Ronald Reagan made his “tear down this wall” speech 20 years ago. John Fund gets at the essence of the communist system today by writing about a film I have yet to see but that my friends are raving about-“The Lives of Others:”


 “The film itself signals some of the reasons for why communism was in crisis in the 1980s. Official corruption had reached stultifying levels. The technological revolution threatened to leave centrally planned economies permanently behind. And, as columnist John O’Sullivan has noted, ‘Communism had failed to retain enough true believers who would murder on its behalf.'”