Today is the 20th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. In several ways, the Wall and its collapse are fitting symbols of communism. They demonstrate several truths about that system that we would be wise not to lose sight of.
First and foremost, Cold War-era Berlin was the most visible demonstration of the superiority of capitalism and democracy over communism and dictatorship. Despite the fact that East Germany had one of the highest standards of living in the Soviet bloc, it had to build a wall to keep its people from fleeing to the capitalist West. By contrast, West Germans and other westerners were free to move to the communist world anytime they wanted. Yet only a tiny handful ever did so. Decisions to “vote with your feet” are often even better indicators of peoples’ true preferences than ballot box voting, since foot voters have better incentives to become well-informed about the alternatives before them. Even more powerful evidence is the reality that many East Germans and others fled from communism even when doing so meant risking their lives.
Second, the Berlin Wall was an important symbol of the way in which communist governments violated the human right to freedom of movement, one of the most important attributes of a free society. If people are forcibly trapped under the rule of the government in whose territory they happen to be born, they are not truly free; rather, they are hostages of their rulers.
Finally, the sudden collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 vividly demonstrated the extent to which communist totalitarianism relied on coercion to maintain its rule. Some Western scholars and leftists contended that most Russians and Eastern Europeans actually supported communism or at least preferred it to the available alternatives. The events of 1989 gave the lie to this notion, though a few writers still defend it today. Once the Soviet government and its puppet states in Eastern Europe signalled that they would no longer suppress opposition by force, the Berlin Wall was quickly torn down, and communist governments throughout Eastern Europe collapsed within months under a tidal wave of popular hostility. Both the communist rulers themselves and many Western observers had been misled by previous widespread expressions of support for communism. They failed to take full account of the fact that those expressions of support were in large part the result of fear. Once the fear dissipated, so too did most of the support. Unfortunately, many scholars and journalists still haven’t learned this crucial lesson. In analyzing places like Cuba and Iran, they too often take public expressions of support for repressive rulers at face value. This is not to say that communist governments had no popular support at all or that decades of communist indoctrination were completely ineffective; far from it. However, the true level of support for such regimes is likely to be much lower than it seems.
Despite all of the above, I am somewhat conflicted about the status of the Berlin Wall as the symbol of communist oppression in the popular imagination. My reservations have to do with the underappreciated fact that the Wall was actually one of communism’s smaller crimes. Between 1961 and 1989, about 100 East Germans were killed trying to escape to the West through Wall. The Wall also trapped several million more Germans in a repressive totalitarian society. These are grave atrocities. But they pale in comparison to the millions slaughtered in gulags, deliberately created famines in the USSR, China, and Ethiopia, and mass executions of kulaks and “class enemies.” The Berlin Wall wasn’t even the worst communist atrocity in East Germany. As historian Norman Naimark has documented, Soviet occupation troops in East Germany raped some 2 million German women, executed thousands of political prisoners (only a minority of whom were Nazis or guilty of war crimes), and imposed extensive forced labor on much of the population. It is true, of course, that German troops committed comparable, and sometimes even greater, atrocities in the USSR. But the one set of wrongs in no way justifies the other. Forced labor and concentration camps continued on a substantial scale even after the Soviets established an “independent” East German state in 1949.
Terrible as the Berlin Wall was, focusing on it as the main example of communist injustice may actually lead people to underestimate how awful that system truly was. It is a bit like portraying Kristallnacht or the Night of the Long Knives (both atrocities had death tolls comparable that of the Berlin Wall) as the main example of Nazi oppression, rather than the Holocaust.
It is important to remember the Berlin Wall and the lessons it teaches. But doing so is only one small part of the task of rectifying the longstanding neglect of communist crimes.
Matthew says:
With China (and Singapore, and elsewhere) what it is, does it still make any sense to necessarily equate capitalism with democracy?
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November 9, 2009, 8:19 pmMatt says:
Two quick points: Immigrants are often very poorly informed as to what faces them in new countries. (Large return rates are only one bit of evidence tending to show this.) So, while they may know what they want to get away from, there’s no reason to think they know what they are getting in to. Secondly, you can almost never go wrong in thinking that Anna Applebaum will mislead you on anything, and this is especially likely with anything she writes on Eastern Europe. Given her track record as a unreliable informant, I find that it’s almost never worth the time it would take me to read that Slate piece.
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November 9, 2009, 8:25 pmwm13 says:
Surely what Prof. Somin characterizes as the position of “a few writers” is the majority position among American university professors. I think it is a little disingenuous how the Conspirators always act as if the evil is out there, when their world is the central generator of it.
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November 9, 2009, 8:33 pmSteve says:
Oh, I’m sure it was a big secret in the West that people didn’t voluntarily choose to live under communism. Witness this debate between Nikita Krushchev and American labor leaders (but mommy! Fox News told me that unions support communism!) way back in 1959:
Yeah, who knew? I’m sure there were many, many, many people in the West who thought that the people of East Germany loved communism, and that the wall was just there for no reason. Or maybe the number of dupes who felt that way is being grossly exaggerated.
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November 9, 2009, 8:33 pmDavid Welker says:
Somin’s argument is flawed.
Somin’s argument is essentially that focusing on the Berlin Wall somehow diminishes other issues involving the Soviet Union and its satellite states.
But, by this same logic, wouldn’t focusing on crimes by communists diminish the seriousness of crimes by others? For example, does focusing on the crimes of communists somehow diminish the Holocaust?
By this same logic, wouldn’t reading the story of Anne Frank diminish other atrocities committed by Nazi Germany?
The logic is simply wrong. Talking about the abuses by communists does not diminish abuses by others, but instead has a tendency to open up a discussion of these other abuses, as the previous thread on the crimes of communism illustrates. (Which I thought was interesting, despite some less than insightful commentary by some.) Reading the story of Anne Frank does not diminish the importance of other atrocities. If anything, it creates an opening to discuss these other issues. Likewise, the Berlin Wall does not diminish other abuses by the Soviets, but rather brings attention to the topic and creates an opening to discuss these other issues.
There is not some sort of exclusivity here. Talking about the Berlin Wall does not prevent the discussion of related issues. In fact, discussing the Berlin Wall makes discussion of related issues more likely.
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November 9, 2009, 8:35 pmguy in the veal calf office says:
Oh [snarky], I’m sure it was a big secret in the West that people didn’t voluntarily choose to live under communism.
That’s a straw man, its more relevant that many people thought communism wasn’t so bad, that it was the wave of the future, etc. Ivy League economic departments taught communism as an equal rival of capitalism. Paul Samuelson (Current Washington Post columnist & Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences recipient) and every single person who wears Che Guerva memorabilia is part of that benighted group.
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November 9, 2009, 9:05 pmyankee says:
I think the issue is that the Berlin Wall was a tangible symbol of both communist oppression and the divide between the free world and the communist world. It attained this meaning partially for what it was and partially because it was so readily visible to the world. The Gulag was hidden in Siberia, but anyone could see the Berlin Wall.
The Berlin Wall was important for what it symbolized, not just for keeping East Germans out of West Berlin.
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November 9, 2009, 9:53 pmSteve says:
That’s a straw man, its more relevant that many people thought communism wasn’t so bad, that it was the wave of the future, etc.
“Straw man” in VC lingo means that someone isn’t making the argument you’d like them to make.
Prof. Somin wrote that lots of people in the West thought that people were voluntarily choosing to live under Communism. Responding to exactly what he wrote isn’t a strawman, even if you would have written something different in his place.
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November 9, 2009, 10:04 pmChrisTS says:
As Matthew asks, why identify democracy and capitalism?
IS writes:
But there are economies that are not capitalist — according to many here on VC — in democratic polities. Further, there is at least some reason to believe that people tried to flee the GDR because of lack of democracy, abuse of power by the Party, and suppression of basic liberties rather than, or as much as, because of the non-capitalist economy.
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November 9, 2009, 10:47 pmChrisTS says:
Veal Calf Office:
I’m 99.9% certain that my daughter purchased her Che T-shirt because she thought the silk screen of his face looked hot, rather than because she had any ideas at all about economics when she bought it on the street in NYC several years ago.
Also, of course, one cannot discount the ‘cool name’ factor.
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November 9, 2009, 10:55 pmRicardo says:
What Paul Samuelson said was that the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries had found a way after WWII to “deliver the goods” to their people. He was wrong as he put too much weight on the bogus government statistics of these countries. A similar issue comes up in the debate over China today: China’s official GDP growth statistics are much higher than would be expected given observed electricity consumption.
Neither Samuelson nor anyone else at “Ivy League economics departments” (aside from the token Marxist theorist that some departments have) ever said Communism was a desirable system or that Communist governments were not guilty of atrocities against their people. And that, as Somin rightly points out, is the real issue. Even if Communism were able to give people a high standard of living, it would still be wrong because of the coercion and loss of freedom it entails.
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November 9, 2009, 11:02 pmChrisTS says:
Oh, thank you: I had almost forgotten that all academics are lefto/leninists. Including all the libertarians who blog on VC.
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November 9, 2009, 11:28 pmKen Mitchell says:
“When the Wall fell”, I was watching it on TV from our base housing at Subic Bay, Philippines, and I said to my wife what may have been the STUPIDEST thing I ever said; “This is the end of an era, there’s no future in the Navy.” By the time the first Gulf War started, I was already retired.
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November 9, 2009, 11:41 pmStrict says:
“Also, of course, one cannot discount the ‘cool name’ factor.”
Most kids don’t know that Che was a ruthless executioner. I would never wear anything Che. But he was extraordinarily brave and charismatic, adventurous and photogenic. It’s not hard to see why he became an idol.
Pre-Revolution Cuba is actually a good example of why it’s incorrect to equate capitalism with democracy. The country under Batista was capitalist, but not at all democratic.
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November 9, 2009, 11:49 pmNeil C. Reinhardt says:
Whenever I see anyone wearing “Che” clothing I inform them, in no uncertain terms, what low life psychopath Che actually was.
He was not only responsible for mass murder, he personally beat old men and old women to death with a base ball bat.
And FYI Che’s skills at military command skills were absolutly terrible.
LAST — Please see my post on the Berlin Wall which Ilya Somin posted on November 10, 2009 12:18
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November 10, 2009, 1:41 amNeil C. Reinhardt says:
OPPS!
MY BAD!
Sorry, I MEANT please see my post on the Berlin Wall in “Orin Kerr’s” November 9, 2009 9:46 pm Post
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November 10, 2009, 1:53 amConstantin says:
Wall coming down was nothing to get worked up about. If it were otherwise, Obama would have been there for the celebration today.
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November 10, 2009, 2:24 amjosil says:
Re the wall, he would have voted “present”.
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November 10, 2009, 3:36 amRicardo says:
Constantin and josil,
Bush was absent from the 60th anniversary commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz in 2005 — he sent Cheney instead. So what?
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November 10, 2009, 4:11 amalkali says:
What Paul Samuelson said was that the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries had found a way after WWII to “deliver the goods” to their people. He was wrong as he put too much weight on the bogus government statistics of these countries.
It is actually true that Communist governments created incredible growth, for a while — they moved millions of workers from farms to cities, built schools, universities, and factories, put women to work outside the home, and made everyone work longer hours. That is “input” growth, and it is real economic growth, and it does raise standards of living to some extent. But when that transition was complete, the input growth ended: asociety can only make that agricultural-to-industrial transition once. Communist systems do a very poor job of creating productivity growth, which is the kind of economic growth we usually think of in the West — growth based on the increasingly better management of inputs.
All that may seem obvious in retrospect but it took Western economists well into the 1960s to work out why Communist economies experienced such tremendous growth after WWII.
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November 10, 2009, 8:30 amguy in the veal calf office says:
ChristS: Maybe you can buy your daughter a set of silk Radovan Karadžić, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and Mohammed Atta T shirts to go with that Che Guerva.
Ricardo– There were more than some stringy Marxists teaching economics at Harvard. Paul Sweezy used Stalin’s book as a text and changed his doctrine in lockstep. Harry White was an actual Soviet Spy. Teddy Roosevelt called Frankfurter a Bolshevik. Schumpeter was a plain old Marxists, but taught for 20 years. There’s more, and that’s just the Harvard economics department.
The point is wide, influential swathes of the U.S., especially its intellectual and artistic classes, believed that communism was the future and was superior to the U.S. model. The residue of that affectionate belief in communist permanency and legitimacy remained within those groups well into the 1980s.
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vanya says:
Soviet occupation troops in East Germany raped some 2 million German women, executed thousands of political prisoners (only a minority of whom were Nazis or guilty of war crimes), and imposed extensive forced labor on much of the population.
Communism has enough blood on its hands without throwing every crime committed by a Russian under the rubric “crimes of Communism.” The raping of German women was roundly supported and practiced by Soviets of all ideological beliefs and actually criticized by the more devout believers of Communism. I find it hard to believe a different Russian regime would have behaved much differently under the circumstances. The forced labor and the treatment of German prisoners in the USSR is arguably a Communist specific crime, but the initial horrors of the occupation owe more to the quality of the soldiers than the ideology of the regime.
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November 11, 2009, 12:58 pmThe Berlin Wall Today | thelobbyist says:
[...] had a couple of posts up commemorating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall – here, here, and here for [...]
Irmtraut H says:
Equating democracy and capitalism is like comparing apples with pineapples.
To survive in capitalism you must have capital, and unfortunately, that is not open to everybody. Sometimes parents don’t give a damn and do not provide a proper education or they are possessionless and the child misses out on support and shot in the arm. Without capital, life is no picnic. I think, many Americans will experience that in 20 years or so after the wipe-out of the GFC.
I grew up in the West Berlin of before the Wall and after, so I am reasonably familiar what happened then. Their system was always going to go bankrupt, as my father maintained from 1948, who had some experience with the Kommandantura.
East Germans could only exercise that freedom of movement because West Germany accepted them in, all of them. Since then, world population has more than tripled and no country can be expected to tolerate willy nilly freedom of movement of millions. You can always stack them like in a Mumbai slum, but if the host people want to retain a quality of life, housing, roads, schools, desalination plants need to be funded and built, which happens at a slower pace that people can move. And then there is the little thing of jobs.
Times have changed, and I for one, am not prepared to share my house so other people can have freedom of movement. This is the cold reality unless you accept rationing of housing as Germany had in those days. In my godmother’s flat of maybe 130 sqm there had to live 15 people, sent by the the government housing department.
The communist system had many inbred injustices. They took our land in East Berlin ‘away’. It was not returned to us or compensated after the Wall fell, so Ulbricht or Kohl government, same difference. What purpose democracy if it washes up people like Helmut Kohl?
If I could obtain justice, I would sign my democratic right to vote away, although after my brother’s suicide it is now too late for him.
It’s not as simple as democracy and capitalism are all benign and communism is all bad. Communism in its early definition, put the common good first. It then deteriorated, but in the Soviet Union they pushed the rate of illiteracy from 90 % in about 1890 to near zero.
From what I read on the German net, former East Germans still live with unpleasant constraints in 2009. Different constraints, but constraints nonetheless.
Before the change they could not get a passport to look at New York. Now they can get a passport, but they do not have the capital to do such a trip and then they get these freefall capitalists who steal or defraud them of their land, or who have no shame to pay labourers 1 Euro 50 cents per hour. FREEDOM! freedom to steal and defraud. The marriage of democracy and capitalism has created a Colluding Class and only if that can be addressed will there be gain.
PS: We actually did not have true democracy in West Berlin. Legislation made in Bonn was endorsed by the City government. They sent delegates to Bonn who had advisory roles, but were not eligible to vote. We never voted for Bundestag Parliamentarians.
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November 13, 2009, 9:11 pmIrmtraut H says:
After some days of internet outages here, I can now put in my addendum.
Actually, freedom only carries you as far as your wallett allows.
Despite having lived in the West since I was four years old, I have never been to NY because money in that category was never over. So the freedom of movement is limited by the money available.
Freedom of speech is also not absolute. Ask those who questioned the Vietnam War. They found themselves on the outer time and time again, never knew if they were on a blacklist, sidelined by competitors or whether they should have regarded themselves as lifelong morons who don’t cut the mustard.
Freedom of association needed to be taken with a grain of salt, too.
I had friends from my childhood in West Berlin who turned into system opponents in adulthood and I never visited them again after I had that suspicion. I imagined there could be a raid (Baader Meinhof period) while I happened to be there and then I would be on file............
Right to an education? In East Germany youngsters from an academic household often had difficulty getting into university because children with a peasant and labourer background were given preference. In the West, university education depended on the willingness of the parents. My father did not like to pay for his offspring, my mother said it was the father’s call to fund education. I had to drop out of university because I had an empty wallett. I could not get a scholarship because my father was not poor. I could not get a loan, because I had no collateral. Theoretically, I could have taken my father to court, but I did not have the money to do so.
Then came reunification with the Western Colluding Class pocketing assetts in the former East without compensation. I had the freedom to take the German state to court, but not the money to do so.
The West has a very long way to go before we break into jubilation, because a person’s freedom does not depend on those rights which are written on paper but on what’s in your wallett.
Get a grip, get out of your gated communities and take a look what life is like without the priviledge of a big bank account!
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