Freedom from Tyranny

                The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday is a celebration in remembrance of the fall of the Berlin Wall 25 years ago.  The East German border opened on November 9, 1989, “heralded the collapse of the Communist system and led to German reunification less than a year later.”  Twenty-five years later the German people celebrated the end of their tyranny.

                German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared the fall of the Berlin Wall to be proof that dreams can come true.  She added that the collapse of the Berlin Wall brought hope to regions where “freedom and human rights are threatened or even trampled on.”

                Ms. Merkel was a child in the former East Germany; she was a 35-year-old scientist in East Berlin when the wall fell.  “The Berlin Wall, this concrete-cast symbol of state despotism, brought millions of people to the edge of the endurable.”

                Germans released thousands of illuminated white balloons to mark the occasion.  The balloons were released at a specific time; the timing was to coincide with the “historical moment, 6:57 p.m. local time, when on Nov. 9, 1989, then-East German Politburo member Gunter Schabowski replied to a  journalist’s question at a conference to the effect that the Communist state was to open its borders immediately.  His response prompted hordes of Berliners to flock to and breach border crossings as East German guards stood by.”

                The celebrations were a memorial to all the people who died trying to escape Communism.  While 138 people are officially estimated to have died crossing the Berlin Wall, approximately 1,000 died trying to” cross the 856-mile border between the former West and East Germany.”  

                Dieter F. Uchtdorf was an 11-year-old boy when he and his mother escaped from East Germany together.  Sixty-two years later President Uchtdorf of the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints recalled his horrible experience.  The family included three boys and one girl, with Dieter being the youngest child.  The family planned their escape after the father learned he was about to be taken in. 

                President Uchtdorf described the horror he saw in his mother’s face when they came to a hill and she realized they were still in East Germany with Soviet border soldiers due at any time.  She told her son, “We need to go.”  He helped her repack their little bit of food, and then the two of them ran.  “They ran for the hills.  To the west.  Toward young Dieter’s father, who would escape through West Berlin.  For his brothers who fled north together.  For his sister, who jumped from a moving train after paying a conductor to unlock the door while it passed through a sliver of West Germany.

                “`The consequences would have been horrible for anyone left behind,” President Uchtdorf said.  Communist retribution awaited any captured family member.  Schooling would be withheld, professional advancement stunted.  His father faced an even worse fate.

                “So, alone in the hills at the edge of the Green Border – they prayed they were alone – his mother ran, as fast as she could manage, to protect young Dieter’s future.

                “`We didn’t stop for a long time after we passed that crossing bar,’ he said.”

                The young boy who escaped East Germany became a fighter pilot in West Germany.  He was a senior vice president for Lufthansa, the West German airline, as well as a stake president in the LDS church with responsibility for numerous congregations in the Frankfurt area.  He was home with his family on November 9, 1989, when they heard the news flash about the border opening.  He and his son wanted to drive to Berlin to see for themselves but were unable to do so because of other responsibilities.  He regrets to this day that he did not make the trip.

                President Uchtdorf explained that the hardest thing about the Berlin Wall was the separation of families for so many years.  Many families were divided because some of them lived in East Berlin and some of them lived in West Berlin.  The Communists’ policy kept families separated.  This alone qualifies as tyranny without any of the economic or political tyranny of the situation.  Any time tyranny is present, there is a lack of freedom. 

Plant Your Flag

"When General Victor `Brute' Krulak asked President Reagan what advice he would give young Marine officers, Reagan didn't hesitate: `Plant your flag.' He meant find those principles, those ideals, that plan or project on which you will stake your reputation, and plant your flag there…." (William J. Bennett, America: The Last Best Hope, Vol. II, p. 480).

Ronald Reagan planted his flag and stood on his principles. He said what he meant and meant what he said. He had three main goals for his administration: smaller government, lower taxes, and stronger defense. He was successful in achieving all three.

As Reagan stepped down from the Inaugural platform, he signed an Executive Order and with his signature destroyed price controls on oil that had been in place for more than a decade. The next day he abolished the Council on Wage and Price Stability and ended an energy crisis that had consumed the Carter administration. This meant that Americans were no longer forced to wait in long lines to buy gasoline.

As Reagan was being sworn in as the 40th President of the United States, 52 Americans were being held captive by Iranian militants. They had been in captivity for 444 days. Some time later on Inauguration Day, President Reagan announced at a luncheon with members of Congress that the American hostages had been freed. Even the militants recognized that Reagan said what he meant and meant what he said.

The Professional Air Traffic Controllers Union (PATCO) went on strike during the summer of 1981. Reagan warned the union members, who were all government employees, that he would fire all of them if they violated federal law by walking off the job. They walked, and he fired all of them.

During the years between 1981 and 1987 Americans enjoyed more labor peace because there were thousands fewer people going on strike. Not only labor unions took note that Reagan said what he meant and meant what he said.

Leaders of foreign nations also watched and marveled. The KGB noted in a background paper for the Soviet Communist leadership that with Reagan "word and deed are the same." When Libya sent Soviet-made MiG jet fighters to threaten U.S. Navy jets in the international waters of the Gulf of Sidra, Reagan ordered his military pilots to shoot them down. He told his military leaders that they could pursue Libyan jets into Libyan territory and even "… follow them into their damned hangers."

Reagan's resolve to build up and strengthen our defense took military morale to new heights. Reagan never wavered from his core principles and stayed committed to his basic beliefs. One of his basic beliefs was that communism was evil. His anti-communism stance began while he served as president of the Screen Actors Guild. He recognized that communism had a record of crushing human rights and was guilty of mass murder. He saw its hatred of God, hostility to democracy and its violence. Once he even called the USSR an "evil empire."

In June 1982 Reagan became the first President of the United States to address the British House of Commons. He told them, "In an ironic sense, Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis, a crisis where the demands of the economic order are conflicting directly with those of the political order. But the crisis is happening not in the free, non-Marxist West, but in the home of Marxist-Leninism, the Soviet Union…. [T]he march of freedom and democracy …will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people." The British leaders recognized Reagan's toughness and his commitment. The relationship between Great Britain and the United States had never been closer than while Reagan was President.

In 1983 the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada - about 51 square miles - was torn with an uprising within its own government. Appeals were made for United States help. Reagan acted quickly because he viewed the situation with suspicion that Granada was the creation of another communist tyranny in the Western Hemisphere. On October 19 United States and allied forces invaded Grenada and quickly overwhelmed the "engineers" from Cuba who were helping island communists build a huge airstrip. It was supposedly being made to land Boeing 747s, but Reagan warned that it could also be used for Soviet long-range missiles. The invasion was cheered by the 100,000 natives of Grenada and rescued American medical students there. It was also an attempt by Reagan to push back at the periphery of the Soviet empire worldwide. Some people believe that Grenada was the turning point of the Cold War just as Gettysburg was the turning point of the Civil War.

Reagan went to West Germany in June 1987 to speak there as part of Berlin's 750th anniversary celebration. Reagan wanted to make a strong statement about divided Berlin. Reagan's speech writer visited Berlin in preparation for writing the speech. He saw the 60-mile long wall that separated West Berlin and East Berlin. He also saw that the wall separated two different types of existence. He saw that East Berlin was colorless and had buildings which still showed signs of bomb and bullet damage from World War II. In West Berlin he saw life, color, movement, modern architecture, traffic, etc. He talked with people in West Berlin who explained how the wall had separated members of their family. He returned to Washington D.C. determined to write something about the wall coming down. The State Department, the National Security Council, and the Secretary of State didn't want anything about the wall in the speech. They rejected draft after draft of the speech. Each time Reagan put the famous line about the wall coming down back into the speech. Reagan's speech at the Brandenburg Gate is regarded today as one of history's greatest speeches. He said what he wanted to say, and he said it with emphasis. "General Secretary, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Reagan believed that the United States must always negotiate from a position of strength. He was a man who believed in standing firm on true principles.

Reagan was a man of faith in God. He wanted to spend his remaining years doing what God wanted him to do. In a visit to St. George's Hall in the Kremlin, after a nice welcome from Gorbachev and surrounded by the gold, crystal, rich tapestries of the Tsars, and the paintings of saints, Reagan looked Gorbachev in the eye and said, "God bless you." This was the first time in 70 years that the name of God had been uttered aloud in that place. It was heard by every citizen across the Soviet Union. Reagan was a man with faith in God and love for his country. He was a great man and a great President because he stood firm on his principles. He said what he meant and meant what he said.

Ideas, information, and quotes for this blog post came from William J. Bennett, America: The Last Best Hope, Vol. II, pp 480-530.

The Berlin Wall

Germans and many other people are celebrating this week! It is now twenty years since November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall - sometimes known as the Iron Curtain - came down. In 1945, at the end of World War II, victorious Allies took over Berlin and divided the city into four sectors. Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States each occupied one sector. Germany was also divided into four zones controlled by the same countries. Berlin is located deep within the area occupied by the Soviets, but the Allies expected to be granted access to the city. In June 1948 the Soviet Union blocked all rail, water, and highway routes through the Soviet territory to the Western sectors. The Soviets hoped the blockade would drive the Western troops out of Berlin, but the Western nations had other ideas. They organized a project called the Berlin airlift to bring the needed supplies to West Berliners. At the height of this project aircraft were landing into West Berlin at the rate of one airplane every couple of minutes. The Soviets ended the blockade in May 1949, but the airlift continued until the following September. Starting sometime toward the end of 1948, East and West Berlin had separate governments, police forces, currency and utility systems. In 1949, the Britain, France, and United States zones were combined into West Germany, and the Soviet zone became East Germany. Roads between East Berlin and West Berlin were unrestricted during the 1950s, allowing thousands of East Germans to flee Communism. By 1961 more than a thousand East Germans were fleeing to West Berlin every day. On August 13, 1961, a wall was begun to divide the two sections of Berlin. The wall was made of concrete slabs 12 to 15 feet tall with pipes, barbed wire, and other obstacles on top of the wall. The wall was about 26 miles long in the Berlin area with a total length of the walls and other barriers about 110 miles long. The wall stood for 28 years, two months, and 27 days. During that time, many East Germans tried to escape to West Berlin. Some of them were successful, but somewhere between 170 and 753 people lost their lives trying to break through this border. Most of them were shot by the East German border guards, but some were blown apart by mines and automatic guns. Others drowned while trying to escape by a sea route. Those escapees caught alive were jailed. There were attempts to break the Communist strangle hold: Hungarians in 1956, the Czechs in 1968, and the Polish shipyards in 1980. In 1989, many East Germans fled to West Germany through Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. Finally, on November 9, 1989, the East German government ended all travel and immigration restrictions on their people. Americans like to think that the fall of the Berlin Wall came about because Ronald Reagan made a speech on June 12, 1987 while standing at the Brandenburg Gate: "We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjWDrTXMgF8&] Pressure from Western countries was one reason the Communists backed down, but there are also other reasons given for the fall of Communism. I watched a program on television last evening which credited the music from the Beatles - brought into Russia illegally and wildly popular with the young people - with destroying the control of the Communists. Russians say it happened because of perestroika - restructuring of the Soviet society, especially its economic policy. Lech Walesa, who led the revolution for Polish freedom, said that the communists were beaten back because the masses of people organized and demanded change. I assume that it was a combination of all these reasons. Life under Communism was very difficult. One visitor to Russia wrote in 1982, "If it is hard to describe the economic wasteland of Russia to someone who hasn't been there, it is even harder to describe what their totalitarian system has done to the human spirit…. It isn't just the drabness and grayness one sees everywhere. Or the rudeness and surliness one encounters so often. It's that you virtually never see people laughing, smiling, or just seeming to enjoy themselves. People seem to walk slightly bent over, their eyes always averting a stranger. There is an overwhelming sense of oppression and depression." Allen Hall retells the experience of Alfred and Renate Kostbade, with their two teenagers, escaping from East Germany on October 13, 1988. They chose to make their escape in a small rubber boat in the dark and then spent twelve hours on the Baltic Sea before arriving in West Germany. The fact remains that human beings want to be free, and many will risk everything including life itself to obtain freedom. As I've said before, freedom is not free! We must not take our liberty for granted. If we lose our freedom, it will be very difficult to regain it. We must protect our freedom, not only for ourselves but because maintaining our freedom gives courage and hope to freedom-lovers all over the world. Many of the facts for this post came from articles written by either Lutz Holzner or Melvin Croan, World Book Encyclopedia, Vol. 2, p 265-267.