Overtaken by History

The changes are literally breathtaking. It's as if a great logjam that plugged up the river of history for almost half a century was suddenly released.

Momentous events are sweeping through the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe that could break the grip of the East-West conflict that has held the world captive since the end of World War II. The Cold War has not only forced us to live on the edge of a nuclear sword for almost half a century, it has also served as a cover for the even more oppressive dynamics between the rich nations of the North and the poor nations of the South. The superpowers have controlled the world's playing field for all these years while other nations either sat on the sidelines or were ground underfoot. It almost looked as though they controlled history itself, and even had the power to end it in a collision of giants that would shake the earth.

But we should have known better. The superpowers didn't control history after all. Indeed, history is overtaking them.

It is starting in the East. In the Soviet Union, the revolutionary promises of 1917 were never fulfilled. A controlled society that would lead to a socialist paradise never got beyond the control. Control itself became the only real political goal in utterly static systems in which human creativity became illegal.

The ideological dream actually died long ago and was quietly replaced with stifling and murderous bureaucracy. It's hard to say when the last true communist departed from the scene, but all that's been left for many years are the repressive controllers and the resentful populace.

It was the stagnation and backwardness and, ultimately, the loss of energy and hope that made perestroika and glasnost necessary. The party line could not hold. History finally caught up.

But no one predicted it, not one Soviet expert. Even the most strident anti-communists in the United States said the communist system could never change. Indeed, that's how they justified their own military adventures and moral double standards. They were wrong. History overtook them, too.

Mikhail Gorbachev emerged onto the political scene, and the changes in Soviet society progressed at a lightning pace. With each new week, the previously unimaginable would happen again. Opening the floodgates of control has set free scores of contradictions and created a rising tide of expectations that are far from being resolved. From the Baltic states to Georgia and the Ukraine, the cries of ethnic nationalism and political sovereignty have become a chorus that threatens to undo the now fragile Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

It was only a matter of time before history would overtake Eastern Europe as well. In Poland, even Lech Walesa didn't imagine that events would turn so quickly to install Solidarity as the leader of the government. Hungary's Communist Party became the first to disestablish itself and call for political pluralism. In Czechoslovakia, the air is again filled with the scent of Prague Spring.

East Germans have filled the streets by the thousands to demand democracy and are pouring across their borders to the West, some to stay and some just to visit, while nervous leaders seek to accommodate a national rebellion. Now we see pictures of people tearing down the Berlin Wall -- Germans with pickaxes are every day chipping away at the ugliest symbol of the great divide between East and West.

In the face of such sweeping changes, Gorbachev promises no Soviet intervention. In fact, it is his initiatives that have spurred the changes, and East European demonstrators march in the streets to the chant of "Gorby, Gorby!"

Now, the Soviet Union is calling for an end to both the Warsaw Pact and the NATO alliance. Its foreign minister suggests that all Soviet foreign military bases be closed and their personnel sent home to Moscow by the year 2000. Perhaps most remarkable is the spirit of public repentance in official Kremlin denunciations of the Afghanistan war as a criminal violation of Soviet law and decency, while the perpetrators of that policy are still in place. It would be like George Bush admitting the illegality and immorality of the Vietnam War and support of the contras in Nicaragua.

However, such things have not yet begun to happen with the American superpower. Thus far, the Russian bear is dancing without a partner.

MOST U.S. POLITICAL LEADERS are drawing all the wrong lessons from the tumultuous happenings in the Eastern bloc. They see it as vindication rather than prophecy. Communism has failed and we won, they proudly exclaim. That perspective is as shortsighted as it is self-serving.

History will overtake the West as well. It's only a matter of time. Here, too, the system is failing while we struggle to keep up the illusions. Our inner cities, which have become war zones, are but the first sign of a global economy that is unraveling.

Even entering into a new partnership with its old Soviet adversary would be less threatening to the United States than dealing with the endemic injustice in the way the world system (both ideological versions of it) has been organized. Indeed, a decline in East-West tension could even remove some restraints on the U.S. role in making the world more safe for the rich. Instead of removing the military threat, U.S.-Soviet accommodation could just redirect it all against the poor.

The historic events we witness today are prophetic. Today it is an east wind of freedom and democracy that is blowing out the old. Tomorrow it will be a south wind of justice and liberation to set free the oppressed. You cannot cheer democracy for Polish workers, Lithuanian farmers, and Chinese students while you block freedom for South African laborers, Salvadoran campesinos, and Korean slum dwellers. When the south wind blows with the hopes of the world's poor on its wings, it will cause a chilly gale to be felt by those northern global power centers that run the world's system of economic apartheid.

Today an ugly wall of ideological repression is crumbling down. Tomorrow the invisible walls of international trade, finance, and economic oppression will also come tumbling down. It's hard to stop the wind when it begins to blow.

Jim Wallis is editor-in-chief of Sojourners.