The Berlin Wall has now been down longer than it was up. For those of us of a certain age, the Berlin Wall seemed like a permanent part of our world. It was built when we were just children, and it was still there when we entered middle age. When Erich Honecker said, in January of 1989, that the Wall would be standing in another 50 or even 100 years, we believed him. We had no reason not to. And yet, less than ten months after he said that, the Wall was down, and joy reigned not just in Berlin but around the world.
For something that seemed so permanent, it is amazing that it probably doesn’t even register for many people alive today. For them, the Wall is just something in history that they may or may not have heard of, like the Battle of Midway, Appomattox, or the Second Continental Congress. But the Wall is just as important as those, if we understand its lesson.
Our intelligence agencies didn’t realize how bad the economies were behind the Iron Curtain or how brittle the dictatorships were in some of those countries. All we could do, and what we did, was to be as good of a model as we could for freedom, democracy, and rule of law. And be ready to help when the people there were finally able to rise up.
I could go on and on about Berlin and the Wall (I have previously – just click on “Berlin” under Categories in the right margin). Let me just say how wonderful it is that the Wall is down – and how sad it is that, when people hear the word “wall” today, too many of them think of something else.1
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1 While Donald Trump’s wall has a different purpose than the Berlin Wall (President Trump’s wall is to keep people from entering illegally; the Berlin Wall was to keep people from leaving), it still has a feel to it, at least the way he talks about it, that doesn’t make one proud.
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