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Subject: The Tiananmen/East Berlin Moment for the US will come
diffusely (Roger Cohen)
Date: Nov 3, 2009 6:16 AM
NYT ROGER COHEN BELOW
=======================
Um, no. We need to be thinking
about when *we* will rebel against our
own repressive regime- one run by
the Banksters and the Bigs and the
Dot Guv Union Pigs who Whore for them:
http://www.actionlyme.org/080924.htm
It won't be a point, like Tiananmen
or the Berlin Wall, but it will come
as a diffuse wave of pitchforks.
*OURS* is the world's most repressive
regime. The 911 stunt was never
investigated and the Bush Regime was
never held accountable for their war
crimes and Israel- the 51st State - can
do whatever they want, *to* whoever they
want, including nuclear weapons proliferation
and blackmailing the USA.
Obama is a great guy, but he cannot
hold together a country that has no
energy resources. Haven't you heard?
E = mc (squared), an idea Einstein
stole while working at the patent office.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS342&ei=mRDwSv6mM9PHlAfvkvT9CA&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&ved=0CAgQBSgA&q=the+laws+of+thermodynamics&spell=1
^^^How Stuff Works
I suppose we could always ask the
American Psychiatric Association and
the Freemasons and the Mormons (all
smarter than the rest of us, of course)
how we will magically make the country
work without the E. (They can consult
their family jewels and crystal balls.)
KMDickson
http://www.actionlyme.org
=================================http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/opinion/03iht-edcohen.html?ref=global-home&pagewanted=print
November 3, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Hinge of History
By ROGER COHEN
Ever since June 15 in Tehran I’ve been asking the most alluring and
treacherous of historical questions: “What if?”
What if the vast protesting crowd of perhaps three million people had
turned from Azadi (Freedom) Square toward the presidential complex?
What if Mir Hussein Moussavi, the opposition leader, had stood before
the throng and said, “Here I stand with you and here I will fall?”
What, in short, if Azadi had been Prague’s Wenceslas Square of 20
years ago and Moussavi had been Vaclav Havel?
In history, of course, the hypothetical has little value even if at
any one moment — like that one in the Iranian capital three days after
the disputed election — any number of outcomes was as plausible as
what came to pass.
Retrospective determinism (Henri Bergson’s phrase) now makes it hard
to imagine anything other than the brutal clampdown that has pushed
Iranian anger beneath the surface. Yet of course things might have
ended differently.
In 1989, the revolutionary year, the Tiananmen Square massacre
happened in Beijing and, five months later, the division of Europe
ended with the fall of the Wall in Berlin. Could it have been
otherwise? Might China have opened to greater democracy while European
uprisings were shot down?
We cannot know any more than we know what lies on the road not taken
or what a pregnant glance exchanged but never explored might have
yielded.
All we know, as Timothy Garton Ash observes in The New York Review of
Books, is, “The fact that Tiananmen happened in China is one of the
reasons it did not happen in Europe.”
And now those events of 20 years ago — Europe’s 11/9 — are pored over
by historians in search of definitive answers to how that world-
changing moment transpired, and pored over by 21st-century repressive
governments to ascertain wherein exactly lay the weakness (as they see
it) of Mikhail Gorbachev, the man who would not open fire.
The history of 1989 is still being written — a plethora of new books
testify to that. The history of Iran in 2009 will also be written many
times over. Truth is elusive, but it’s worth recalling that beyond the
inexorable historical forces at work in moments of crisis, there often
lies one person’s decision in a particular confused moment.
The hinge of history hangs on a heartbeat.
Harald Jaeger is a good reminder of that. I first met him in Berlin a
decade ago. He’s the former officer in the East German border guards
who, on the night of Nov. 9, 1989, opened the gate at Berlin’s
Bornholmer Strasse, ending the Cold War.
Now 66, Jaeger recently retired to a small town near Berlin where he
cultivates his garden. When I saw him a few weeks ago, he was wearing
a blue T-shirt and gold-rimmed spectacles: an ordinary-looking gray-
haired guy with a frank gaze. He’s not been invited to the elaborate
20th-anniversary celebrations but bears no rancor. “To put it in a
nutshell,” he told me, “It was a lucky moment.”
I tried to imagine him at his post 20 years ago, facing a growing
crowd, defending the border that had been his life, knowing that a
senior official (Günter Schabowski) had just said East Germans could
travel “without meeting special provisions,” unable to get clear
orders from his superior, wavering, alone.
Just after 11 P.M., he gave the order to open the gate. How did he
feel? “Sweat was pouring down my neck and my legs were trembling. I
knew what I had done. I knew immediately. That’s it, I thought, East
Germany is finished.”
Jaeger had not set out to terminate a country. Behind him lay great
forces: Pope John Paul II; Lech Walesa and the heroic Poles of
Solidarity; Soviet economic collapse; Ronald Reagan’s “tear down this
wall;” Gorbachev’s refusal to go the Tiananmen route; the
irrepressible stirring of the myriad European souls imprisoned at
Yalta.
Yet, despite all this (history’s long arc), the event itself — the
unimaginable event — still needed a single beleaguered officer to open
a gate rather than open fire. A decade ago, Jaeger told me: “I did not
free Europe. It was the crowd in front of me, and the hopeless
confusion of my leadership, that opened those gates.”
Having been in that Tehran crowd, I know the force was with it. I felt
myself how fear evaporates with such numbers. Nobody, not in 2009, can
slay millions. Behind those Iranians, too, lay greater forces, all
Iran’s centennial and unquenchable quest for some stable balance
between representative government and religious faith.
The millions didn’t want to overthrow the Islamic Republic; they just
wanted the second word in that revolutionary name to mean something —
enough, anyway, for their votes to count.
What if they had wheeled and borne down on the fissured heart of power
in the instant of its disarray? What if this had been Iran’s “lucky
moment?”
I have no answer to my “what if?” but 1989 suggests this: One day the
dam must break when a repressive regime and the society it rules march
in opposite directions.
"[Real] scientists are *fiercely* independent. That's the good
news."-- NIH's Top Fool, Anthony Fauci |
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