Marty Peretz: What Obama Doesn't Get About Tyrants
[Marty Peretz is the editor-in-chief of The New Republic.]
It is just about 30 years since the wall around Iran went up. And it is a few days away from fully 20 years since the Berlin Wall came down.
The Berliner Mauer had been up for more than a quarter century, and its surface facing east, grim gray, was a metaphor for life in the German Democratic Republic. On its western face graffiti evoked the freer spirit of the half-city whose heart had nonetheless been broken by the Soviet goose step that divided it. And the Cold War was won on the very day the authorities of the D.D.R. were simply coerced by the power of human will to let its subjects scramble over the deeply ugly barrier into a Berlin with life and life-blood.
There are three broad reasons that the Wall came down. The first is that the communist system itself was a Potemkin Village, and even the village facade spread from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics--always distrust political projects pompously named!--all the way through eastern Europe was not pretty. Neither was it efficient. It's human relations were, well, inhumane. No, they were cruel, although the Bolshoi Ballet danced serenely. My friend Dr. Jerry Groopman, the great chronicler of contemporary medicine, returned from a trip to Moscow a few years before the fall. And his report after visiting a few hospitals: "There is an ongoing epidemic of tuberculosis. The Soviet Union is a failure." This was not an oversimplification.
The second reason for the collapse of both the Warsaw Pact and the U.S.S.R. was the problem of nations and nationalities. The Pact put the Soviets as sovereign over great historic peoples. This simply could not last. There is just so much humiliation that Poles and Hungarians, Czechs and Rumanians could take. Moreover, the Soviet Union was also a union of coerced ethnic groups with pasts of which they were both conscious and proud. The regime began to aggress against these already shortly after the revolution, and these aggressive strategies soon included starvation, exile, population transfer and the importation of Russian nationals into the lands of others. Not many observers or, for that matter, scholars noticed--let alone, saw deeply--these issues abuilding. I was lucky. The greatest historian of communism, at least in the languages I read, Adam Ulam (now deceased), who was the supervisor of my doctoral dissertation at Harvard, saw these phenomena plenty clear and thus was always optimistic about the Soviet collapse. Look at some of his books and a few of his TNR pieces to get a sense of his depth and breadth. Also on the national question, see Hélène Carrère d'Encausse's masterful The End of the Soviet Empire: The Triumph of the Nations, a volume the publication of which in English by New Republic Books (in collaboration with Basic Books) I had much to do.
The third reason for the fall of the endlessly aggressive Soviet Union was the fidelity of American presidents, the Congress and the people to the material (also, if necessary, military) and spiritual struggle against communism. There are some presidential exceptions, to be sure. Jimmy Carter, for instance, hadn't a clue. He was just plain dumbfounded by Moscow's invasion of Afghanistan. And he, like Barack Obama, felt he could contain the Tehran ayatollahs, poor man. In any case, he had already proclaimed at a Notre Dame commencement in 1977 that "we are free of that inordinate fear of communism..."...
Read entire article at New Republic
It is just about 30 years since the wall around Iran went up. And it is a few days away from fully 20 years since the Berlin Wall came down.
The Berliner Mauer had been up for more than a quarter century, and its surface facing east, grim gray, was a metaphor for life in the German Democratic Republic. On its western face graffiti evoked the freer spirit of the half-city whose heart had nonetheless been broken by the Soviet goose step that divided it. And the Cold War was won on the very day the authorities of the D.D.R. were simply coerced by the power of human will to let its subjects scramble over the deeply ugly barrier into a Berlin with life and life-blood.
There are three broad reasons that the Wall came down. The first is that the communist system itself was a Potemkin Village, and even the village facade spread from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics--always distrust political projects pompously named!--all the way through eastern Europe was not pretty. Neither was it efficient. It's human relations were, well, inhumane. No, they were cruel, although the Bolshoi Ballet danced serenely. My friend Dr. Jerry Groopman, the great chronicler of contemporary medicine, returned from a trip to Moscow a few years before the fall. And his report after visiting a few hospitals: "There is an ongoing epidemic of tuberculosis. The Soviet Union is a failure." This was not an oversimplification.
The second reason for the collapse of both the Warsaw Pact and the U.S.S.R. was the problem of nations and nationalities. The Pact put the Soviets as sovereign over great historic peoples. This simply could not last. There is just so much humiliation that Poles and Hungarians, Czechs and Rumanians could take. Moreover, the Soviet Union was also a union of coerced ethnic groups with pasts of which they were both conscious and proud. The regime began to aggress against these already shortly after the revolution, and these aggressive strategies soon included starvation, exile, population transfer and the importation of Russian nationals into the lands of others. Not many observers or, for that matter, scholars noticed--let alone, saw deeply--these issues abuilding. I was lucky. The greatest historian of communism, at least in the languages I read, Adam Ulam (now deceased), who was the supervisor of my doctoral dissertation at Harvard, saw these phenomena plenty clear and thus was always optimistic about the Soviet collapse. Look at some of his books and a few of his TNR pieces to get a sense of his depth and breadth. Also on the national question, see Hélène Carrère d'Encausse's masterful The End of the Soviet Empire: The Triumph of the Nations, a volume the publication of which in English by New Republic Books (in collaboration with Basic Books) I had much to do.
The third reason for the fall of the endlessly aggressive Soviet Union was the fidelity of American presidents, the Congress and the people to the material (also, if necessary, military) and spiritual struggle against communism. There are some presidential exceptions, to be sure. Jimmy Carter, for instance, hadn't a clue. He was just plain dumbfounded by Moscow's invasion of Afghanistan. And he, like Barack Obama, felt he could contain the Tehran ayatollahs, poor man. In any case, he had already proclaimed at a Notre Dame commencement in 1977 that "we are free of that inordinate fear of communism..."...