Posts Tagged ‘Mikhail Gorbachev’

I first visited the Berlin Wall as a student back in the mid sixties.  It had not then long been constructed and was far from the smooth and forbidding concrete behemoth that it later became.  I was taken there by a young West German – not much older than myself – bitterly angry at what he saw had been perpetrated on his city by an occupying power.

It was an untidy structure, built from elongated concrete blocks thrown together hurriedly by people who clearly had never so much laid a brick in their lives. It was not even particularly high and so ugly coils of barbed wire, now decayed and rusty, had been wound on top.  The overall effect was crudity, roughness, hasty slipshod work by people who cared not for anything or anybody, but were enslaved to an idea.

I remember a sparrow flying out of the East and alighting for a moment on the top of that wire before flying off into the West – a poignant image that remains with me to this day. How come sparrows could cross freely when thinking people could not?

Of course, the Wall was enhanced soon after,  but as the fabric of the structure was renewed, the political substance that kept it in place gradually crumbled. Twenty years ago it came tumbling down.

That it did so, largely amid tears of joy rather than of grief and sadness, can be attributed to the statesmanship of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet Premier. With the sense to recognise defeat he determined ‘not to lead to destruction what (he saw) had already perished.’  From this followed consecutive revolutions in central and eastern Europe and, later, the enlargement of the European Union.

Mikhail Gorbachev was writing this week in The Times newspaper - looking back on those events and forward into the future.  His described a zeitgeist – a force practically irresistible.  Glasnost and perestroika were a response to this – but the pressures kept building.  A unity of popular purpose brought the revolution into being.

Could today a new unity of purpose be assembled to fight climate change, he asked? Likening climate change to a Wall he invited President Obama and other world leaders to ‘Tear it Down.’  ‘You cannot dodge the call of history,’ he implored.

Indeed. But just as the multi-faceted and multi-causal movement that culminated in the collapse of the Soviet Union and the return of democracy to countries that had not known it for decades, or in some cases ever at all, was a movement more profound than simply tearing down an iron curtain, so today’s problems go beyond climate change alone.

For instance suppose that at a metaphorical click of a switch we could solve the climate problem tomorrow.  Let’s suppose that the scientists working on the ITER project – aimed at bringing us unlimited amounts of cheap and clean energy from nuclear fusion – make a sudden breakthrough and that never again need we worry about burning a single drop of fossil fuel.

Let us then suppose that the climate soon reverted to normal:  glaciers growing again nicely, only occasional typhoons in the Philippines, East African droughts consigned to the history books.

No more climate change – but we should all still be in peril.  In the next century the world will acquire another three billion people.  Another three billion mouths to feed – all demanding their share of the planet’s resources.  Already each year we consume the sustainable resources of three planets.  Despite this, two thirds of folk are poor, malnourished, illiterate, diseased.  We know the only way they will stop having large numbers of children is by raising their standard of living.  This will take resources.

So the crisis is not just about climate change – it is far wider than climate change.  It is a crisis of sustainability itself within which climate change is just one element.

But neither is sustainability the only threat we face.   With the ending of the Cold War we exchanged one ideological struggle for another.  Today we face a new battle for hearts and minds, a new conflict of fundamental ideas as to how mankind should behave towards one another.  And if the struggle has not the same potential for disaster as Cold War armageddon, it nevertheless still has the potential to kill untold millions.

We have exchanged the Cold War for the ‘War on Terror’ – or rather more accurately – the Jihadist struggle.  Since the Wall fell, cities all over the world have grieved over Jihadi outrages. New York, London, Madrid, Rawlpindi, Bali, Mumbai, Kabul – the list is a long one.  Yet despite the world’s attentions, both military and civil, the activities of the Jihadis are undiminished, if anything they grow stronger all the time.

Not all are wedded to violence though there are plenty that are willing to kill no matter whom.  Others just encourage the suicidal struggle, preaching the doctrine of a brutal medieval caliphate stretching from the eastern Himalayas to the Atlantic ocean – a clock-turned-back-world of fundamentalism in which human rights are extinguished, women deprived and oppressed, democracy extinguished.

NATO is fighting this threat in Afghanistan. That is where the conflict was yesterday – but already it has spread to the mountain valleys of nuclear-armed Pakistan and threatens to undermine and destabilise that country with consequences that do not bear thinking of.

Yet incredibly as we celebrate in Berlin the defeat of one kind of totalitarianism, Europe is already debating whether we should end our commitment to Afghanistan.  Debating whether we should withdraw out support, our finance, our forces and leave the majority population there to their fate and the Jihadist movement to exult.

This Afghan conflict is unlike those of previous generations. It is a global threat we are fighting, not specifically an Afghan one.  This fight can erupt violently at any moment in any territory of the world. The evil of the terrorist knows no bounds – either as to place, or as to victim or as to method.

It is as much a threat to peace-loving and tolerant Islam as to any other religion or belief. It is a terrible diversion from the wider struggle towards sustainability.   So it would be ironic if, at the moment when world leaders are commemorating the passing of a dark chapter of oppression, they should choose to turn away from the Jihadist threat. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance and Europe must be vigilant.