A short time before his sadly premature death, George Orwell said of his new novel, 1984, “I do not say that such a thing will happen. Only that it could happen…. The moral of this tale is: don’t let it happen. It’s up to you.” If there is anything we should be celebrating on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, we should be celebrating this: We didn’t let it happen. The totalitarian world that Orwell envisioned, and which, lest we forget, was a very real possibility at the halfway mark of the last century, was successfully deterred. And is was not deterred by impersonal, determinative forces of history or economics, but by the concerted and often despairing efforts of many people, often in the face of brutal and determined opposition. If this anniversary is anything, it is the anniversary of their victory. This anniversary, this triumph, this vindication, does not belong to all of us. It belongs to the anti-communists of all countries and all parties who fought for it, sometimes at great cost to reputation, family, friendship, sanity, and often life and limb.

It is easy to look back now and lie to ourselves that the whole thing was inevitable: the contradictions of communism would eventually out, its incapacity for economic growth would rot the system from within, the Soviet empire was too large and diverse to be sustained, etc. etc. We have the benefit now of deciding that history simply took its slow but steady course, and left us with its natural outcome of good triumphing over evil, and freedom over oppression.

Fifty years ago, however, it did not look that way at all. It may seem strange now, but for most of the twentieth century, the rise of communism was seen—for good or ill—as the wave of the future, the contradictions of capitalism and democracy were believed to be a cancer that would destroy the organism over time, and the Russian revolution was held to be the defining moment of the century, if not of all human history. Even those like Arthur Koestler and Whittaker Chambers who had once been enamored of this particular church, and had left it with a hatred just as passionate, were quietly convinced that they were engaged in a futile endeavor, whose only recompense would be an honorable death. Chambers’s remark that in fleeing communism he had joined “the losing side,” or William F. Buckley’s claim that he and his movement were “standing astride history yelling ‘stop!’” were not atypical of the era. Even Orwell, in his darker moments, seemed to be fighting more out of despair than hope, and his fierce determination to finish 1984 even in the face of his terminal illness was likely born out of the desperate belief that his novel might, just might, make a difference.

It did, of course, just as Chambers’s Witness, Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, and especially Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago all made a difference. Today, we look back on these works as masterpieces of anti-totalitarian literature. Back then, we should not forget, they were often words lost in a maelstrom. Orwell toiled for years without a publisher, Koestler was a marginalized eccentric to most right-thinking people, and Solzhenitsyn had to memorize his vast work and secrete copies of it in the hopes of smuggling it to the West.

And these were merely literary and intellectual humiliations. In the realm of raw politics, the battle was even more bitterly fought. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the case of Chambers, who faced a campaign of slander, vilification, and hatred rarely seen in the United States, all because he had chosen to tell the truth about a prominent man’s—and, it should be noted, also his own—acts of treason. Nor was Chambers’s case unusual. To the true believers, and to the anti-anti-communists of all parties, those who told the truth about totalitarianism, whoever and wherever they were, amounted to little more than collaborators with oppression and injustice. They were traitors to history itself. This loathing, with its constant accusations of heresy and proclamations of excommunication, often reached farcical proportions. Richard Wright, whose contribution to The God That Failed is one of the most eloquent statements of disillusionment in the English language, gave devastating voice to this in one of his works, in which a young black party member is upbraided by his white comrade for being insufficiently radical, until finally the young man can only respond by asking if his interrogator received his blackness by injection or osmosis.

This was to be the lot of many anti-communists over the course of half a century. Some, like Camus, were merely ostracized. Others, like Buckley, had to put up with being called things like “crypto-Nazi” on various occasions. When the New Left hit, and its opposition to the Cold War took hold over the zeitgeist of the 1960s, many of the old left, who had learned their anti-communism the hard way, had to watch as the movement they had struggled to save fell piece by piece to apologists for totalitarianism. They were first astonished, then horrified, then excommunicated. It was a soft purge, perhaps, but a purge nonetheless.

All of this, however, was nothing compared to the lot of those actually living under communist rule. Often, they were simply slaughtered. Some, like Solzhenitsyn, Natan Sharansky, and many, many others, had to face prison, expulsion, harassment, and the constant threat of death in order to make their plight known to the world. And when they did, there were many prepared to dismiss them as heretics, traitors, and most often liars.

Still worse was the lot of the nations and peoples who resisted communism. In 1956, Hungary faced its auto-da-fe, and its modest attempt to cast off Soviet domination was crushed under the boots of the Red Army. In Czechoslovakia, the only genuine revolution of 1968 suffered a similar fate. These uprisings had to languish as aberrations, ignored as the march of history supposedly passed them by on the way toward its revolutionary future, until the wall came down, and even the most dedicated apologists had to admit that the Czechs, the Hungarians, and their supporters had been the wave of the future all along.

The apologists, it should be noted, have not gone away. Even in the immediate aftermath of the wall’s collapse, they were toiling busily in search of some way to claim that it never happened. Witness the palsied old Stalinist Eric Howbsbawm’s attempt in his Age of Extremes to deify Mikhail Gorbachev as the hero of the hour; or Noam Chomsky’s pathetic claim that the Soviet Union had happily allowed its imperial domains to go free out of altruistic, almost paternal love.

They are not alone. We heard, hear, and will continue to hear from those who would rather it hadn’t happened, and would prefer that it didn’t mean what it does mean. They will point to Augusto Pinochet, Francisco Franco, and other disreputable members of the anti-communist camp, as though Pol Pot, Mao, and Stalin had not committed vastly more heinous and bloody crimes. They will note the economic malaise of much of Eastern Europe, as though the trepidations of freedom were inferior to those of slavery. They will note the brutal wars in the former Yugoslavia, as if these ancient and long-festering hatreds would never have erupted had it not been for the fall of a totalitarianism they long predated and will long outlive. Worst of all, however, they will claim, as they do claim, that it was all inevitable, and nothing anyone did or said made any difference.

The truth is far more sobering. The truth is that the wall fell, and with it tyranny, only because good men fought to bring it down. Their victory teaches us that the struggle for what Orwell called “common decency” is not something we can complacently leave to the machinations of history. The discontents of civilization will go on. People will continue to seek ways to escape the brutal realities of life through fantasies of unification, solidarity, and violence. The great lesson of the anti-communists, both left and right, is that nothing—good or bad—is inevitable; that the totalitarian temptation will always be there; that each generation will have to relearn this lesson; and that each generation will also have to choose whether or not to let it happen. It’s up to us.

Benjamin Kerstein is a Senior Writer for The New Ledger.