Coming full circle, from the Berlin Wall to Brexit.

Al Jourgensen was there at the very inception of the New World Order. It goes to show that we all should listen to more Ministry.

Above all else, Brexit to me is a symbol of my life of the mind, coming full circle. It has been an exhausting few days, and I'm not even British.

Since the early 1980s, I've rightly or wrongly accused the drunken stork of depositing me on the wrong continent. Even when stretched thin and utterly distracted by life, I've tried to stay abreast all all things European.

On Friday, after the referendum vote was announced, it dawned on me that I was feeling extremes of depression and exhilaration, and the last time these conflicting emotions were so strong was 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down.

Back then, I was not unlike many others. We thought that with the Cold War ending, there'd be the opportunity for progressive solutions to world problems. I struggled with the notion of pulling stakes and trying to be a part of this, on the ground, somewhere on the continent, but after much thought, my choice was to go into business, be an American Europhile in exile, and take a stab at indie capitalism.

Now, 25 years later, I'm finished with that chapter -- and Britain says it's done with Europe. I've learned quite a lot, and am no longer interested in binaries, whether Leave or Remain, or Democrat or Republican. During my quarter century of NABC, I was too busy pouring myself into grassroots this-or-that, right here at the local level, to fully grasp the implications of neoliberalism.

It's all gone sour, folks. The facts changed, and I changed my mind. I regret that it took so long. Incrementalism probably isn't going to cut it.

Brexit has been immensely emotional for me, but the one sure thing is that cramming these events through the familiar American-centric shape shifter isn't tremendously useful. There's more to it than Yanks bitching about their 401Ks, or trying to create memes with strained Trump/Clinton analogies.

In many respects, Timothy Garton Ash guided me through the fall of Communism in Europe and its aftermath. I own several of his books, and I feel his pain. His final sentence in the passage quoted below is especially relevant.

As a lifelong English European, this is the biggest defeat of my political life (The Guardian)

Yet the origins of this debacle are as much European as British. As so often, the seeds of disaster were sown in the moment of triumph; of nemesis in prior hubris. It would be an exaggeration to say that a wall will be going up at Dover because a wall came down in Berlin, but there is a connection nonetheless. In fact, there are three connections. As their price for supporting German unification, France and Italy pinned Germany down to a timetable for an overhasty, ill-designed and overextended European monetary union. As a result of their liberation from Soviet communist control, many poorer countries in eastern Europe were set on a path to EU membership, including its core freedom of movement. And 1989 opened the door to globalisation, with spectacular winners and numerous losers."

Garton Ash: "Americans need to discover how the world sees them."

Read up, tea partiers. You too, KZ.

Americans need to discover how the world sees them, by Timothy Garton Ash (Guardian)

There's little awareness of how the budget crisis has eroded US credibility. It's time for a reverse Christopher Columbus

On Monday, government offices were closed in Washington DC, to mark Columbus Day. Except that most of them had been closed anyway, because of the US government shutdown. As everyone knows, Christopher Columbus was an Italian navigator who, in the service of the Spanish crown, supposedly "discovered" America and reported its potential to a wondering world. I have spent the summer in the United States watching, with growing alarm, a country engaged in a degree of self-harming which, if observed in a teenager, would lead any friend to cry "call the doctor at once". As I set course back to Europe, my conclusion is this: America should do a reverse Columbus. The world no longer needs to discover America; but America urgently needs to discover the world's view of America.

Ordinary Americans, and especially the small minority active in Democrat and Republican primaries, must learn more of what people across the globe are thinking and saying about the US. For if you follow that, you realise that the erosion of American power is happening faster than most of us predicted – while the politicians in Washington behave like rutting stags with locked antlers.

Timothy Garton Ash: "We see this iconography of peaceful protest, and we know at once where we stand."

Of course we know where we stand. As Americans, we're not standing, but sitting -- in the drive-through line at Chick fil-A.

Timothy Garton Ash's insightful writing probably first came to my attention through The Spectator during my tenure abstracting magazines at UMI Data Courier in the late 1980s.

Garton Ash's byline last appeared at NAC in 2009 on the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall's obliteration, and appropriately so, given that his coverage of the 1989 revolutions behind the Iron Curtain is seminal. Thanks to J for pointing me to this commentary about Taksim Square in The Guardian:

Europe must condemn Erdoğan, but without hubris or illusions; Europe should support those who stand up for our shared values, but don't expect miracles from Turkish democracy

Another year, another country, another square: after Wenceslas in Prague, Independence in Kiev, Azadi in Tehran, Red in Moscow and Tahrir in Cairo, there's now Taksim in Istanbul. Each square reaches the world through totemic photographic images. In Istanbul it is that young woman in a red dress – Ceyda Sungur, a young academic at the city's technical university – being sprayed with tear gas at close quarters by a riot policeman. The national symbols, flags and colours change – green in Iran, orange in Kiev, red in Istanbul – but the essence of the image is the same. A young, modern, urban, probably secular young woman faces the armed, helmeted, faceless man. He represents the forces of reaction, authoritarianism and domination, whether in the service of the ayatollahs, President Vladimir Putin, or this would-be sultan, the Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

But it was a peachy photo-op, wasn't it?

In the Guardian, Timothy Garton Ash recalls the fall of the Berlin Wall in the context of the year 1989, "the biggest year in world history since 1945."

With Mikhail Gorbachev's breathtaking renunciation of the use of force (a luminous example of the importance of the individual in history), a nuclear-armed empire that had seemed to many Europeans as enduring and impregnable as the Alps, not least because it possessed those weapons of total annihilation, just softly and suddenly vanished.

Nowhere in this article does Ash so much as mention Ronald Reagan's name ... nor should he.