"An exultant Western triumphalism" is the pithy yet comprehensive way in which the one-time Soviet Union's arguably most celebrated President, Mikhael Gorbachev, has, just the other day, chosen to use to describe the ideologically partisan manner in which the West(ern powers), 'led' by the then United States' President, George Bush the First, understood, interpreted and publicly described the historic fall of the Berlin Wall 25 years ago (yesterday, New Zealand time, and today, Northern Hemispheric time - November the ninth, 1989).
'Right on' was my own automatic, instinctive reaction the other day - indeed what Gorbachev said pretty well echoed my own long-held view and perception of that decisive *'event' almost word for word - though unlike that prescient and domestically unfairly-maligned - essential, if often unrecognized (at least by his own countrymen and women) architect of the one-time Soviet Union's counter-revolution - it astonishes me to realize I cannot for the life of me **recall exactly where I was and what I was doing when news of such history-in-the-very-making finally hit home to me, or that precise event (of the Berlin Wall's fall) transpired.
*Though more a series, a succession of similar events, as nation after nation, country after country amongst the U.S.S.R.'s string of satellite states stretched across the former Eastern Europe buckled, crumbled to the ongoing 'onslaught' of democratic sensibilities, of the simple thirst for not only 'liberty' but indeed even ***'equality' - two of the three pillars of the itself historic, earth-shaking events of the French Revolution almost exactly two centuries prior.
**Again unlike where I was (and what I was doing) when news reached me of Princess Diana's death (or anticipated end, anyhow, following her motorcade's horrific smash/crash in a French tunnel), or similarly when I first heard (and, moreover, it truly sunk in) that America had just undergone the events of '9/11' (as it will ever after be known) - those incredible scenes of airliners crashing into the sides of the 'Twin Towers' being indelibly etched, seared into the memory cells, one's consciousness, and thereafter is unfailingly remembered for time immemorial, world without end. (Though I do distinctly recall pacing the streets (in my itinerant, door-to-door selling capacity) observing a headline in the local Courier Mail proclaiming - at least some significant parts of - said events occurring, now I really come to it.)
***As is now well known 'everywhere' and to 'everybody' taking even just a casual interest in such matters, the so-called 'equality' for which that autocratic, monolithic system was best known was only ever a parody of such egality envisaged by the likes of Friedrich Engels and his infinitely better known fellow theorist Karl Marx - being in actual, everyday, concrete practice far more akin to George Orwell's brilliantly satirical line: "all (2-legged creatures) are equal, but some are more equal than others".
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