The countdown has begun. It will soon be 20 years since the Berlin Wall came down on 9 November 2009 and led to the final demolition of communism in Europe. Communism was the Big Idea that became the Big Lie. A lot can be written and said about its economic and environmental failures — but the eventual failure was rooted in the popular fatigue with living in societies where lying had become a way of life.
“They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work,” was how an old Soviet joke went.
The dissident writer Vaclav Havel wrote a stunning essay in 1978, The Power of the
Powerless. Havel gave the example of the greengrocer who obediently puts up a propaganda poster in his shop window —”Workers of the world, unite!” — not because he believes in the slogan but as a way to buy his right to left alone.
There was such systematic cynicism till the Big Lie was finally rejected almost exactly 20 years ago.
Or think of an equally famous essay by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, written a day before the Soviet secret police arrested him and sent him into Western exile in 1974, titled Live Not By Lies. It was a call on Soviet citizens to refuse to cooperate with the system and to open a “breach in the imaginary encirclement caused by our inaction”;And the simplest and
most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation lies right here: Personal non-participation in lies. Though lies conceal everything, though lies embrace everything, but not with any help from “This is our path, the easiest and most accessible one, which takes into account out inherent cowardice, already well rooted. And it is much easier–it’s dangerous even to say this–than the sort of civil disobedience which Gandhi advocated,”wrote Solzhenitsyn.
The final collapse of the Soviet Union and its European empire undoubtedly had many
catalysts: the economic strain of a failed system, the inability to keep up with America in the arms race, the disastrous war in Afghanistan. But the fact that the final collapse was so sudden and peaceful surely had much to do with citizens getting tired of the brazen
lies.
Growing protests every Monday in the town of Leipzig from September 1989 had shaken East Germany even as communist neighbours such as Hungary and Poland had seen that change was
inevitable. It is said that the final push came when the slogans in the streets of the German Democratic Republic changed — from “We want to get out” to “We are staying here”
was a call for change rather than escape.
The Berlin Wall was doomed from that moment on.