misery and suffering, so long left unheard and unseen, muffled and hidden, behind walls and curtains, and propaganda from their own pens, were such as few ever imagined. Poverty and environmental decay were rampant, the worst horror stories of communist tyranny confirmed, old communist "heroes" openly denounced and cursed by the common man. A paradise, their paradise, lost!

At that moment of revelation, even the most devout ideologue dared not deny this pathetic picture of human and economic rubble; for the world was watching, and the truth was too widely published. So what to do? As if on cue the answer came, with typical unity, a fabricated funeral: "Communism," they said, "is dead." "Socialism," as a legitimate economic philosophy, forever "discredited and discarded."

It was a wonderfully disarming ploy; their best yet. For the target of their gimmick was not the average apathetic citizen, who was already theirs, but the concerned citizen, that stout and stubborn opponent, who for so long had been a bulwark against their apologism. Convince that soul that his enemy has been consigned to the catacombs of history; who then would stand in their way?

And so with tongue in cheek, and fingers crossed, they repeated the mantra, "communism is dead," "all is well," till it sounded like truth, and for a season, became the gospel. Indeed, it seems few stood up to this charade, less find themselves characatured as a Cold War relic in search of a cause.