First They Came for USAID

America’s growing resistance movement

The View from East Berlin: A Historical Warning

These days, I consume the news with a heaviness I haven’t felt in decades. My mind keeps returning to a history museum I visited years ago in early 1989. It was on the other side of the wall, in East Berlin. I had arrived from the east and was on my way home after being away for nine months. Since I had left Hong Kong five weeks earlier, I had traveled in Communist countries. I had no idea of the monumental change that would soon take place in these countries that would forever change history.

It was fascinating to experience an entirely different version of 19th and 20th-century history in that museum in the German Democratic Republic. Each event was described as a chapter in a permanent ideological battle between communism and capitalism, with — no surprises here — communism as the ultimate victor. The Soviet-led communist bloc was a force for peace and progress, starkly contrasting with the greed, inequality, and imperialism of capitalist nations like the United States. World War II and the Cold War were framed as struggles in which communism emerged as a morally superior system despite challenges from Western powers. It was hard to find differences between fascism and Western democracies.