An Anniversary To Teach Us Some History

One of the most quotable statements ever made by President Ronald Reagan was "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this Wall." Those famous words, spoken in 1987 at the Brandenburg Gate of the Berlin Wall, were hurled as a direct challenge to the Soviet Communist Empire, and they changed history. Those words marked the beginning of the end of the vast dictatorship that Reagan had called the "evil empire."

The Berlin Wall was the visible manifestation of the Iron Curtain that divided West from East, freedom from Communist slavery. At the end of World War II, millions of refugees fled from Communist Russia into Germany. The Soviet Union could not tolerate this flight to freedom and ordered East Germany to stop people from escaping. The Soviets ordered the building of a frightening structure of concrete, 12 feet high and 100 miles long, guarded by Communist soldiers who were ordered to kill anyone who tried to cross it. Between 1961 and 1989, a few desperate East Germans managed to escape by ingenious methods — one in a famous hot air balloon — but at least 100 were killed trying to cross the border. They were the 20th century types who would have agreed with Patrick Henry, "Give me liberty or give me death."

When the Wall was dismantled in 1990, a few pieces were brought to the United States so we can remember the viciousness of the evil empire. One piece of the Wall stands at the Churchill Memorial in Fulton, Missouri where Winston Churchill made his famous Iron Curtain speech. Another section is at the Ronald Reagan Library in California. In my office at Eagle Forum headquarters, I have a little piece of the Wall that I chiseled out when the Wall was half up and half down in 1990.

We should use the memory of the Berlin Wall, and today observe the 20th anniversary of its fall, to teach young people about the evil of Communism.

Audio version of this commentary.