We’ve come a long way from the days when Reagan stood up to tyrants, to now falling down prostrate before them

I

recently wrote here about the passage in the Yamim Noraim davening of “Uv’chein tein pachdecha” and its relevance to contemporary events. I return to it now, just days after the 30th anniversary of the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, to focus on one of its more evocative phrases: “V’chol harisha ke’ashan tichleh ki sa’avir memsheles zadon min ha’aretz” — that all of the wickedness will evaporate like smoke, when You remove the dominion of evil from the earth.

Stirring words, evoking in the mind’s eye a scene we pine for. But why is the wickedness described as “evaporating like smoke”?

In City Journal, Guy Sorman reflects on the meaning of the Berlin Wall:

Pictures speak louder than words: The destruction of the Berlin Wall, on November 9, 1989, provides an exact date for the end of the Soviet Empire and its Communist ideology…. The fall of the Berlin Wall thus taught us, if we had not already understood, that Communist ideology was a bluff concocted for Western intellectuals and other suckers. The Soviet Union was founded on Communism only in appearance. Since its forced birth in 1917, it was nothing more than a dictatorship based on fear. What Walesa understood applies to all totalitarian regimes, from Syria to Cuba and from China to North Korea….

Shouldn’t we have understood the hollowness of the Soviet system from the moment the Wall went up in 1961? If the Soviet Empire had been founded on an ideology, a belief, a hope for a better society, it would not have been necessary to build a wall, surrounded by barbed wire and explosive mines, to prevent East Germans from leaving. The Wall had no other significance than to evoke and reinforce fear in the subjects of the empire and among Communist leaders themselves; if they had once believed their Marxist vulgate, the wall proved, starting in 1961, that they no longer believed it….

I once asked [Lech Walesa, the dissident leader of the Polish Solidarity union] doubtless one of the best practical analysts of the Soviet system — he has the advantage of being an electrician, not a philosopher… if Poland, under Russian domination from 1939 to 1990, had ever numbered among its officially Communist leaders a single “believer” in Marxism. “Not a single one,” Walesa answered….

The disintegration of the Soviet Union is an object lesson in the truth of a great, albeit open secret: that the evildoers who rule over and oppress so much of humanity do so entirely by illusion, perpetrating lies they themselves don’t for a moment believe. Although the monstrous suffering they inflict on human beings is all too real, their ideologies and propaganda are all a knowing façade. They are naught but a wisp of smoke, which will evaporate into thin air with the arrival of Mashiach.

Ronald Reagan seemed to understand that the way to challenge and eventually topple such regimes is to stand up to them. He called them what they really were — he called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” — and went to Berlin and said bluntly, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

And as Vladimir Kara-Murza, the Russian democracy leader who was twice nearly poisoned to death, has written, “Reagan made personal advocacy on behalf of political prisoners a hallmark of his Soviet policy, handing Gorbachev lists of names at their every meeting. ‘There are too many lists,’ Gorbachev complained at one point.”

Reagan’s U.N. ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and a group of American dignitaries once visited the apartment building in which the famed Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov lived. When he met them, he said, “Kirkpatski, Kirkpatski, which of you is Kirkpatski?” When the others pointed to her, he said, “Your name is known in every cell in the Gulag.” That’s because she had read out the names of Soviet political prisoners on the floor of the U.N.

As National Review’s Jay Nordlinger has written, “There is nothing a political prisoner wants more than to be remembered; there is nothing a dictatorship wants more than for him to be forgotten. Worst of all, from the prisoner’s point of view, and best of all, from the dictatorship’s point of view, is when the Free World sides with, or excuses, the dictatorship.”

That was then. And now? Last week, Turkey’s aspiring dictator Recep Tayyip Erdoğan — who is the world’s leading jailer of journalists and has imprisoned and tortured more than 100,000 public servants since a coup attempt in 2016 — was granted a White House visit, over the objections of a bipartisan group of Congressmen. This comes just weeks after his invasion of Syria, in which Turkish forces have killed Kurdish civilians, displaced more than 100,000 people from their homes, and, according to an internal State Department assessment, engaged in “war crimes and ethnic cleansing.”

Erdoğan not only returned the letter the president had sent him after the Syrian invasion telling him, “Don’t be a tough guy,” but at their joint press conference, also told the world he had done so, later boasting that the American “had no reaction” to his snub. Actually, there was a reaction by the president at the press conference: He said he’s “a big fan” and “very big friend” of Erdoğan. As Bret Stephens observed, “in the annals of diplomatic humiliation, it’s hard to top Erdoğan’s visit.”

The president also said his talks with Erdoğan were “wonderful and productive.” And he’s right. Although no progress was made regarding the Syrian crisis or Turkey’s recent purchase of missile systems from the Russians, Erdoğan has “proved to both his domestic audience and international leaders that he’s not a pariah, that he’s still welcome in the White House,” according to Aykan Erdemir of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

What could possibly explain such a fiasco? In The American Interest, Eric Edelman, a former US Ambassador to Turkey, and David J. Kramer, an assistant secretary of State under George W. Bush, write that according to attendees at a gathering in Miami last week where John Bolton spoke, the former national security advisor “believes there is a personal or business relationship dictating Trump’s position on Turkey because none of his advisors are aligned with him on the issue.” We’ve come a long way from the days when Reagan stood up to tyrants, to now falling down prostrate before them.

Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 786. Eytan Kobre may be contacted directly at kobre@mishpacha.com