The Berlin Wall and the unmasking of Communism — VOICES for REASON

Today is the 20^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, arguably the most famous event signaling the fall of Communism. In the days following November 9, 1989, the world saw residents of East Germany—a satellite state of the supposedly great and powerful Soviet empire—flee en masse to West Germany, revealing how hellish life under Communism truly was. The sight of Germans literally breaking down the wall is an inspiring one that should be remembered as a great landmark of the 20^th century—as Yaron Brook and Onkar Ghate explain in this must-see interview.

As we celebrate an event that revealed to the world the oppression of Communism, it is important and instructive to note that for the seven decades of the Soviet Union’s existence, many journalists, authors, and intellectuals in the West evaded the atrocities of Communism, even as Communist states were racking up death tolls in the tens of millions.

One instructive case was Ayn Rand’s attempt to publish her first novel, We the Living, set in 1920s Soviet Russia—a place Rand knew intimately. Born in Czarist Russia in 1905, Rand experienced firsthand the Russian Revolution of 1917, when Communists took over the country and nationalized private property (including her family’s business) and killed dissidents at will. She witnessed horror after horror until she managed to flee the country in 1926.

We the Living, written in 1933, dramatizes what life under Communism was truly like. In particular, it shows how the basic ideals of Communism—collective ownership of property and a life of service to a collectivist state—led inexorably to the subjugation of the individual: his liberty, property, hopes, dreams, and even survival. The novel was profoundly important for Americans to read—if for no other reason than that it was, in Rand’s words, “the first story written by a Russian who knows the living conditions of the new Russia and has actually lived under the Soviets in the period described…”

But the book was rejected by publisher after publisher for being anti-Communist—a reflection of the mass-embrace of Communism by American intellectuals. As Leonard Peikoff describes the experience in the 60^th anniversary edition of We the Living, “For nearly three years, We the Living was rejected by New York publishers. It was rejected by more than a dozen houses. A typical rejection said that the author did not understand socialism.”

Decade after decade, Rand saw the Soviet Union praised as a moral ideal—even as it kept its own people in a subhuman state of starvation and imprisonment. Intellectuals believed that a state that subjugates the individual to the collective is a noble ideal—and they did not let reality get in the way.

Rand discussed exactly this phenomenon in her Introduction to the 1958 reprinting of We the Living, the first time the novel got a genuine hearing with Americans.

Take a look through the files of the newspapers. If you do, you will observe the following pattern: first, you will read glowing reports about the happiness, the prosperity, the industrial development, the progress and the power of the Soviet Union, and that any statements to the contrary are the lies of prejudiced reactions; then, about five years later, you will read admission that things were pretty miserable in the Soviet Union five years ago, just about as bad as the prejudiced reactionaries had claimed, but now the problems are solved and the Soviet Union is a land of happiness, prosperity, industrial development, progress, and power; about five years later, you will read that Trotsky (or Zinoviev or Kamenev or Litvinov) or the “kulaks” or the foreign imperialists) had caused the miserable state of things five years ago, but now Stalin has purged them all and the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union has surpassed the decadent West in happiness, prosperity, industrial development, etc; five years later, you will read that Stalin was a monster who had crushed the progress of the Soviet Union, but now it is a land of happiness, prosperity, artistic freedom, educational perfection and scientific superiority over the whole world. How many of such five-year plans will you need before you begin to understand?

Unfortunately, Western intellectuals still evade to what extent Communism was evil. To take a recent example, recall how White House Communications Director Anita Dunn praised Mao Tse Tung, a Communist icon who presided over the death of 50 million Chinese,:

… the third lesson and tip actually comes from two of my favorite political philosophers Mao Tse Tung and Mother Teresa, not often coupled with each other, but the two people that I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point which is you’re going to have make choices, you’re going to challenge, you’re going to say why not….

Communism is a movement that has butchered upwards of 100 million people, according to many estimates. That is almost 10 times the total of Nazi Germany, which killed 11 million (including 6 million Jews). And yet while no one would express a shred of admiration for any member of the Nazi movement, a top member of an American administration felt no compunction–and faced no consequences–for praising one of Communism’s leading killers.

That Anita Dunn was not immediately fired shows that much of the modern establishment still does not genuinely oppose Communism—that they still view it as a noble ideal, rather than a murderous ideal that denigrated individualism in theory and butchered countless individuals in practice.

For more on how today’s intellectuals view Communism, and what that means for our society, see Part 2 of the Yaron Brook and Onkar Ghate interview, coming soon. And to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall, read—or reread—We the Living, an enduring tribute to the sanctity of the individual.

flickr: hey mr glen