The Washington Post’s coverage of the 50th anniversary of the Berlin Wall included a blog post about other walls:
“[The Berlin Wall] may be one of the most famous walls in modern history, but it is far from being the only one. Around the world, walls are built to keep out people, drugs, guns and war. They keep people in, too. They protect and civilize, guard and defend. And they divide people from one another.”
The blog post showed pictures of these other walls: walls between Israel and Palestine, India and Pakistan, China and Burma, Zimbabwe and South Africa, Morocco and Spain, Mexico and the United States (of course), West Belfast’s Peace Line, and traffic barriers in Baghdad.
But look at the pictures of these walls (all but two of them between countries) and compare them with the pictures of the Berlin Wall I posted yesterday. The walls between India and Pakistan or Morocco and Spain are about disputes between countries. The wall between Israel and Palestine is about keeping out suicide bombers. The barrier between Mexico and the United States is about controlling illegal immigration, not locking people up – or in. And to include traffic barriers in Baghdad that are designed to keep out terrorists is absurd.
In fact, to compare these “walls” with the Berlin Wall is to show a lack of understanding of what the Berlin Wall was about and what it represented in the Cold War between freedom and communism. Also, it is unfair to the people of West Berlin who had to live with the Wall for 28 years. But most of all, it is an insult to the people of East Berlin and East Germany who were imprisoned by the Berlin Wall for almost three decades – and to those people who died trying to cross it, merely because they wanted to be free.
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