The exaggerated power of the people

German public TV, ARD, emphasized to viewers on Fri. that it wasn't the Americans or the Soviets who brought down the Berlin Wall, or even Helmut Kohl; it was the brave people of the German Democratic Republic alone who did it. Likewise, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in Berlin on Fri. that the real heroes of this story are the "brave and noble" citizens of East Germany who refused to "remain chained inside a Communist system." Yet Mikhail Gorbachev said in Der Spiegel last week that he considered the reunification of Germany to be his biggest achievement. When he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990, the New York Times wrote that he "allowed popular revolutions to topple hard-line Communist governments in Eastern Europe, paving the way for German unity." He allowed it to happen. The further we get from the actual event, the greater the effort to convince the people that they were exercising free will. This is how history is rewritten.