REACTIONS TO OBAMA'S DECISION NOT TO ATTEND THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL

November 9th is the date of the grand celebrations in Berlin.  President Barack Hussein Obama will not be attending.  Should he be?  Conservatives think so.  Here are some reactions published by National Review Online:  (excerpts - read the whole article for more complete reporting)

FRANK GAFFNEY

Nine words say it all: Undermine our allies. Embolden our enemies. Diminish our country.

That’s the Obama Doctrine in a nutshell, and the slighting of Germany with regard to one of the most symbolic and consequential expressions of the quest for freedom undertaken in the  teeth of Soviet oppression does all three.

PAUL KENGOR

Obviously, this is an outrage. There’s no good excuse for it, even as Obama’s disciples grasp for one.

First, this is what we ought to expect from a president whose mentor was Frank Marshall Davis and who, in the 1980s, when President Reagan was seeking to breach the Berlin Wall, was being educated by — and chose to “hang with” — what he himself acknowledged were “Marxist professors.” Obama was raised, nurtured, and

educated by what Whittaker Chambers — and Ronald Reagan quoting Chambers — dubbed the wrong side of history. By not going to Berlin, Obama is once again choosing the wrong side of history.

Second, with all that said, I’m personally not disappointed by Obama. Barack Obama is who he is. I’m disappointed by the American public, which elected a leader who thinks this way.

Ronald Reagan went to the Berlin Wall. He went there and demanded it be torn down. It was. And now, today, Ronald Reagan rolls over in his grave.
PETER ROBINSON

The Cold War was the defining struggle of the second half of the 20th century — a clash of beliefs about God, man, government, and economics so utterly basic, so primal, that it stands in comparison with the Persian Wars or the long conflict between Rome and Carthage. “My view of the Cold War is simple,” Ronald Reagan once famously explained. “We win, and they lose.” And with the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago on Monday, that is just how it turned out. Liberty vanquished tyranny.

Barack Obama? He has no idea. No idea at all.

MICHAEL RUBIN

Symbolism is incredibly important. When Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an “Evil Empire,” the reverberations within the East Bloc went far beyond what Reagan’s own supporters realized. Likewise, the moral clarity evident in Reagan standing before the Berlin Wall and declaring, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” did as much as tens of millions of dollars poured into influence operations aimed at the Soviet bloc. Nor can anyone forget the symbolism of East Germans, with hand and hammer, tearing down that symbol of oppression.

Alas, Pres. Barack Obama’s decision not to celebrate one of the seminal events of the 20th century — an episode that illustrates the victory of freedom over totalitarianism and peace through strength — is also replete with symbolism. Just as Reagan’s advisers had no idea just how much his rhetoric would reverberate, I’m afraid that Obama does not understand how important his refusal to attend commemoration events will be, not only to those still suffering under the yoke of oppression, but also to adversaries who see American isolation and weakness as a phenomenon to be exploited.

DAVID SATTER

President Obama’s decision to skip the ceremonies marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall has worrying implications for the war in Afghanistan. Although Obama may not be aware of it, Communism and political Islam are basically the same. One pretends to be a perfect science, the other religious. But each divided the world into the holy and the profane. Each believed itself in possession of absolute truth and, deifying itself, attempted to impose its deranged interpretation of reality on the world by force.

The fall of Communism showed that fanatics are defeated by the collapse of their ideology. This lesson is critical to our success in Afghanistan. If we discredit fanatical Islam, we win. If it discredits us, we lose. It was therefore critically important for Obama to use the opportunity of the Berlin Wall commemoration to explain to the world and, in particular, the Muslim world, why we are fighting. The fact that he did not seize this opportunity indicates that he may not know. Clausewitz wrote that in war the first priority of a statesman or commander is to understand what kind of war he is fighting. Obama is involved in an ideological war. If he does not understand that, it will be his tragedy — and ours.

ANDREW STRATTAFORD

. . . I couldn’t help but be amused by the fact that (as Rich Lowry has observed) Obama was prepared to go to Berlin when it was all about Obama. The most symbolically charged moment in the collapse of Communism, by contrast, doesn’t appear to count for quite so much. Oh well.

I worry more over the thought that (even if accidentally) Obama’s decision is a reflection of a wider trend in which the story of Soviet Communism — its rise, its crimes, its failures, and its eventual fall — is being allowed to slide into a memory hole that is (thankfully) unimaginable in the case of the rise, crimes, failures, and eventual fall of the Third Reich. To the extent, therefore, that Obama’s absence wastes a potential (dread phrase) “teachable moment,” it’s a pity.

GEORGE WEIGEL  (my bolding)

It’s a very big deal, because the president’s absence bespeaks a woodenheadeness about the history of our times: a woodenheadness likely influenced by the classic left-liberal notion that the Cold War was just an action-reaction cycle between two “great powers” (“two scorpions in a bottle,” as a Jimmy Carter appointee notoriously put it), not a moral contest for the human future between imperfect democracies and pluperfect dictatorships.

There have been few moments in modern history when the good guys won, cleanly, and without mass violence; Americans had a large role in creating the conditions for the possibility of that. The fall of the Wall was the symbolic centerpiece of the Revolution of 1989 — it’s shameful and, frankly, embarrassing that an American president is not in Berlin to celebrate the implosion of the worst tyranny in human history. But it’s hardly surprising, given the president’s performance before Russian students earlier this year.

The politics of national self-deprecation — moral blindness wrapped in moral sanctimony — continues.