As you celebrate the Berlin Wall's 'fall' in 1989, remember 1979, too

National Post, 22 November 2019

Communism was killed in Poland on June 2, 1979, but the evil empire was a fearsome thing and it took 10 years before the burial would take place.

The coverage of the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which occurred earlier this month, was disappointing. Much of it made it seem as if the wall just fell down, like a weathered old barn. But it did not fall down; it was torn down. Little coverage seemed interested in why and how.

The error was made in high places. Before the anniversary, Germany’s foreign minister, Heiko Maas, put out an official statement in which he paid tribute to the Gdansk shipyard workers and Prague’s Charter 77. But mostly he offered Euro-speak about multilateral efforts to combat climate change.

Maas, like so many others, did not acknowledge that the key turning point in the Cold War, the events that made 1989 happen in the way that it did — non-violently through a moral revolution — began 10 years earlier in 1979.

In 1979, St. John Paul II visited Poland. In 1979, Margaret Thatcher was elected prime minister of the United Kingdom.

The former marked the acceleration of a revolution of the spirit, a moral defiance of the suffocating atheism and materialism that Moscow imposed throughout the evil empire.

America’s leading Cold War historian, John Lewis Gaddis, wrote that “when John Paul II kissed the ground at the Warsaw Airport on June 2, 1979, he began the process by which communism in Poland — and ultimately everywhere — would come to an end.”

The Yale professor is not Catholic, by the way. It’s not a case of special pleading. What happened that June day?

A million Poles gathered in and around Warsaw’s Victory Square for a public Mass — unthinkable in communist Poland except that it could not be denied to a Polish pope. As John Paul preached the true story of Poland — a history of a people formed by their faith — a rhythmic chant went up, over and over: “We want God! We want God!”

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