The fall of the Berlin Wall - followed by a big left-wing lie, as usual

The greatest political event of my lifetime was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The sight of tens of thousands of East Berliners joyously tearing down the world’s longest prison wall, erected by the most monstrous tyranny the world has ever seen had a certain hallucinatory quality at the time: who would have thought it possible just a few months before? 

Of course, most of us knew who in the West was to thank for it: that stupid ex-actor and  clownish cowboy,  Ronald Reagan, aided by that ridiculous, provincial, hectoring, narrow-minded housewife, Margaret Thatcher. Two mean-minded, vicious, provincial, right wing, intellectual nullities had been instrumental in bringing the hope of freedom to hundreds of millions of enslaved people.

And most of us knew who not to thank: generations of left-wing commentators, journalists, writers, academics and politicians who had spent most of their time attacking the United States whilst creating a cuddly, Disneyfied version of its almost inconceivably vile enemy.

How they all sneered when Reagan called the USSR “The Evil Empire”. What a fascist!

Obviously, not all left-wingers subscribed to this pernicious notion – many brave socialists were vilified for describing the horrors of Soviet Communism and risked everything by fighting the communists within their own party. 

But many prominent left-wingers from the Cold War era were like those Muslims who condemn Islamo-fascist terrorist attacks before adding a qualifying statement blaming Western governments for bringing suffering on their own people as a result of their iniquitous anti-Muslim foreign policies. Just as Muslims who do this are, essentially, condoning psychopathic murderers, any left-winger during the Cold War era who actively sided with the Soviets against America, or who preached that the super-powers were morally equivalent, or who did not actively champion the benefits of Western democracy against the horrors of Communism were essentially condoning a barbaric tyranny based on lies, torture, murder and the suppression of everything that makes us truly human. That was the system tens of thousands of left-wing fellow-travelers wanted their countrymen to live under.

Vicious, selfish, treacherous, frivolous, poisonous fools. Shame on all of them.

When the wall fell, with exquisite timing, I had just left the BBC’s main evening news bulletin to work on some tedious business programme, which had to confine itself to reporting how the markets were reacting to events in Germany – as if anyone cared!

But I did notice how massively pleased many of my left-wing colleagues seemed to be: TV and radio reporters who had spent a decade attacking Reagan and Thatcher’s idiotically naïve, hawkish foreign policies on air, and calling them fascists in private, were apparently overjoyed that thisdeluded strategy had proved so gloriously triumphant.

When, exactly, I wondered, had these aiders and abetters of the Soviet slave state realized that it was in fact a monstrous dictatorship which simply had to be overthrown? After all, they’d spend most of the previous decade laughing at or wearily dismissing the very people who had brought about its fall. Day before yesterday? And why did they look so happy – did they feel no shame at being so terribly wrong for so long? When they saw the pictures of joyful East Germans flooding to freedom, did they not feel the need to ask themselves whether, in some small way, what they had been doing and saying all those years hadn’t delayed this wonderful, glorious happening?

Rather than admit they’d been wrong, they lied to themselves and others (as the left always does): Reagan and Thatcher had had nothing to do with it. In fact, they’d proved a hindrance.

Just another in a long succession of lies the left-wing got away with during  the 20th century. Only they didn’t quite manage to make this one stick at the time: that’s one of the reasons the left went on hounding Reagan and Thatcher long after they’d both left office, trailing clouds of glory.