When Liberal Democracy Was Ascendant

With the eighteenth anniversary of 9/11 this past week, we now have young men and women old enough to serve in the military — and to vote — who have never known a time when the U.S. was not at war. Sejmback Saturday therefore serves this reminder of a September just thirty years ago when it seemed that mankind might be making progress toward a kinder and gentler world.

in UWM Post, September 5, 1989

Eight years of repression against the Solidarność movement in Poland had not only failed to weaken it, but weakened the communist government of Wojciech Jaruzelski instead. Even Solidarność leaders were surprised by their successes in the elections in August, 1989, winning all but one of the Senate seats they were allowed to run for, and all of the contested seats in the Sejm.

Meanwhile, eight years of Reaganomics in the U.S. had left George H.W. Bush with an enormous budget deficit.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, September 7, 1989

China's quashing of the Tienanmen Square uprising in June notwithstanding, the stunning success of Solidarność quickly inspired independence movements in Lithuania, Latvia, Moldova, Hungary and East Germany.

This is the cartoon I mentioned a couple weeks ago that didn't get returned to me; so this is as well as I'm able to clean up the image from the Ranger's on-line archive. You can't see it from the above, but I had drawn Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev speaking through gritted teeth; my recollection is that you couldn't tell that from the printed copy, either.

in UWM Post, September 19, 1989

So to make up for that poor copy, here's a colorization of what was originally just a black and white cartoon, aping Soviet imagery to depict the sudden exodus of East Germans. Hungary had opened its border with Austria, whereupon several thousand East German refugees were able to escape to West Germany in a round-about route through Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Austria. In Berlin, there were signs that East German border patrols were no longer shooting to kill persons who tried to cross No Man's Land.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, September 14, 1989

Pressure for reform was not limited to the communist bloc. South African police initially responded to anti-apartheid protests that year with billy clubs, tear gas, and purple-dye water cannons; perhaps as many as 60 protesters were killed. In August, a new President took the reins from P.W. Botha, who had suffered a mild stroke in January. Claiming a mandate for reform in September's elections, F.W. de Klerk appeared to signal that his approach to dissent might be modeled after Gorbachev's rather than Deng Xiaoping's.

in UWM Post, September 21, 1989