Twenty years ago next week, the Berlin Wall came down.  And so did the collapse of a destructive ideology that divided nations and peoples between embracing a way of life that was based on abstractions involving nothing less than a reconstruction of human nature based on communist ideals and living out reality as it is.  [...]

Bela Kiraly was someone who I knew and respected as a history colleague in New York.

Kiraly was a hero of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. That autumn I had begun my graduate studies in the history of international relations at Fordham University in The Bronx. I had a lecture course and a seminar with Professor [...]