30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, chaos not freedom reigns in our world

Three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that most concrete and evocative of symbols of a Cold War that raged for five decades between Soviet communism and Western capitalism after WWII, only the most unreconstructed Western ideologue would dare still claim the event as a triumph of good over evil.

On the contrary, the thirty years that have elapsed since have revealed that if evil resided anywhere it was on the side of the Wall which those in East Germany and elsewhere in the Soviet Bloc were desperate to get to. Because, looking back, the fall of the Wall set in train three decades of unfettered free market global capitalism and conflict in the name of the Washington-led unipolar world the event gave birth to, responsible for wreaking unremitting chaos, carnage and human despair across the world.

Despite the ocean of demonisation that has been levelled at the GDR, to give the former East Germany its Sunday name, it was a noble attempt to establish a country and society on principles of human solidarity, equality, collectivism and egalitarianism out of the ashes of fascism. Indeed on the subject of fascism, here the difference between the GDR and its FDR counterpart was exemplified by the contrast between the extent to which the former seriously de-Nazified its society and…