Yesterday, walking through the "Roads Not Taken" exhibit at the Deutsches Historisches Museum, I thought of Joni Mitchell's lyrics:
"Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone"
Looking back from 1989, to 1848, the year the first attempt at a democratic society failed, the exhibit explores what might have happened. If Hitler had been assassinated, for instance. Inevitably, the exhibit compares the tragic outcome of the Tienanmen Square massacre with the success of the relatively peaceful protests ending the DDR.
The German DDR protesters, like the Chinese advocates for democracy, were asking for basic human rights: the right to freely discuss ideas and the right to gather together in order to do so. The right to criticize the government.
I cannot help but compare these protests with the spectacle today on American campuses. In the age of information, these students are remarkably ignorant of history and reality. The most absurd group, Queers for Palestine, have no idea how badly Palestine treats gay people. Honor killings, rape, torture, are widely accepted.
Those chanting "from the river to the sea" can't name which river and which sea, and couldn't cough up basic Wikipedia info on the history of the founding of the state of Israel. Much of it is really this dumb.
We are in the process of watching what we've got--shreds of democracy--go. Protesters favoring Palestine believe Israel is a "white supremacist" state. The only democracy in the middle east, Israel has many Arab citizens who vote and participate in the free society that still exists. One glance at the tenets of Hamas--it believes in wholesale destruction of Israel--should be enough to discredit it. If that's not enough, the cultural hatred of gay and queer people should tip off young demonstrators that they're giving up something they won't know they had until it's gone.
The "Roads not Taken" exhibit takes its title from Robert Frost's poem--that, too, is significant: America is founded on the right to choose between different roads. Other countries have traditionally admired that idea. As Douglas Murray has pointed out, refugees are fleeing to America and other democratic countries--they're not heading for Russia and China. But now, Chinese students studying in the USA compare the political mood to the Chinese one: "One engineer had taken a Pitt psychology class that frequently touched on race, and he said that it reminded him of the political-indoctrination classes at Sichuan University," a recent New Yorker essay reports.
"Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone"
