Editor’s note: James Burnham wrote the following in the September 25, 1962, issue of National Review .

The front page of the August 18 issue of the West Berlin newspaper, Bild Zeitung, consisted of the photograph of the East German boy, Peter Fechter, dying at the foot of the Wall. The caption read: Vopos let refugee bleed to death. Amos look on. “Vopos” are the East German “people’s police,” or militia. “Amis” is German slang for “Americans.”

Of course, there was nothing else these individual soldiers could or should have done, except to stand passively watching the death agony of this unknown, unlucky boy. The impotence of those Amis was one more consequence of the defining impotence of their leader: from his failure to respond when, a year before, almost to the day, the Wall made its first probing appearance.

On that morning of August 13, 1961, Berlin’s Wall was a trivial enough entity, physically speaking; and even today it is physically not very formidable. But the physical wall has never been important, never anything for modern machines and explosives to take seriously. “The Wall” that properly bears the capitalized initial is compounded of spirit and will, not of matter. It is a wall rather like the wall of fire that Wotan drew around Bruennhilde: which no physical weapon but only a fearless heart could breach.

It cannot be too often repeated: Who said A, must say B. This is the first law of politics, and the hardest to comprehend; and President Kennedy and his ideologues do not, evidently, comprehend it. The Wall was the first term in a linked series. Its first meager stones smashed, by necessary implication, the political structure upon which the Western position in Berlin and the corridors is based. Having accepted so much, how can they oppose – except with words, of which they have a-plenty, or unconvincing gestures like these pointless mobilizing – each further step, or slice? They cannot; they do not.

Those who fail before A try to conduct themselves as if A had never been. For this or that reason, we could not handle A. But A is over the dam. Now we confront B, or rather, J, K, L. This time things are to be different. We shall draw the line, stand firm before K and L.

It doesn’t work that way. K and L are only secondary consequences of J; J, of I and H; and the whole series, of A. You cannot stop K and L for long. To hold there you must turn back, and painfully, slowly, retrace the series: right back until, with a thousand times more difficulty than at the first chance you meet A’s still persisting challenge. In Berlin, that means you must face and conquer, the Wall. Failing that, your position must continue, slow or fast, to crumble.