Margaret Thatcher, Soviet Apologist

I was watching the CBC newscast on a five-inch black and white television set in a North Battleford newsroom on the day the Berlin Wall came down. What struck me, apart from the joyous celebrations of the German people who no longer had to worry about their nation becoming an atomic battleground during World War Three -- was that President George Bush was, at first, reluctant to show any emotion about the symbolic fall of the Warsaw Pact. Presidents from Kennedy (YouTube) to Reagan (YouTube) came to the Berlin Wall and used it to denounce communism. So, if the wall came down, it showed that America's will and system had triumphed, right? Right?

Well, as it turns out, neither was British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. She and the French government were worried that a newly resurgent Germany would mean another warlike Germany. (BBC)

Given how active the peace movement was in Germany, given also how much the population -- who had suffered through two world wars and expected a third on their soil -- didn't want to go to war over anything, and given that the former West German government had a lot of work to improve economic and social conditions in the former East Germany before thinking of anything else, it was very hard to see how a united Germany would become a warlike Germany. And it still isn't today.

While this columnist (The Telegraph) says Mrs. T was right to worry, in reality, she was dead wrong. Unless Gorbachev's imposition of the Sinatra Doctrine (Wikipedia) resulted in a coup (there was a badly blundered one in 1991) , a united, peaceful and integrated Germany in Europe would mean a more stable, not a more unstable, world.

One of the major problems with the conservative movement is that they possess such blinkers that even when they win, they're relishing the next battle, almost as if the only way they can define themselves is through who they're fighting against.