The New Yorker:

A source of inspiration is that era of history, not so distant, when leaders and movements, for all their flaws and failures, agreed to agree.

By David Remnick

In an era of darkness and blood, it is nearly impossible to remember that, from Moscow to Jerusalem, there was once a time of promise. Not resolution, not paradise, and certainly not the end of history––but promise. Between 1989 and 1995, the following things happened: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the liberation of Eastern and Central Europe; the collapse of Soviet Communism and the (seeming) end of the Cold War; the brief, but startling, appearance of a pro-democracy movement in Beijing and other Chinese cities; the end of South African apartheid; and the signing of the Oslo Accords by the Israeli leadership and the Palestine Liberation Organization.

In other words, in many nations, political leaders, dissidents, and social movements, having exhausted so many rotten ideas and endured so much oppression and tragedy, began to push the world in a direction of decency, democracy, and compromise. Of course, there is much that is oversimplified in that sentence—euphoria and triumphalism obscured some of the dark currents that persisted in those countries and in human nature itself—but the promise was real, and it ran deep.

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