In some ways, this past year has been the counterpoint of 1989, the year in which the final countdown to the demise of Soviet and Eastern European communism began. Though the TV images of the Occupy movement, the Euro crisis and the worldwide economic malaise do not come near to matching the drama of the fall of the Berlin Wall, they are arguably no less significant. The events of 1989 and of 2011 both portended the bankruptcy of an ideology that had been the bedrock of governments and determined the lives of hundreds of millions of people.