1989: Spark of Liberation

"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" As many visitors to Patria know, Patria's "Dharmic Revolution" - its unique micronational movement to embrace Hinduism, Sanskrit, yoga, New Age and Eastern-based spirituality - was inspired by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the mostly non-violent (Rumania excepted) democratic revolutions that swept the former Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe in the latter part of 1989 as the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union imploded.

In Patria, the momentous events of twenty years ago were an inspiration to focus inwardly, to begin a spiritual quest, and to tear down walls within that might as well have been made of brick and fortified with machine gun-toting guards. The bland, dishwater-dull centrist, small-l liberal, and small-c conservative parties that had governed Patria for decades and formed the bulk of the 43rd Congress were turfed out of power almost as swiftly as the monolithic Communists of the old Warsaw Pact. Perhaps not coincidentally, in late 1989 an election for a new Congressus Patriaë was on the horizon. In the 44th Congress election of 1990, the Spiritual Regeneration Movement, Chakra Party and the now-defunct New Forum of Patria - new parties that could not have been imagined on the ballot four years earlier - rose up to meet the challenges of a new consciousness and Patria's post-Cold War longing for spiritual values.

Just as there are many Germans who grew up in East Germany and two decades later still long for the pre-November 1989 days of job security, guaranteed housing and child care, cheap (if seldom available) consumer goods, unsafe at any speed Trabant cars and the discredited leadership of Erich Honecker, there are many citizens of Patria who still long for the old days of the boring, secular, but nominally Judeo-Christian republic. The rightist, tough-on-crime, macho-man National Union panders to much of this nostalgia, at least to the populist perception that law and order has crumbled, crime has gone out of control, and Patria has become irreversably feminized by hatha/raja/bhakti yoga, Hinduism and New Age spirituality.