"Revolutionaries think differently"

Tomorrow, Monday, November 9, is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Today, Der Spiegel has an amazing interview with Lech Walesa, the one person most responsible for that event.

http://www.spiegel.de/int...

History is a continuous conveyor belt, and intertwined at that. It's not intellectually honest to point to a single person or single event as a cause for another later event. But if we had to pick a single person responsible for the fall of the Berlin Wall, it would be Lech Walesa. For two decades, he struggled to bring democracy to Poland, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 for his efforts, and finally succeeding in "half democracy" in the spring of 1989 at the event known as the "Polish Roundtable". That event in turn inspired Hungary, long eager to free itself from totalitarian communism, to ask, "hey, what would happen if we snip the barbed wires" and literally did just that in the fall of 1989. With that escape route gushing with fleeing East Germans, East Germany threw up its arms and let everyone through the Wall itself.

The Der Spiegel interview, though short, is hard-hitting. Lech ridicules those who hold up Reagan as somehow being responsible with his "tear down this wall" speech.

More importantly for us, he tells of how his objectives were achieved through peaceful means. He talks of the means, such as

the communists were not able to stage a demonstration that was larger than ours

This reminds me of how the Internet has allowed us to organize large groups, such as at Iowa Forum and at caucuses around the country.

None of them believed that such systemic change was possible. [...] Revolutionaries think differently.

How many times have we heard that voting for "the lesser of two evils" is our only choice?

Getting back to the concept of the conveyor belt of history, in some sense Lech Walesa rode the coattails of the martyrs of the 1956 Hungary uprising and the 1968 Prague uprising. In some sense, it was "try, try again", and Lech Walesa happened to be the one who succeeded. History could have played out differently -- he could have been martyred and it would have been someone else, at a later time, and in a different place that would have eventually succeeded.

I doubt that anyone here thinks of Ron Paul's loss in 2008 as a defeat. It was a great battle victory toward reaching the ultimate goal of freeing us from the government of death (war, abortion, and now rationed healthcare).