CONTEXT: A final re-post, for now, from my 2016 visit to Berlin with my friend Paul. I post this to try to exorcise my still-throbbing rage at this image – as you, kind reader, will surely understand when you see it. This post was meant to convey stark, heartbreaking evidence of why Soviet style Communism not only would, but must succumb, as an encumbrance to the happiness of the world. This, my last word on the Berlin Wall, is chosen to affirm my opinion on that matter.

However: As I have aged (matured?), I cannot reconcile donning a metaphorical robe of righteousness to validate oneself and all that is dear to one – like a proud proclamation that ‘All men are created equal’ – then acting as if somehow, such assertions offset behaving non-righteously. For a coarse but valid example, let’s ask Native- and Black Americans how ‘equal’ America seems to them.

Loving something – as I love my country – or someone, doesn’t mean we must pretend the object of our affection is perfect. Indeed, love may let us recognize its potential to become better than it is, and strive to make it so. Thus, in my last post, about ‘Checkpoint Charlie,’ I suggested that despite having outlasted Communism and providing more material abundance, the American system of Capitalism is far from ‘perfect’ in various senses. And that we Americans should not avert our eyes from the harm and injustice that system is capable of doing.

For example – an echo of what you will see in this post – no doubt, innocent American children have also died needlessly because some executive made a ‘business decision’ to cut corners on car safety design – until the number of people killed in car crashes necessitated adding features to prevent such deaths. No robe of righteousness can conceal the implications and consequences of a culture that so often ‘puts profit before people.’

But for my last word on the subject: I believe absolutely that willingness to kill babies to uphold state control is far worse than accidents due to callousness (despicable though that is). A government that would do so has forfeited any right to obedience or respect, let alone patriotism. Be outraged and thankful the Berlin Wall and the awful regime that needed, built and maintained it are gone, but do not then be satisfied that our own society is faultless. Recognize its flaws, care for it in spite of them, and – if you feel it is worthwhile – resolve to help bring it closer to its ideals than it was, or is.

Photos of Children Killed Trying to Escape through Berlin Wall:  The weather when Paul and I went to the site of this remnant of the Wall and memorial to fugitives murdered trying to get past it was chilly, gray and damp – thoroughly suitable for so depressing a spectacle.  It started to rain as we walked around, as if Nature herself were weeping at this site of such bleak evidence of the folly and failings of men (that may sound like a cliché, but truly is how it felt).  Many people had been killed at the Wall, their names and pictures enshrined here, but it was particularly infuriating to see these images of children – presumably their ages when they died, probably with parents risking all their lives to get to freedom – so that I may have snarled involuntarily aloud on seeing these.  I’m not sure I did, but given the setting and provocation would not have been the least embarrassed to do so.

No single political ideology is so all-encompassing as to address every human need and aspiration.  And any that assert that they are – as did both Communism and Nazism – must fall short, and often resort to force to maintain the semblance of inerrancy, so at odds with actual experience.  The Soviet Eastern bloc was no Workers’ Paradise, no matter how often or loudly its rulers bellowed that it was.  Their reflex was to suppress evidence to the contrary, and to treat anyone who wouldn’t play along with their official fictions as a criminal.

Capitalism certainly outlasted Communism, but that doesn’t mean that it was, or is, remotely perfect.  No system in which some members flourish massively while others starve can ever be considered “ideal.” But that doesn’t mean I’d find any sort of Totalitarianism preferable to America’s messy, contentious, always-in-progress democracy. 

And if I’d had any uncertainty about that before, seeing those pictures of dead babies certainly squashed it.  Any sort of regime that can only survive by killing people, even children – for the heinous offense of wanting to live elsewhere is in effect, committing human sacrifice to the idols of its doctrine, rather than admit it is not flawless – is inherently doomed.  The sooner it croaks the better; and that surely includes North Korea.