LOOMING DISASTER

America: Freedom and Capitalism’s Promised Land
to an unimaginable new era of television, automation, and computerization.
At the same time, on the other hand, the countries of
Eastern Europe redistributed their wealth, devolving into the Soviet
Socialist Empire, which dispossessed a third of the world’s population
of its properties and killed tens of millions of its citizens to
keep the disinformation called socialism in power. In the end, our
promised land of capitalism had to assume the burden of freeing
the world from the boot of Soviet socialism as well.
In 1989, as I watched the Berlin Wall being torn down, I
felt incredibly proud to be an American citizen. I had been with
Khrushchev when the idea of erecting the Berlin Wall germinated
in his head. He had landed in Bucharest on October 26, 1959, to
solicit Romania’s political support for seizing West Berlin, which
had become the escape-hatch through which millions of starved East
Germans were fleeing westward, draining East Germany’s already
crumbling socialist economy.
At that time I was running Romania’s intelligence station in
West Germany, and as a “German expert” I had been brought back
to Bucharest to attend the discussions with the Soviet leader. “No
power on earth can stop us,” Khrushchev spat out. But capitalist
America did. On August 13, 1961, Khrushchev made the humiliating
decision to close off East Berlin with a barbed wire fence that
later became the Berlin Wall, and he proclaimed that a major victory.
But the Wall did not last.
On December 26, 1989, Leonard Bernstein conducted a magnificent
concert before that toppled Berlin Wall. His centerpiece was
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony containing Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,”
but with the word joy (Freude) changed into freedom (Freiheit). The
orchestra and choir were from both East and West Germany, as well
as from the United Kingdom, France, the Soviet Union, and the
United States. That concert celebrated the most astonishing defeat
of Marx’s disinformation system, which we call socialism – and the
fall of its supreme monument, the Soviet Socialist Empire.
55