The 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which
culmitated a series of events in the summer and fall of 1989,
allows us to begin looking through the lens of history.
Important lessons are to be learned from the “year of miracles,”
as Czech play-write and dissident Vaclav Havel called it,
lessons about American leadership and lessons about the
importance of engaging in the war of ideas with enemies of
ffreddom and democracy. The world has changed so dramatically
since 1989, but many of us will never forget those spine
chilling moments when demonstrations throughout Central and
Eastern Europe started to challenge the power of the communist
puppet regimes. The images of East Germans breaking down the
Berlin Wall and pouring into freedom through the gashes will
never fade away. But a new generation has come of age that has
not known a world divided by the Iron Curtain or by that grim,
grey, barbed-wired structure that separated the two Berlins. The
Berlin Wall now exists only as museum pieces and desk