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History is calling

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MICHAEL BARONE

The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 14, 2009

Anniversaries are opportunities to reflect on the past and on what it might mean for the future. Monday saw the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, even if Barack Obama could not find time to travel once again to Berlin to attend the commemoration there. And Wednesday was the 91st anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I.

The two events being remembered can be seen as bookends: the beginning and end of the history of a Short Twentieth Century. Until 1914, the world had seemed to be on a march toward democracy, liberty, economic growth and globalization under the leadership of Western Europe and its offspring America.

Then the horrific slaughter and seeming pointlessness of World War I delegitimized Western values for intellectuals and artists, but also for statesmen and politicians and ordinary people. World War I gave birth to communism in Russia and made the ground of Italy and Germany fertile for fascism and Nazism. The latter two were utterly defeated in 1945. Communism persisted for four and a half decades more.

The triumph of Western values was not inevitable. In the 1930s, Anne Morrow Lindbergh saw totalitarianism as "the wave of the future."The determination of heroic leaders made an amazing difference. Franklin Roosevelt standing with Winston Churchill in 1940 when Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin were allies. Harry Truman's response in 1948 to the Soviet blockade: "We're not leaving Berlin." Pope John Paul II's open-air sermons to millions in Poland in 1979: "Be not afraid." Ronald Reagan's defense buildup and his speech before the Brandenburg Gate in 1987: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

But these leaders could not have prevailed without the support, through many difficult times, of millions of ordinary people in America and other Western nations.

The year 1989 removed the threat of totalitarian communism, but other threats remain, as we learned on Sept. 11, 2001. Islamist terrorists despise our tolerance and freedom and work to inflict as much damage as they can on Western society.

But Obama and his administration, eager to placate our enemies and ever ready to disrespect our friends, tend to downplay this threat. If our enemies today seem less formidable than our enemies before 1989, they are nonetheless dangerous. If the process of distinguishing Islamist terrorists from ordinary Muslims is difficult, so was the process of distinguishing communists from social democrats.

Our earlier leaders had faith in the ability of ordinary Americans to make such distinctions and to behave tolerantly even while aggressively fighting evildoers. And they had confidence, even in that Short Twentieth Century, of the basic goodness of our system. Does Obama have that faith and that confidence?

Michael Barone is senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner.

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