பெரும் சமுக மாறுதல்கள்- எப்படி சாதிப்பது? வன்முறையாலா அல்லது மக்கள் திரளியக்கங்களாலா

கார்டியன் ஒரு இடது சாரிப் பத்திரிகை. நம் ஊர் மவுண்ட் ரோடு மாவொ நடத்தும் பத்திரிகையில் இதில் இருந்து அடிக்கடி கட்டுரைகள் அடிக்கடி பிரதி செய்யப்படும். இதில் சமயத்தில் சேம் சைட் கோல் போடுபவரும் உண்டு. :)
இதோ டிமதி கார்ட்டன் ஆஷ் என்பவர் தன் கட்சிக்காரருக்கு ஒரு எலெக்ட்ரிக் ஷாக் கொடுக்கிறார். ஆனால் சைபீரியாவே அசைக்க முடியாத மத/ மூட நம்பிக்கைக்கு இவர் கொடுக்கிற சின்ன ஷாக் என்ன செய்யப் போகிறது?
கேட்கிற கேள்வி எளியது. லெனின் நிறைய உளறி இருக்கிறார். அதில் ஒன்று வன்முறை இல்லாது புரட்சி வெல்லாது என்பது. இங்கே கிழக்கு ஜெர்மனியின் கம்யூனிஸ்டுகளுக்கு எதிராக வென்றது மக்களின் அமைதியான எதிர்ப்பும், எழுச்சியும்தான் என்கிறார். நான் அவரோடு கட்சி கட்டப் போவதில்லை. தமிழகத்தில் நிறைய பேர் இருப்பாரே?அவர்கள் பார்த்துக் கொள்ளட்டும்!
சூ.கா.
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The path of the fallen wall is hard to find, but a powerful example lives on

Memories of the day have faded and capitalism has triumphed, but the event endures as a model of non-violent resistance
Timothy Garton Ash in BerlinThursday November 8, 2007The Guardian
Remember, remember the 9th of November. But who does? If you had not seen the headline to this column, would you instantly have known that I refer to the day the Berlin wall came down, 18 years ago tomorrow? Dates age faster than we do, said the poet Robert Lowell, and most of the time that is true.
For an older generation of central Europeans, November 9 meant the Kristallnacht, the "night of broken glass" in 1938, when Nazi thugs left the streets of this city strewn with the smashed glass of Jewish shopkeepers' windows. For those still older, it recalled Hitler's attempted putsch on November 8-9 1923. Each November 9 supplants the last. Perhaps - heaven forbid - in a few years' time there will be an attempted terrorist attack in Berlin (foiled, let us hope) on a November 9 and Germans will have to work out whether to call it 9/11, European style, or 11/9, American style.

Earlier this week, I spent an afternoon with a long-time East German friend showing my younger son, who was three years old in 1989, the places where the wall used to be. There's not much left: a few stretches of old concrete and raked sand (once the "death strip" where would-be escapers from the former East Germany were shot), grainy museum photos, a stark and rusty memorial. The ruins of Persepolis are more vivid. For those of us who were there, the experience - both the taste of our friends' long imprisonment and the magical moment of liberation - is unforgettable, life-transforming; but to explain it to someone who was not there requires a novelist's effort of evocation. "To feel how it was" ("Fuehlen, wie es war"), a local newspaper captions a picture of children stretching out their fingers to touch an internally illuminated, multicoloured plastic replica of the wall, erected by a Korean artist in front of the Brandenburg Gate. Or rather, how it wasn't.
This remoteness is not merely a function of age or physical distance. Over dinner, I asked my old friend's eldest son, who as a 21-year-old escaped through the perforated iron curtain from Hungary to Austria in the summer of 1989, and is now a priest in west Berlin, what his parishioners would make of it if this Sunday he preached a sermon based on his experience. Not much, he said. The west Berlin congregation would probably think: there he goes again, bothering us with his eastern reminiscences. Like the bored family when dad starts retelling for the umpteenth time his veteran's tales of Vietnam or the second world war.
But imagine the case of a young woman born on the morning of November 9 1989, here in East Berlin, and therefore 18 this Friday? How would she celebrate and reflect on her coming of age? "Just like someone in Spain or Britain," say my friends. Spain is probably a better comparison. Of course, there is a general sense that there was a dark and gloomy past somewhere back there, before one was born - like the shadow of the Franco dictatorship for a young woman in Madrid. But it's only marginally relevant to your own life.
So why has this epochal event, considered by many historians to mark the end of the "short 20th century" (1914-1991), faded so rapidly from lived experience? Perhaps because, unlike, say, the 4th of July, it did not start a big new thing that is still with us (for instance, the United States). It was more a great ending than a great beginning.
On the morning after, there were huge questions in the air. Could (and should) Germany be peacefully united? Could (and should) communism, which had abolished virtually all private property, emasculated the rule of law and supplanted democracy with the "dictatorship of the proletariat", be transformed back into capitalism? As the joke went at the time: we know that you can turn an aquarium into fish soup, but can you turn fish soup back into an aquarium? Eighteen years on, these questions have been answered. Yes, you can. Driving into the centre of East Berlin, I noticed an alternative, hippy-style shop which had on its door a parody of the famous cold war Berlin signs that used to say, "You are now leaving the American sector" (of West Berlin, that is, crossing into the Soviet sector, or East Berlin). This parodic notice read: "You are now leaving the capitalist sector." But it isn't true. Even among the incense and beads behind that alternative shop door, capitalism rules, OK.
The ultimate proof of the triumph of capitalism is to be seen in a striking full-colour advertisement that has appeared in the pages of the Economist and the Financial Times in recent weeks. It shows a thoughtful-looking Mikhail Gorbachev, sitting in the back of a car through whose rear window you can clearly see one of the few remaining stretches of the Berlin wall. Beside him is a leather bag by Louis Vuitton, for which luxury goods manufacturer this world historical figure and hero of our time is now serving as an advertisement. Eighteen years on, that seems to me a perfect icon of the age we're in.
What, then, is left of that incredible November night, when the people made their own history as they danced through the wall? "Was bleibt?" ("What remains?"), as the East German novelist Christa Wolf mournfully asked. Apart from our fading memories, there is, I believe, at least one thing that survives with a future. The fall of the wall is perhaps the world's most famous image of the triumph of what we call in English "civil resistance" - that is, popular non-violent action. It followed massive peaceful demonstrations in Leipzig and other then East German cities. As one East German worker told me at the time: "You see, it shows Lenin was wrong. Lenin said a revolution could succeed only with violence, but this was a peaceful revolution."
The East German "revolution of the candles", as some dubbed it at the time, had predecessors, from the non-violent campaigns of Gandhi and Martin Luther King to Poland's Solidarity. It has also had many successors, from the velvet revolution in Prague, which followed within a matter of days, to South Africa, Slovakia, Serbia, Ukraine and, most recently, the protests led by Buddhist monks in Burma (too hastily tagged the "saffron revolution") and those of lawyers in Pakistan today. (Expect a "lawyers' revolution" tag, assuming some journalist hasn't reached for it already.)
I am involved in a fascinating research project, led by my Oxford colleague Adam Roberts, which is looking at many of these cases of the use of civil resistance and trying to work out why some succeeded and others failed. Courage, imagination and skilled organisation of peaceful protest is not enough, if other factors of power - the army and police, a colonial power, neighbouring states, international media, economic forces - are not sufficiently present, benign or amenable. You need your Gorbachev, your Helmut Köhl, your western TV cameras and, not least, your party leaders who give up without a shot fired in anger. But you also need the citizens on the streets, with their candles, banners, chants and the sheer peaceful force of numbers. Without them, there is no revolution. With them, you can change the course of world history, even in the face of a nuclear-armed superpower. So the date may fade, but the example lives on.www.timothygartonash.com