LM#58--The Peaceful Revolution of 1989: The Fall of the Berlin Wall...some 35 years ago

Transcript

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Those are the drums of liberty.

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God's good providence was on the march to the beat of those drums some 35 years ago.

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Let's talk about it on this Liberty Minute.

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Welcome to the Theory to Action podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time, to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life.

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Now here's your host, David Kaiser.

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Hello, I am David and welcome back to this Liberty Minute.

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35 years ago this month, the world witnessed the revolutions of 1989, also known as the fall of communism, which led to the liberation of a vast number of people across Eastern Europe.

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I mean huge, huge swaths, millions of people.

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It has to be one of the most peaceful revolutions in the history of the world.

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Revolutions as we know when we read history, revolutions never go quietly into the night.

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I mean off the top of my head.

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Let's run through some of the most violent revolutions in the history of the world.

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Throughout history, several revolutions have been marked by extreme violence, high death tolls.

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Here are just some of the bloodiest revolutions in world history.

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First of all, the french revolution 1789 to 1799.

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The revolution saw widespread violence, including the execution of king louis the 14th or 16th, rather, in queen marie antoinette 16th, rather, in queen marie antoinette.

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Then we have the reign of terror from 1793 to 1794, which resulted in tens of thousands of executions.

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Millions more perished in wars sparked by the french revolution itself.

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Then we move to the chinese revolution and its civil war from 1911 and 1949.

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The 1911 revolution overthrew the Qing dynasty, ending imperial rule in China, and then the subsequent Chinese civil war, from 1927 all the way to 1949, between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party of China, resulted in a horrific estimated four and a half to five million, all the way upwards to nine million, deaths.

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So again, these revolutions are not going quietly into the night.

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What's the next revolution?

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We can think of the cambodian revolution led by the camille rouge, 1975 to 1979, the killing fields of cambodia, as it was known, just a most brutal and devastating revolution in the history of the world.

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The camille rouge's role was characterized by unimaginable Amir Rouge's role was characterized by unimaginable brutality.

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Upwards of 2 million people, about a quarter of Cambodia's population, died during this short but violent four-year period.

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Then the Mexican Revolution 1910-1920.

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That revolution resulted in an estimated 1.7 to 2.7 million deaths.

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That involved various factions fighting for control of Mexico, leading to widespread violence and social upheaval throughout the whole country.

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And the topic of this podcast, the Russian Revolution and its Civil War 1917 to 1922.

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The revolution that began in 1917, overthrowing Tsar Nicholas II, and then the ensuing Russian Civil War, claimed an estimated 7 to 10 million lives Now.

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It involved multiple factions, including the Bolsheviks, the anti-Bolsheviks, multiple factions, including the Bolsheviks, the anti-Bolsheviks, and many foreign interventions.

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But for all intents and purposes this revolution resulted in an iron grip onward from the 1920s.

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And then we get Soviet communism, which began to spread rapidly in the late 1920s and into the 30s, and it just keeps going.

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So most often in world and in human affairs, revolutions, once they get started, they do not go quietly into the night.

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And that brings us to our topic of the day, the Revolution of 1989.

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Let's run the numbers there.

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Based on the 1989 Soviet census data and population figures from other Eastern European countries, we can estimate the total number of people that did not die but that were liberated is overwhelming, almost unimaginable.

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The Soviet Union in 1989 census was 286 million.

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Again, this is Soviet data, so we'll just roll with these numbers.

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We don't have a better source for them but the approximate figures for other Eastern European countries of that revolution of 1989, east Germany had a population of 16 million, poland 37 million, czechoslovakia 15 million, hungary 10 million, romania 23 million, bulgaria 9 million.

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The total estimate, when you add all these figures together, is roughly just short of 400 million people, 400 million people that were liberated from communist rule in Eastern Europe during the revolutions of 1989.

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And again, it's important to note that this figure includes the entire population of the Soviet Union, even though not all the Soviet republics gained independence immediately in 1989.

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That process of dissolution would continue until 1991, when the Soviet Union officially ceased to exist.

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That's a massive, massive shift affecting nearly, like we said, 400 million lives.

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It marks it as one of the most significant.

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It marks it as one of the most significant peaceful revolutions in world history.

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The fall of communism in Eastern Europe reshaped the political fall of the Berlin Wall.

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In November of that same year, the most visible symbol of the Cold War and the end of communism was the visible toppling of the Berlin Wall.

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That wall stood there from 1981 or 1981, 1961 to 1989.

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You might remember from your history books, when they actually still did teach world history and Western civilization.

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You might remember that the Berlin Wall became the physical manifestation of the Iron Curtain that Winston Churchill had worn back in his speech in 1946.

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That actual wall came about in 1961.

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The communists actually built the wall in 1961 after Churchill called them out symbolically in the Iron Curtain speech in 1946.

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One of the craziest ironies in modern world history.

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It was you can check out podcast number 269 for those details all about the Iron Curtain speech by Churchill.

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We'll put a link in the show notes.

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The Iron Curtain speech by Churchill.

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We'll put a link in the show notes.

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We actually take you on a journey into.

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The heart of that speech is Sir Winston Churchill's iconic Iron Curtain speech.

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Now, more than 100 people died trying to cross from East to West Berlin over those 28 years that the Berlin Wall came stood before it came down, and many, many more people died throughout many of the Soviet satellite states trying to flee Soviet communism.

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So at today's Liberty Minute we're going to talk about God's good providence during this week of Thanksgiving in the United States and we're going to appreciate the peaceful revolution that ended Eastern European communism back in 1989, some 35 years ago, which led to the further collapse of the USSR in 1991.

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And with that let's jump to our first quote from our book of the day.

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Going to the book your, 1989 marked the 200th anniversary of the great revolution in France that swept away the ancient regime and with it the old idea that governments could base their authority on a claim of inherited legitimacy.

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Even as the celebrations were taking place, another revolution in Eastern Europe was sweeping away a somewhat newer idea the governments could base their legitimacy on an ideology that claimed to know the direction of history.

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There was a certain delayed justice in this, for what happened in 1989 was what was supposed to have happened in Russia in 1917.

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A spontaneous uprising of workers and intellectuals of the kind Marx and Lenin had promised would produce a classless society throughout the world.

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But the Bolshevik revolution had hardly been spontaneous, and over the seven decades the ideology it empowered produced only dictatorships which called themselves people's democracies.

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It seemed appropriate then that the revolution of 1989 rejected Marxism-Leninism even more decisively than the French Revolution, two centuries earlier, had overthrown the divine right of kings.

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Nevertheless, the upheavals of 1989, like those of 1789, caught everyone by surprise.

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Historians could, of course, look back after the fact and specify the causes Frustration that the temporary divisions of the World War II settlement have become the permanent divisions of the post-war era.

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Fear of the nuclear weapons that have produced that stalemate.

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Resentment over the failure of command economies to raise living standards.

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A slow shift in power from supposedly powerful to seemingly powerless, thus seemingly powerless.

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The unexpected emergence of the independent standards for making moral judgments.

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Sensing these trends, the great actor leaders of the 1980s had found ways to dramatize them, to make the point that the Cold War need not last forever.

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The point that the Cold War need not last forever.

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Not even then, however, foresaw how soon or how decisively it would end.

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What no one understood at the beginning of 1989 was that the Soviet Union, its empire, its ideology and therefore the Cold War itself, was on a sand pile ready to slide.

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All it took to make that happen was a few more grains of sand.

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The people who dropped them were not in charge of superpowers or movements or religions.

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They were ordinary people with simple priorities, who seized and saw, and sometimes stumbled into opportunities.

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In doing so, they caused a collapse.

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No one could stop.

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Seized and saw, and sometimes stumbled into opportunities.

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In doing so, they caused a collapse.

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No one could stop.

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The leaders had little choice but to follow, and one particular leader, however, did so in a distinctive way.

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He ensured that the great 1989 revolution was the first one ever in which almost, almost no blood was shed.

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There were no guillotines, no heads on spikes, no officially sanctioned mass murderers, no-transcript.

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In both its ends and its means, then the revolution, this revolution became a triumph of hope.

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It did so chiefly because Mikhail Gorbachev chose not to act, but rather to be acted upon, and this quote comes to us from our book of the day the Cold War A New History, written by John Lewis Gaddis.

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The book offers us a comprehensive view of the Cold War era, but written for a general, lay audience, and that's why we like it.

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Now you might say who is John Lewis Gaddis?

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Well, he is a prominent American historian, widely regarded as one of the leading experts on the Cold War.

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He is the Robert A Lafitt Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale and he's been called the Dean of Cold War Historians.

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Gaddis has authored numerous influential books on the Cold War history and on American foreign policy, influential books on the Cold War history and on American foreign policy.

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So when we picked up this book, we immediately searched in the index and in the bibliography for Pope John Paul II and for George Weigel's incredible biography Witness to Hope.

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And we do so because often there seems to be a blind spot within American historians and with English-speaking folks to not give John Paul II his due for the events unfolding in Eastern Europe, beginning in 1979 and carried through to the end of Soviet-era communism.

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And lo and behold, both of those entries John Paul II and George Weigel's incredible biography Witness to Hope.

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Both of them showed up.

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Gaddis had done his homework and after all, he was the dean of the Cold War historians.

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So good on you, mr Gaddis.

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He captured all the regular highlights and pivotal moments in the book, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, the building up of the Berlin Wall and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union, and it's with that last theme that we're going to return to the book.

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The Cold War A New History.

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For our second to return to the book, the Cold War a new history.

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For our second quote going to the book, the year began quietly enough with the inauguration on January 20th 1989 of George H W Bush as president of the United States.

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As Reagan's vice president, bush had witnessed Gorbachev's emergence and the events that followed, but he was less convinced that his predecessor of their revolutionary character.

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Did we see what was coming when we took office?

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No, no, he said we did not, nor could we have planned for it.

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The new chief executive wanted a pause for a reassessment and so ordered a review of Soviet-American relations that took months to complete.

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Brent Scowcroft, bush's national security advisor, was even more doubtful.

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I was suspicious of Gorbachev's motives and skeptical about his prospects.

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He was attempting to kill us with kindness Scowcroft thought my fear was that Gorbachev could talk us into disarming without the Soviet Union having to do anything fundamental to its own military structure and that in a decade or so we could face a more serious threat than ever before.

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Gorbachev, for his part, was wary of the Bush administration.

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Gorbachev, for his part, was wary of the Bush administration.

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Quote these people were brought up in the years of the Cold War and still do not have a foreign policy alternative, he told the Politburo shortly before Bush took office.

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I think they are still concerned that they might be on the losing side.

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Big breakthroughs can hardly be expected.

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He said the losing side.

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Big breakthroughs can hardly be expected.

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He said that Bush and Gorbachev anticipated so little suggests how little control they had over what was about to happen.

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Calculated challenges to the status quo, of the kind of John Paul II, margaret Thatcher, ronald Reagan and Gorbachev himself had mounted over the past decade, had softened the status quo that it now lay vulnerable to less predictable assaults from little-known leaders, from even, frankly, unknown individuals.

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Scientists know this condition as criticality A minute perturbation in one part of a system can shift or even crash the entire system.

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They also know the impossibility of anticipating when and where or how such disruptions will occur and what effects there will be.

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Gorbachev was no scientist, but he came to see this Quote.

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Life was developing within its own dynamism, he commented in November.

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Events were moving very fast and one should not fall behind.

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There was no other way for a leading party to act.

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There was no other way for a leading party to act, and indeed events were moving very fast in the year of 1989.

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They had started to move in a different direction back in 1979, on the insistence of one man who was listening to God every day of his life, john Paul II, the Pope from Poland, had returned to his native land in that 1979.

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Perhaps God's good providence was prevailing on these events Now.

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You'll remember we covered this in a podcast those nine days in June Catholic Corner number 10.

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We'll put a link in the show notes for you, but here's a brief summary of what happened in 1979.

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John Paul II's first pilgrimage back to his native Poland in June of 1979 was a historic and transformative event.

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It had far-reaching consequences for both Poland and the entire Soviet bloc.

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That nine-day visit, occurring less than a year after his election as Pope, marked a significant turning point in the struggle against communism in Eastern Europe.

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Now the visit, the pilgrimage, well, that took place from June 2nd to June 10th 1979.

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It included stops in eight Polish cities.

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John Paul II's visit had an extremely profound effect and impact on the Polish people.

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During a mass in the capital city of Warsaw, john Paul II uttered those famous words, quote let the spirit descend and renew the face of the earth, this earth.

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The message resonated deeply with the Polish population, inspiring a sense of courage and unity in them.

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The Polish people responded by chanting we want God.

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We want God A phrase unheard of to be spoken in public behind the Iron Curtain, to be spoken in public behind the Iron Curtain.

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Historians widely regard this pilgrimage as a crucial event in the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, and John Gaddis, our Dean of Cold War Historians, is one such historian, and his book doesn't disappoint.

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He throws credit where credit is due, and that is admirable.

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Let's go back to the book.

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The Pope, joseph Stalin, was reputedly fond of saying how many divisions does he have?

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John Paul II, during those nine days spent in Poland in 1979, provided the answer.

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This too was a development, as Dobrynin might have put it, totally beyond the imagination of the Soviet leadership.

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That trip was indeed a quote development, as Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Fedorovich Dobrynin might rightly have called it.

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And that quote development would for a lack of better phrasing keep developing snowball going down an alpine slope in winter.

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It kept picking up steam as if somebody or something was moving the chess pieces perfectly in place and as if history was on the move again.

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Remember, it is history, it is his story.

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Yes, indeed, john Paul II's 1979 pilgrimage to Poland has and should be remembered as a pivotal moment that sparked a chain of events leading to the eventual collapse of the Iron Curtain and the transformation of the geopolitical landscape in Eastern Europe.

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And here is how historian John Gaddis nails it.

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Going back to the book, when John Paul II kissed the ground at the Warsaw airport on June 2nd 1979, he began the process by which communism in Poland and ultimately everywhere else in Europe would come to an end.

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Hundreds of thousands of his countrymen cheered his entry into the city, shouting we want God, we want God.

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And so, from June of 1979 to October of 1989, we travel and we have the election of great Western leaders such as Ronald Reagan being elected as US president in 1980, which was pivotal.

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Reagan's moral clarity was paramount in the fall of Eastern European communism.

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One thinks of his tear down this wall speech.

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Another pivotal figure was Locke Valenza, the head of the Solidarity Movement in Poland, which started the whole toppling of the cards throughout the whole Eastern Bloc.

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Some other items that contributed to the revolution happening in 1989, as we go along our way are particularly five of them.

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The Soviet-Afghan War from 1979 to 1989.

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It marked the beginning of a costly and protracted conflict that significantly weakened the Soviet Union.

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It drained Soviet resources and morale.

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It exposed starkly the weaknesses in Soviet military capabilities.

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It fueled dissent within the Soviet republics, especially in Central Asia, and it contributed to the international isolation and was an economic strain Further complicating.

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That was the economic stagnation in the Soviet Union.

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1970s and 1980s saw severe economic problems in the Soviet Union.

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Their inefficiencies of the centrally planned economy had become more and more apparent in free market capitalism.

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Under Ronald Reagan, especially in the years 1983, 84, and 85, put extreme pressure on the USSR to have to keep up and catch up with the Americans.

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Furthermore, declining oil prices reduced Soviet export revenues, increased military spending diverted resources away from civilian sectors, and then consumer goods shortages and declining living standards simply just piled on and fueled discontent for the Soviet rulers.

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The third reason that helped perpetuate and get us to 1989 and the revolution that happened was the general secretary who was selected in 1985, mikhail Gorbachev.

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Glasnos, which means openness, allowed for greater freedom of speech and information.

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And then perestroika, the restructuring attempted to try and reform the Soviet economy.

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These reforms, while intended to strengthen the system, ultimately exposed it Furthermore, deepening the weakness and accelerating the collapse.

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And then, in 1986, we have the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, with far-reaching consequences.

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That exposed the inefficiency and cover-ups in the Soviet system.

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They were not trustful and they were not transparent.

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It damaged the Soviet Union's international reputation and, furthermore, it increased the economic strain due to its massive cleanup and containment efforts.

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And then we have the final reason the rise of nationalism.

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Gorbachev's reforms inadvertently fueled nationalist movements across the Baltic states.

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Estonia, latvia, lithuania all pushed for independence.

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Other Soviet republics, including Ukraine and Georgia, saw growing separatist sentiments, which all came to a conclusion.

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It all came to a head in 1989.

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To a head in 1989.

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The late 1980s saw a wave of anti-communist revolutions.

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That happened in Poland.

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The Solidarity Movement continued to gain strength and roll on, continued to gain power under elections and by 1989 was on the verge of collapsing the country and by 1989, was on the verge of collapsing the country.

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In Hungary, it opened its border with Austria, allowing East Germans to flee.

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That happened in 1989.

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East Germany had the fall of the Berlin Wall in November of 1989.

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Czechoslovakia had the Velvet Revolution happening in 1989.

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And Romania had the overthrow of the Ceausescu regime in 1989.

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So to put a capstone on this, let's go back to John Gaddis' the Cold War, a New History for another quote.

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Meanwhile, guests, including Gorbachev himself, were arriving in East Berlin for the official commemorations on October 7th and 8th 1989.

00:29:23.277 --> 00:29:31.920
To the horror of his hosts, the Soviet leader turned out to be even more popular than he had been in Beijing.

00:29:31.920 --> 00:29:35.739
Be even more popular than he had been in Beijing.

00:29:35.739 --> 00:29:44.673
During the parade, the Unter den Leiden, the marchers abandoned the approved slogans and began shouting Gorby, help us, gorby, stay here.

00:29:44.673 --> 00:29:58.021
Watching from the reviewing platform next to an ashen Hanukkah, gorbachev could see that these were specially chosen young people, strong and good looking.

00:29:58.021 --> 00:30:04.384
Jaruzelski, the Polish leader, came up to us and said do you understand German?

00:30:04.384 --> 00:30:06.788
I said I do a little bit.

00:30:06.788 --> 00:30:08.070
Can you hear?

00:30:08.070 --> 00:30:10.054
I said I can.

00:30:10.054 --> 00:30:12.183
He said this is the end.

00:30:12.183 --> 00:30:14.931
And that was the end.

00:30:14.931 --> 00:30:16.535
The regime was doomed.

00:30:17.898 --> 00:30:21.787
Gorbachev tried to warn the East Germans of the need for drastic changes.

00:30:21.787 --> 00:30:28.323
He said one cannot be late, otherwise one will be punished by life.

00:30:28.323 --> 00:30:38.935
But as he later recalled, comrade Erich Honecker obviously considered himself number one in socialism, if not in the world.

00:30:38.935 --> 00:30:43.391
He did not really perceive anymore what was actually going on.

00:30:43.391 --> 00:30:49.010
Trying to get through to him was like throwing peas against the wall, gorbachev said.

00:30:49.010 --> 00:31:10.186
Gorbachev said Anti-government protests had been building for weeks in Lepsyk and they resumed on October 9th, the day after Gorbachev returned to Moscow With the Soviet guest gone.

00:31:10.207 --> 00:31:13.895
The possibility of Deng Xiaoping's solution was still out there.

00:31:13.895 --> 00:31:15.098
Honecker may even have authorized one.

00:31:15.098 --> 00:31:18.143
Actually, let's stop there to understand what we're reading.

00:31:18.143 --> 00:31:39.291
The possibility of Deng Xiaoping's solution was the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and Gaddis is making the point that Honecker, the East German chancellor, could have or the East German ruler rather, could have authorized another Tiananmen Square, but in East Germany, east Berlin.

00:31:39.291 --> 00:31:41.365
But he didn't.

00:31:41.365 --> 00:31:44.949
He didn't on the insistence of Gorbachev.

00:31:44.949 --> 00:31:46.766
Let's go back to the book.

00:31:49.380 --> 00:32:10.634
But at this point an uninspected actor, an unexpected actor, kurt Mauser, the widely respected conductor of the Gundwad House Orchestra, intervened to negotiate an end to the confrontation and the security forces withdrew to be no tenement-like massacre.

00:32:10.634 --> 00:32:17.884
But that meant that there was no authority left for Honecker, who was forced to resign on October 18th.

00:32:17.884 --> 00:32:27.309
His successor, ergon Krentz, had attended the 40th anniversary celebration of Mao's revolution in Beijing just a few weeks earlier.

00:32:27.309 --> 00:32:31.505
But he did not think that firing on demonstrators would work in Germany.

00:32:31.505 --> 00:32:49.071
East Germany, it would not happen, he assured Gorbachev on November 1st, even if the unrest spread to East Berlin, there might be an attempt to break through the wall, krentz added, but such a development was not very likely.

00:32:49.071 --> 00:32:54.023
Not very likely.

00:32:54.023 --> 00:32:56.090
Such a development was going to happen.

00:32:58.180 --> 00:33:17.186
Gorbachev's decision not to intervene militarily, which was known at the time as the Brezhnev Doctrine to not do that in Eastern Europe, marked a drastic and dramatic and significant shift in Soviet relations with its Eastern satellite countries.

00:33:17.186 --> 00:33:27.267
It allowed these peaceful revolutions to succeed and it signaled the end of Soviet control over its satellite states.

00:33:27.267 --> 00:33:31.483
And how would it all come down?

00:33:31.483 --> 00:33:38.454
How would the end of Eastern European communism happen?

00:33:38.454 --> 00:33:45.788
Well, as TS Eliot so aptly put it, not with a bang but with a whimper.

00:33:45.788 --> 00:33:58.567
Well, actually, you could say it did end with a bang, but not an explosive bang, but with a bang of a hammer, and that hammer was hitting the Berlin Wall.

00:33:58.567 --> 00:34:10.469
Going back to the book, what Krenz did not expect was that one of his own subordinates, by botching a press conference, would breach the wall.

00:34:12.059 --> 00:34:27.554
And after returning from Moscow, krenz consulted his colleagues and on November 9th they decided to try and relieve the mounting tension in East Germany by relaxing, but not eliminating, the rules restricting travel to the West.

00:34:27.554 --> 00:34:40.652
The hastily drafted decree was handed to Gunter Schabetzky, a Politburo member who had not been at the meeting but was about to brief the press.

00:34:40.652 --> 00:34:53.532
Schabetzky glanced at it also hastily and then announced that the citizens of the GDR, the German Democratic Republic, were free to leave through any of the border crossings.

00:34:53.532 --> 00:34:58.570
The surprise reporters asked when the new rules went into effect.

00:34:58.570 --> 00:35:10.009
Shuffling through his papers, schabowski replied, according to my information, immediately Were the rules valid for travel to West Berlin?

00:35:10.009 --> 00:35:11.192
The question came.

00:35:11.192 --> 00:35:27.166
Schabowski frowned, shrugged his shoulders, shuffled some more papers and then replied permanent exit can take place via all border crossings from the GDR to West Germany and West Berlin respectively.

00:35:28.851 --> 00:35:29.030
Hmm.

00:35:30.481 --> 00:35:34.751
The next question was what's going to happen to the Berlin Wall now?

00:35:34.751 --> 00:35:43.364
Schabowski mumbled an incoherent response and closed the press conference Within minutes.

00:35:43.364 --> 00:35:46.652
Literally, the word went out that the wall was open.

00:35:46.652 --> 00:35:52.164
It was not, but crowds began gathering at the crossing points and the guards had no instructions.

00:35:52.164 --> 00:35:54.086
The crowds began gathering at the crossing points and the guards had no instructions.

00:35:54.086 --> 00:36:02.597
Krentz, stuck in a central committee meeting, had no idea what was happening and by the time he found out, the crush of people was too large to control.

00:36:02.597 --> 00:36:17.565
At last, the border guards at the Bonhommerstrasse took it upon themselves to open the gates, and an ecstatic East Berliners flooded into West Berlin to open the gates, and an ecstatic East Berliners flooded into West Berlin.

00:36:17.565 --> 00:36:19.730
Soon, germans from both sides were sitting, standing and even dancing on top of the wall.

00:36:19.730 --> 00:36:53.523
Many brought hammers and chisels to begin knocking it down.

00:36:53.523 --> 00:36:57.864
Gorbachev in Moscow slept through the whole thing and heard about it only the next morning.

00:36:57.864 --> 00:36:59.905
Unbelievable, everything was possible.

00:36:59.925 --> 00:37:04.527
On November 17th, demonstrations broke out in Prague and quickly spread throughout Czechoslovakia.

00:37:04.527 --> 00:37:35.568
Within weeks, a coalition government had ousted the communists and by the end of the year, alexander Dubek, who had presided over the 1968 Prague Spring, was installed as a chairman of the National Assembly stalled, as a chairman of the National Assembly reporting to the new president of Czechoslovakia, unbelievably Václav Havel.

00:37:35.568 --> 00:37:46.021
The speed with all that has happened in each of those countries is quite remarkable and very, very hard to imagine is quite remarkable and very, very hard to imagine.

00:37:46.021 --> 00:37:52.507
It's as if a supersonic wind was blowing all throughout Eastern Europe, and perhaps it was.

00:37:52.507 --> 00:37:57.893
Perhaps that wind was not a natural phenomenon, though.

00:37:57.893 --> 00:38:07.992
Perhaps it was a wind, but maybe it was supernatural wind, maybe it was a Holy Spirit wind.

00:38:07.992 --> 00:38:11.378
And all while a man, all while a man.

00:38:11.378 --> 00:38:24.105
The 264th successor to the Apostle Peter, sat in Rome and locked on at each of these events in Eastern Europe with gratitude and with humility.

00:38:24.105 --> 00:38:37.773
He must have thought all in God's good providence, all in God's good providence.

00:38:37.773 --> 00:38:40.637
A recent National Catholic Register article.

00:38:40.637 --> 00:38:43.943
We learned several other aspects of the story.

00:38:43.943 --> 00:38:47.592
Let's go to that article for a quick quote.

00:38:49.916 --> 00:39:08.025
The impact of John Paul II's role was acknowledged even by secular leaders, from former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who recalled a decisive moment during the Pope's 1996 visit to the reunified Berlin.

00:39:08.025 --> 00:39:34.673
Walking through the Brandenburg Gate, once a symbol of division, the Pope turned to Helmut Kohl and said Mr Chancellor, this is a profound moment in my life that I, a Pope from Poland, stand here with you, the German Chancellor, at the Brandenburg Gate, and the gate stands open.

00:39:34.673 --> 00:39:41.945
The wall is gone, berlin and Germany are united and Poland is free.

00:39:41.945 --> 00:39:45.182
And Poland is free.

00:39:45.182 --> 00:40:04.626
And perhaps the most striking testimony came from an unexpected source Mikhail Gorbachev himself, the last leader of the Soviet Union who acknowledged that without John Paul II's influence, the peaceful revolution of 1989 might never have occurred.

00:40:04.626 --> 00:40:10.641
Very high praise indeed from both of them, both leaders.

00:40:10.641 --> 00:40:26.550
So, some 35 years later, we celebrate the peaceful revolution that was in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November of that same year, of the Berlin Wall in November of that same year.

00:40:26.550 --> 00:40:45.909
Like we said, that Berlin Wall stood from 1961 to 1989, and it was the most visible symbol of the Cold War, and actually it is perhaps the most powerful symbol of the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe communist regimes in Eastern Europe.

00:40:49.949 --> 00:41:07.592
I remember being a freshman in high school in 1989, and I think I frankly stunned my German teacher, herr Hatzla, because I was always the class clown in school and when she pulled in the television that day to watch the live coverage of what was happening in her home country as the Berlin wall was coming down.

00:41:07.592 --> 00:41:14.224
I was riveted because I understood what a big deal this was.

00:41:14.224 --> 00:41:24.300
Frankly, I was telling my classmates hey, this is no joking matter, this is a big deal.

00:41:24.300 --> 00:41:27.465
And I think they were frankly surprised.

00:41:27.465 --> 00:41:44.634
And she was surprised Because Harold Hartzler always saw me as the smart aleck kid that could barely do his homework on time and was always interrupting her class.

00:41:44.634 --> 00:41:53.282
Now I will say it was touching to see a different side of Hera Hartzler, my German teacher, because several times she had welled up with tears.

00:41:53.282 --> 00:42:10.221
Over the course of that week she told us stories of friends and family that were reaching out to her that she had lost touch with when the wall was quickly put up, almost overnight in 1961.

00:42:10.221 --> 00:42:28.244
I believe she was a very young kid at the time, maybe seven, eight or nine but she acutely remembered the whole change, how everything changed overnight and how she had lost touch with cherished friends, not knowing if they were alive or dead.

00:42:28.244 --> 00:42:40.257
So the Berlin Wall was a physical manifestation of the Iron Curtain that Winston Churchill had warned us about in the West back in 1946.

00:42:40.257 --> 00:42:49.376
Like we said, more than 100 people died trying to cross from East to west Berlin before that wall came down in November of 1989.

00:42:50.757 --> 00:43:09.039
So in today's Liberty Minute, john Gaddis, the dean of the Cold War historians, reminds us of those powerful forces that were on the move at the end of the Cold War and from our perspective, those events were from God's good providence.

00:43:09.039 --> 00:43:24.018
During this week of Thanksgiving, may we offer a prayer for Thanksgiving that God gave the push in his grace for the human actors to do their part in that drama of life.

00:43:24.018 --> 00:43:34.862
May we thank God for those actors placed in the right spot, at the right time, in the right place to carry out his providential will.

00:43:34.862 --> 00:43:45.601
And may we thank God that the revolution that ended Eastern European communism back in 1999 was very peaceful.

00:43:45.601 --> 00:43:52.663
It could have been much, much worse some 35 years ago.

00:43:52.663 --> 00:43:56.820
As always, let's keep fighting the good fight.

00:44:04.972 --> 00:44:06.197
Thank you for joining us.

00:44:06.197 --> 00:44:09.579
We hope you enjoyed this Theory to Action podcast.

00:44:09.579 --> 00:44:18.759
Be sure to check out our show page at teammojoacademycom, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast, as well as other great resources.

00:44:18.759 --> 00:44:22.621
Until next time, keep getting your mojo on.

LM#58--The Peaceful Revolution of 1989: The Fall of the Berlin Wall...some 35 years ago

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