We interupt your regularly scheduled post for this special note

This day I'm not going to blog about what everyone else is. Sure, we went to a conference that was really interesting with a lot of insight to be had. Sure we read the reading for class as well. But today is November 9, 2009.

Twenty years ago today the Berlin Wall fell to the ground.Twenty years ago today millions were freed from the communist yoke. Twenty years ago today was the symbolic end to the greatest evil the world has ever seen. Twenty years ago today...

Saturday evening I sat in a massive auditorium in Philadelphia, at the Mid-Atlantic Students For Liberty Conference graciously hosted by the Drexel Student Liberty Front. I was surrounded by over a hundred peers, brothers in liberty from across the Mid-Atlantic. We entered that auditorium that morning running on nothing but passion and half an hour of sleep, only to leave that evening exhausted but burning, burning with a fire that no man could extinguish. Why? How do some kids from Philly and DC make it though a 12 hour day of sitting in a room without passing out? One final speech by little-known a UPenn professor by the name of Alan Charles Kors.

Kors gave speech entitled "Can there be an 'After Socialism'". It asks whether the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago today really was as significant as we think.

We are surrounded by slain innocents, and the scale is wholly new. This is not the thousands killed during the Inquisition; it is not the thousands of American lynching. This is not the six million dead from Nazi extermination. The best scholarship yields numbers that the mind must try to comprehend: scores, and scores, and scores, and scores of millions of bodies.¹ All around us. If we count those who died of starvation during Communists' experiments with human interactions—twenty to forty million in three years in China alone²—we may add scores of millions more. Shot; dead by deliberate exposure; starved; and murdered in work camps and prisons meant to extract every last fiber of labor from human beings and then kill them. And all around us, widows and widowers and orphans.

This speech was powerful, to say the least. More so when you consider one of the people in the room.

The coordinator of the conference was a young liberty-lover, Mid-Atlantic Director of Students For Liberty and AU student whom I've grown to know closely. She also happened to be born in Russia. The day she was born was the day before the Berlin Wall fell. After the speech ended was the moment scores of people realized what they were really living for. She walked up to the stage, tears streaming down her face and brought the conference to a close after struggling to pronounce the words of her two-minute speech.

Now that's what I call Cross Cultural Communication.

Nick Zaiac