You Pat My Back, I’ll Pat Yours

polarization now taking place in East Germany and reflected in the success of the Christian Democrats in the election there. Hardly any of these intellectuals had spoken up and demanded the obvious when it mattered. Rather, that was done by the people in the streets, moved not by any ideal vision but simply by the intolerable character of prevailing circumstances. Perhaps it was this that determined the level-headed course of this unprecedented revolution, this dispensing with radicalism which many have felt to be the real miracle. For the turn to inhumanity always springs from the dogmatism of a theory.

What comes through as the impulse behind all the uprisings from Warsaw to Bucharest is the people’s demand to be spared those political systems of deliverance which have their roots in the nineteenth century and which have claimed millions of victims in our century. Vaclav Havel recently spoke up against the terror of ideologies and interpreted the revolutions of 1989 as an uprising of the right to modest happiness against the great political blueprints of salvation: “Who is proposing some ‘radiant dawn’ to us yet again?”

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David Hale

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polarization now taking place in East Germany and reflected in the success of the Christian Democrats in the election there. Hardly any of these intellectuals had spoken up and demanded the obvious when it mattered. Rather, that was done by the people in the streets, moved not by any ideal vision but simply by the intolerable character of prevailing circumstances. Perhaps it was this that determined the level-headed course of this unprecedented revolution, this dispensing with radicalism which many have felt to be the real miracle. For the turn to inhumanity always springs from the dogmatism of a theory.

What comes through as the impulse behind all the uprisings from Warsaw to Bucharest is the people’s demand to be spared those political systems of deliverance which have their roots in the nineteenth century and which have claimed millions of victims in our century. Vaclav Havel recently spoke up against the terror of ideologies and interpreted the revolutions of 1989 as an uprising of the right to modest happiness against the great political blueprints of salvation: “Who is proposing some ‘radiant dawn’ to us yet again?”