Special to WorldTribune.com

By John J. Metzler, November 13, 2025

On Nov. 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall collapsed. On a very ordinary night thousands of East Germans started crossing the dividing barrier between the communist East and capitalist West Berlin after the East German regime had suddenly opened tightly controlled border crossings.

In a matter of hours history was made. Throngs of people soon swamped the Wall and then started smashing the hated communist barrier into concrete rubble.

The Joshua trumpet had sounded, and the freedom Tsunami surged throughout Central Europe.

The unbelievable road to German unity in peace, liberty and freedom had begun. Indeed, only months earlier in Poland and Hungary the socialist regimes had fallen.

The German Democratic Republic, the part of Germany occupied by the Soviets following WWII, soon began to crumble. What was proudly called the socialist state on German soil, the red jewel of the Soviet Empire, just over a year later would fall into the ash heap of history.

Millions of people fled from socialist East Germany to the Free West.

Comparing the two sides of the once divided metropolis of Berlin was in a sense contrasting a drab grey place with a colorful and vibrant city.

Having been to Berlin both before and after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the difference was strikingly black and white, say between a smoke-belching East German Trabant auto and a West German Mercedes-Benz.

The key was of course political liberty and economic freedom.

Also on Nov. 9, but in 1938, a fateful day occurred in Berlin and throughout the Third Reich.

Adolph Hitler’s Nazi party, officially known as the National Socialist German Workers Party, began a series of attacks on Germany’s prosperous Jewish population, unleashing a vitriolic pogram burning synagogues and trashing Jewish-owned businesses.

What was called the Kristalnacht, or The Night of the Broken Glass became a jarring precursor of what would later follow. National Socialist stormtroopers unleashed a fury meant to intimidate.

Kristalnacht finally awoke Western nations into realizing the sinister plans of Hitler’s regime. Yet the incidents came just six weeks after the Munich Agreements, the Anglo/French sellout of then independent Czechoslovakia into the arms of the Third Reich.

The British and French press, and Neville Chamberlin and Edouard Daladier, tiptoed around Kristalnacht so as not to offend Herr Hitler or the Italian Duce. Better a good diplomatic deal to avert another war.

We know the rest.

The cold winds of Autumn bring back memories. The 1956 anti-Soviet Hungarian Revolution, and Czech Prague Spring in 1968, Poland’s heroic Solidarity Labor movement, all stood as brief and courageous glimmers in the gloom of the Cold War.

It’s all about political semantics; What you label yourself as and how others view you.

Just a generation after the historic collapse of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, aka the Soviet Union, Russia’s nomenclature has decidedly changed but tragically not its methods.

The old socialist states of the Warsaw pact, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, the Polish People’s Republic, Hungarian People’s Republic are happily gone; Today these countries are proud members of NATO and the European Union.

I’ve always said that when a national title has the words Democratic, People’s Republic or Socialist in its official name, its government is usually anything but.

Look at the divided Korean Peninsula. The communist Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the North stands in stark and tragic contrast with the prosperous and free Republic of Korea in the South.

Or take divided China; since 1949 the communists have ruled the People’s Republic of China, aka the Mainland. The democratic and prosperous Republic of China governs the island of Taiwan.

In South and Southeast Asia, it’s more of the same. Vietnam is officially called the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, a place of vibrant commerce but dismal human and civil political rights.

A Beijing-backed military regime runs the Union of Myanmar aka Burma. Then there’s the People’s Republic of Bangladesh. Not surprisingly in all these places, people are leaving their country if they can.

In Africa there’s the People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria, an authoritarian Arab state. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, one of the world’s longest running humanitarian crises with ghastly ethnic violence.

Additionally in Latin America there’s Cuba, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, and Nicaragua. These regimes despite their authoritarian political pedigree use the bland official titles such as Republic of Cuba. Venezuela once a reasonably prosperous middle class country, has turned into an odious socialist dictatorship.

Now New York City, the global commercial and financial metropolis had its wakeup moment having elected a Democratic Socialist Mayor. Zohran Mamdani proudly proclaimed in a confrontational victory speech in Brooklyn, “I am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this.”

Haven’t we seen this movie before?

John J. Metzler is a United Nations correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. He is the author of Divided Dynamism the Diplomacy of Separated Nations: Germany, Korea, China (2014). [See pre-2011 Archives]

  Socialism in history and these theaters; Yes, we have seen this movie before