We adopted some of the worst manifestations of godless capitalism and some of the worst tenets of Stalinism
In some quarters there will be some mourning of the event which drove a knife into the heart of Karl Marx's dream of an egalitarian society.
I must confess I am one of those who does not have fond memories of that November of 1989. It was with horror that I and my friends watched those scenes of Germans dancing on top of the wall and merrily chipping away at it.
We found it inconceivable that people would be celebrating the end of their socialist Utopia and that they were handing themselves over to the evil ways of the capitalist West. The German Democratic Republic (or GDR as the freedom songs we sang said) was dying a very dramatic death.
Two years earlier, US president Ronald Reagan had delivered that ringing speech at the Brandenburg Gate in which he made this appeal to then Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev: "If you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalisation: come here, to this gate. Mr Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall."
In the end it was the people of Berlin who tore down the wall, opened the floodgates and freed themselves from tyranny.
Little did my friends and I know then that the fall of the wall was only the beginning of our trauma. Over the next few months and years communist governments would fall, to loud cheers in western capitals. Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria - models of Utopia - fell like dominoes. This was to culminate in the overthrow of Gorbachev and the break- up of the Soviet Union.
It was clear then there would be no socialism in our lifetime. (Okay, now we know that this was a good thing - but back then it did not seem that way).
So spare a thought for some of us who will not be cracking open champagne bottles. Spare a thought for some of us who will be reliving sad memories.
Of course, even those of us who were devastated back then now know better. When the Iron Curtain came down, it revealed a dismal world of sad people and cruel rulers. We discovered that the "propaganda" that the western media had been feeding us about the state of affairs was actually true. It was as bad, if not worse, than what had been portrayed.
But with the collapse of communism the world also lost something good. In the triumph over communism, we as humans threw the baby out with the bath water (by the way, did anybody ever actually do that?)
We forsook the moral foundations of socialism, which, at the outset, were premised on human beings being just to human beings. In those triumphalist days when the West was dancing on the Eastern Bloc's grave, we simply replaced godless communism with godless capitalism and created an amoral world.
And with that we were thrust into the godless 1990s, a period of greed and heartlessness.
It was that greed that led to the horrendous meltdown of 2008 and plunged the world into the worst recession in nearly a century. The same greed that is feeding corrupt practices the world over, including our country.
In South Africa, the post-Cold War period had its own effects. We adopted some of the worst manifestations of godless capitalism and some of the worst tenets of Stalinism.
When the ANC returned to the country in the early 1990s, the residue of the Soviet Union was still very much in their blood. Yes, most of them had embraced the reality that the socialist experiment had failed and that the free market was the most efficient way of allocating resources.
But in terms of political style they knew only one way to operate. In South Africa they found a vibrant democratic culture that had been nurtured in communities. The returnees' first order of business was to impose their leadership style on the internal democratic movement, whose leaders and activists were still star-struck at the revolutionary heavyweights in their midst.
It was a grave mistake, for which we continue to suffer today. The political culture imposed on the internal structures stifled the democratic culture that had been so key to weakening the apartheid state.
This was a culture of secrecy, authoritarianism and intolerance.
It was this culture that enabled the motley clique that ran our country for the past decade to get away with murder. Even though the Polokwane revolution was about displacing that culture, one senses it creeping back into our political space. Bad habits are hard to kill.
The great irony is that, while retaining the Eastern Bloc's political culture, on the other end we adopted the materialist culture of the so-called imperialist West. This, as Cosatu boss Zwelinzima Vavi pointed out the other day, has fed the corruption beast that we are battling today.
If there is a present we South Africans should give ourselves to mark the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall's fall, it will be to find a way of reining in these tendencies.
We cannot go back to the pre-Polokwane political culture and we cannot allow corruption and materialism to eat away at our democratic dream.
guardian vampire