The Berlin wall was the real 9/11

The Berlin wall was the real 9/11/By Victor Sebestyen, the author of Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire

THE GUARDIAN, 09/11/09;

Today is the real 9/11. This is not meant as a quibble about dates. Future historians will remember 9 November 1989 as far more significant than that terrifying day in September eight years ago. Countless long-forgotten events have been marked in headlines as the day we shall all remember. But nobody can doubt that the world changed on that wonderful night in Berlin.

When the Berlin Wall fell, communism died. Events have moved on fast since then. A new clash of civilisations – or in many ways an old one – began to surface. Now it is hard for anyone under about 40 to remember communism. To recap: it was that once idealistic, inspirational creed promising equality, freedom from exploitation and the creation of a new perfect humankind. The problem was that people had an annoying refusal to be perfected.

Almost always communism was imposed at the point of a gun and created labour camps and bread queues. The Stalins, Mao Zedongs and Pol Pots turned communism into the bloodiest social experiment of all time. History will mark 9 November 1989 as the day it was seen off as a miserable failure.

Again, we should try to look back. Less than a generation ago a third of our continent was under military occupation by a foreign superpower. The Soviet Union had around 750,000 troops stationed in central Europe. Hundreds of nuclear missiles were aimed at western cities, while the Nato countries had hundreds targeted at Budapest, Warsaw and so on. As easyJet and Ryanair take us on weekend breaks to Berlin or Bucharest, we should recall how unwelcoming and lugubrious these places were 20 years ago. Their people, imprisoned behind an iron curtain of electrified fences and minefields, were crying out to be free.

Then there was the wall in our heads, on both sides of the divide. For most of the four decades before 1989, communism was a real threat to our way of life. Two generations were brought up to fear the Soviet monolith. There were nuclear scares (the Cuban missile crisis) and the cold war fuelled proxy wars on other continents, such as Angola and the Soviet conflict in Afghanistan. Culturally, we were fed on spy thrillers and movies with the reds as the enemy.

All that changed in 1989. The collapse of communism inspired liberation elsewhere, most dramatically in South Africa, where apartheid could have survived longer. Nelson Mandela was released three months after the fall.

A downside to this story is that 9 November led directly to 11 September. The end of the cold war opened a door for Osama bin Laden. But Islamic fundamentalism is not a threat to western-style democracy as communism was. Obviously there will be converts, and all demographic graphs show that the number of Muslims will increase. But it is unlikely that Islam will appeal to the sort of western minds who were once attracted by socialist thinkers in the European intellectual tradition.

Terrorism is not a cause; it is a weapon, as Trotsky observed. Modern terrorist groups are a threat to many lives and will continue to be so. But to our way of life? Only if we choose to make it so. Outside the mind of an al-Qaida fanatic, it is fanciful to imagine that any day in London, Paris, Rome or Budapest imams will be in charge of governments sanctioning sharia law. In 1989, communist party apparatchiks ran a dozen now free European states, quite apart from the communist revolutions exported to the third world.

Last, but not least, 9 November was gloriously happy. Anything seemed possible that night. 11 September was a day that sparked panic and fear. I know which is a better 9/11 to remember.