As a senior in high school, I was forced to take a course in government. I already had enough credits as a junior that I could have graduated early except for two required courses – economics and government. That was the title of the semester long course. Government. In just eighteen short weeks, we would learn everything we needed to know about government.
Our instructor was a portly (yes, I said portly), old white dude who stood at the windows between classes and shouted insults at the smokers on the non-school-property sidewalk outside. This particular OWD was a Republican, which I know because he declared so in class on a daily basis. I was most definitely not a Republican, but he had a PhD and I figured I could learn something from him despite his misguided ideology.
There were also in our class, two exchange students from Germany. One from West Germany. The other from still-behind-the-iron-curtain East Germany. It made for interesting discussions in the classroom, especially with our OWD teacher mockingly accusing the East German student of being in our class so he could go back home and pass on secrets to his countrymen. What national secrets were being divulged in a twelfth grade government class in the Midwest, I’m not sure. I’m also not sure our OWD was entirely joking.
Most of the semester, we had spent talking about communism. And how it stacked up against democracy. We didn’t actually discuss the ideological bases of democracy vs. communism, or how fascist governments could be the product of any political system. Instead, we talked about the communist USSR and how it stacked up against the democratic US of A. And most of what we learned was reinforcement of what we had already learned through television and the media, the gist of which was that communism was bad, democracy good.
So the eighteen weeks of government was little more than a course in flag-waving, the capstone on eighteen years of Cold-War-Era learned paranoia. The Communists were out to get us. Because they hated freedom.
We were offered examples of how freedom-hating the communists really were.
- In Russia, the KGB suppresses political dissidence. In the US, you’re free to say whatever you want about the government and nobody cares.
- In Russia, there are all these secrert prisons and the government can hold you there for no reason whatsoever. Like if you disagree with them or something. Not like in the United States where you have right to due process.
- In Russia, the police can just barge right into your house any time. Not like in the US where they have to have a search warrant.
- In Russia, the secret police torture people to get information from them. We don’t torture in the US.
- In Russia, the government controls the media. They decide what goes in the papers and on the air, not like in the US where we have freedom of the press.
- Communist elections are fixed. Leaders aren’t chosen by the people. Cronyism is rampant in communist countries, unlike in the US where our leaders are democratically elected.
- In communist countries, the government listens to your phone calls and reads your mail. Not like in the US where we have a guaranteed right to privacy.
- In Russia, the whole country is run by the same people. The government is all-powerful. Not like in the US where we have a set of checks and balances that protect the people.
You get where I’m going. At least I hope you do.
I had the good fortune of going on to college, of actually reading Marx (and Hume and Hobbes and others on whose theories our Enlightenment following founders based our particular brand of government), and of learning the difference between a government and an ideology. And the things that had bothered me as a child and young adult (how can we say all communists are bad when their government won’t let them be any other way?) started to make more sense. And also less.
That semester I took government was in the fall of 1989. In November of that year, the Berlin Wall came down. I remember that our OWD pushed a tv set into the room and we watched coverage on CNN (it might have been a tape of the previous nights’ broadcast, I can’t remember). In the desk in front of me sat the West German student and a few chairs over, the East German. We asked them both lots of questions. What did this mean to them? What was it like to see all those people pouring into West Berlin? Are you sad you aren’t there to witness it for yourself?
I honestly don’t remember their answers. I don’t even remember if they did answer or if they just sat there, staring at the television, and the crumbling of a wall.
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