The Berlin Wall of the 21st Century
We are hearing the refrain of familiar lyrics from the mouths of leaders in America that want to build ideological walls to “protect” the rest of us from our own freedom.
When invoking nostalgic visions of the mighty fight between Good and Evil, Americans most often turn their focus on the speech President Ronald Reagan made at the Brandenburg Gate on June 12, 1987:
[E]very man is a German, separated from his fellow man. Every man is a Berliner, forced to look upon a scar…As long as this gate is closed, as long as this scar of a wall is permitted to stand, it is not the German question alone that remains open, but the question of freedom for all mankind…
The Cold War was a point of order in the resurgent American belief in itself: the vision of world leader, beacon of liberty, custodian of freedom for all who seek its shores. But it may be more helpful in understanding America’s current state-of-mind to mention the event that formed such resolve and demanded a leadership that would only come to fruition after decades of an internal struggle over what many considered the End of History. That event was 60 years ago. In the early morning hours of August 13th, 1961 East German military and police closed the border between East and West Berlin. It marked the beginning of both the construction of what would become the Berlin Wall and the partitioning of one country into freedom and despair. It was the inevitable period put on a sentence that had been written since the end of World War II and the rise of Stalinist Russia.
The consequences of the wall and the stark contrast in life between the Communist East and Free West was undeniably apparent. The police state of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) suffered from massive emigration to the West in the 1950s as West Germany experienced a post-war Wirtschaftswunder or “economic miracle.” In Hope Millard Harrison’s 2003 book, Driving the Soviets Up the Wall: Soviet-East German Relations, 1953-1961, the East German “Brain Drain” was detailed as a major concern, and a full-throated propaganda campaign was launched in an attempt to twist a human instinct for freedom and self-preservation into a betrayal of the State. Yuri Andropov, a Communist Party of the Soviet Union official reported to the Central Committee that young professionals and the German intelligentsia made up a significant portion of defectors, despite East German leadership’s public insistence that they were leaving solely for economic reasons. In fact, testimony from refugees indicated the reasons were largely political and ideological. Intellectual and economic opportunity fueled a panic among the Communist officials, worried the demographics of the defectors having devastating consequences to an already weak and faltering socioeconomic state. Much work had to be done to harden a façade already crumbling under the weight of its own lies. From the Agitator’s Notebook: He Who Leaves the GDR Joins the Warmongers (English translation):
Both from the moral standpoint as well as in terms of the whole German nation, leaving the GDR is an act of political and moral backwardness and depravity. Those who let themselves be recruited objectively serve West German Reaction and militarism, whether they know it or not. Is it not despicable when for the sake of a few alluring job offers or other false promises about a “guaranteed future” one leaves a country in which the seed for a new and more beautiful life is sprouting, and is already showing the first fruits, for the place that favors a new war and destruction?...Does not leaving the land of progress for the morass of an historically outdated social order demonstrate political backwardness and blindness?...[W]orkers throughout Germany will demand punishment for those who today leave the German Democratic Republic, the strong bastion of the fight for peace, to serve the deadly enemy of the German people, the imperialists and militarists.
Now we are hearing the refrain of familiar lyrics from the mouths of politicians and bureaucrats in America that want to build ideological walls to “protect” the rest of us from our own free thoughts, ideas, expressions, and will. We are seeing it in the propaganda spewed out from government officials, gaslighting from corporate media, and censorship from technology companies like Google and Facebook. In fact, they are collaborators in a mission to redefine what it means to understand and share a common objective truth. The more the information gatekeepers of these elite classes try to tighten the blindfolds on average Americans fighting for honesty and transparency, the more blatantly dishonest measures they use in their attempts to preserve their power. We are not far from becoming prisoners of our self-censorship to escape persecution.
Similar to the agitprop used by the East Berlin communists in which they flip an individual’s quest for freedom into a mortal sin against the State and their fellow Germans, an individual American’s search for autonomy and intellectual freedom is met with accusations of racism, bigotry, insurrection, and disinformation. The walls being built are not physical, but psychological and intellectual. Data is manipulated to indoctrinate, not inform. People like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo have convinced Americans that not judging people by the superficial characteristics of the color of their skin is a sign of one’s own racism. To have the power over what your children are learning in taxpayer-funded schools is an attack on history – even if that history is a narrative contrived for the benefit of destroying a legacy of the American Ideal.
To question the efficacy of masks on children is to question the gilded hand of Louis Pasteur himself: to question science is suddenly…unscientific! To believe in the inherent value of the life of an unborn child is anti-choice, anti-woman…anti-life?! To believe in two sexes defined at birth is anti-science – and as Abigail Shrier knows all too well, it will get a person branded as an anti-trans bigot and censured from the digital marketplace. The censorship for your own good might well have been written by the East Berlin communists themselves. The American Bookseller’s Association apologized for distributing Shrier’s book, Irreversible Damage calling it “anti-trans” and is distribution a “serious, violent incident.” The ABA went further, later issuing another statement after the group mistakenly conflated two books by black authors.
Riots and unrestrained violence that burned cities from coast to coast last year were justified anger at inherently racist political and societal systems – systems branded as such by the very people holding generational power in those places – Democrat run cities like Minneapolis, New York City, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Washington D.C. and Philadelphia. The media mouthpieces worked as advocates of the propaganda. This is an informative, if not horrifying master cut of leftist media proclaiming the chaos as “not generally unruly”, while communities were engulfed in devastating flames and looting.
This spring, the Biden Administration denied any crisis at the border, insisting the new human policies were in accordance with the Obama administration’s attempts to offer safe harbor to the huddled masses yearning to be free. Months later, those same people are attempting to rewrite their own narrative on everything from kids in cages, to migrant facilities, the backgrounds and family status of those coming through the border.
But unlike the physical wall separating East and West Germany, how do Americans overcome the oppression separating propagandizing censorship and intellectual freedom? Where are our dissidents willing to bear the burden of liberty against autocracy to restore generational objective truth? When are we going to awaken from the hypnosis of false promises promulgated for the “Common Good” and take a stand for the last best hope of freedom in the world – because there is no other place to which we can escape? We must stand for truth to stand for America’s survival. Those who know the ruins of communism such as Bertram Wolfe and William Herberg became the best advocates for its defeat. Now the illiberal factions of America are being met with people like Bari Weiss, Glenn Greenwald, and John McWhorter. They step outside the boundaries set forth by the gatekeepers who believe they know how to safely disseminate information. It is up to the rest of us to stop talking in the shadows, nodding along with the narrative given to us, and take the risk worth taking: that for our freedom.