Berlin Wall's Revenge

Here's the start of an article about the people who were NOT overjoyed by the fall of the Berlin Wall:

THE BERLIN WALL’S REVENGE
By Nelson Ascher

Maybe we, or at least many of us, were too busy commemorating the fall of the Berlin wall in late 1989. Thus, we overlooked all those people who weren’t exactly happy with the outcome of the Cold War. Well, perhaps “overlooking” is not the appropriate term.

I, for instance, had an acquaintance (deceased since then), a hardliner Trotskyite who should have felt partly vindicated by the failure of the system erected by his hero’s archenemy, Stalin. But he didn’t look vindicated at all.

It wasn’t easy for him, in that climate of euphoria, to give full vent to his disappointment, but still he managed to mutter a few words about the “wrong” turn events were beginning to take in Eastern Europe, and he was not talking about the looming shadows of the Balkan wars (which were clearly visible by then).

No: he complained that those societies, instead of using their newly conquered freedom to correct their course and head full-speed towards the socialist utopia, were rather turning to Western style “alienated” consumerism.

Read the whole thing.