Page 2693 - Week 12 - Thursday, 16 November 1989
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Mr Duby: On a point of order, Mr Speaker; Mr Stefaniak's comments here on the gutless appeasement of the Western powers obviously do not take into account historical facts. If it was not for the statesmanship of Neville Chamberlain - - -
MR SPEAKER: Order! You are debating the issue.
MR STEFANIAK: I would like to note that, despite a few hiccups, the reason why events have occurred in Eastern Europe and have been able to occur as they have in recent months is that NATO has remained firm against threats from Soviet imperialism and it has been contained - I think the Western world owes a great debt to such persons as Truman and Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of West Germany, for their efforts in the early days - and in more recent times the rearmament of the West to meet a very dangerous Soviet threat in the 1970s, carried out by the Reagan administration in the United States, ably supported in Europe by the Thatcher administration in Britain and the West German administration of Mr Kohl, as well as the rest of the European allies.
Maintaining a position of strength against Soviet imperialism has led to a change in the Soviet Union because their economy is in tatters. It is an economy geared for war and not geared for consumer goods and/or for consumers. The Soviet Union is quite unable to match the West in a real arms race. They realise that; they have been forced into changes and those changes are now being seen. I think it behoves this Assembly as a democratic body of this Territory to applaud the very positive signs that we are now seeing in Eastern Europe, but let us not forget the steps and indeed the hardships which the people of Eastern Europe have suffered over the last 70-odd years. Let us also not forget the vision of certain leaders in the West that ensured that the West has remained free during these very troubled 45-odd years since World War II.
Berlin Wall
MR HUMPHRIES (5.35): I would also like to speak about the Berlin Wall, and I rise to address what I see as the real implications of the symbolic breaching of the wall over the last days. I say "real" because I believe that last Tuesday night, when two Ministers of the Government engaged in debate on this matter, they were effectively engaging in a quite extraordinary hijacking of this debate in mounting, as they did, the suggestion that the breaching of the wall was in some way a triumph over fascism.
They spoke at length about fascism, and they spoke about the Nazi Holocaust, the horrors of Nazism and so on. When it was put to them that notwithstanding their eloquence on this subject - and I acknowledge that both Ministers Berry
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