This is certainly the year for anniversaries: 200 years since the birth of Charles Darwin, Abraham Lincoln and Edgar Allen Poe; 80 years since the notorious pogrom in Hebron, ending the Jewish community there; 70 years since the beginning of the greatest disaster in human history, WW II; 50 years since the passing of the preeminent Rabbi Yitzhak Zev Soloveitchik; 40 years since man landed on the moon; and 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
How blessed it is that a generation has grown up not knowing the Berlin Wall that despicable blockade to freedom and monstrous symbol of communism.
Not a single person ever tried to cross the wall from West Germany to East Germany; the hideousness of communism was on daily display, closing in hundreds of millions of people, all in the name of freedom.
Although the edifice of communism was already showing major cracks before 1989, and although some communist countries did not fall until a year or two later, it is clear that November 9, 1989 marks the fall of communism. It remained only to gasp at the evil it perpetrated the tens of millions of people that the likes of Lenin and Stalin murdered and at the gullibility, make that the self-gullibility, of so many otherwise intelligent people who thought that to fight for communism was to be idealistic. Read the related blog posting on post-communist German Jewry
The end of history widely expected with the fall of communism overlooked one detail: Islamic terrorism. The world is immeasurably better for the fall of communism ask countless millions in the former USSR but the world is still locked in a life-and-death struggle for freedom. In this round, it is not a secular, extremist creed but a religious, extremist creed that threatens the world.
The last war was black-and-white: One side possessed nuclear weapons and threw up a symbol the Berlin Wall to represent itself. The present war is anything but black-and-white. Its warriors, lurking not behind nuclear silos but in the shadows, unnamed, masked, unafraid of death itself, show how everything from small arms to airplanes and even stones can, if aimed at the right civilian target, wreak havoc around the world. Item: Had three airplanes not flown into buildings in 2001, the security in airports and the billions of dollars spent on it, not to mention the inconvenience would have been saved.
And so, as we deservedly mark a major step in history toward freedom for all the fall of the Berlin Wall we must redouble our commitment to the struggle. The new enemy is cunning and heartless.
The major lesson from the Wests victory in the Cold War is that if we are firm enough and patient enough, we shall triumph. As there was an end to communism, there will be, G-d willing, an end to terrorism.
