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When the Wall came tumblin’ down
Posted by Bigfoot on November 9th, 2009
Twenty years ago today, the Berlin Wall came down. It was torn down, not by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, as famously urged by American president Ronald Reagan, but by ordinary Germans. The destruction of the wall led to the reunification of Germany, and eventually to the end of European communism. Another wall, known as the “Iron Curtain”, would likewise meet its demise, as communist regimes fell, culminating with the end of the Soviet Union itself.
These events were largely unforeseen, but were welcomed in the United States and Europe, as the decades-long Cold War came to a peaceful end. It was an especially sweet time for people like myself, Americans of east European descent. I had grown up with the knowledge that my ancestral countries of Poland and Czechoslovakia (which would later break up into two separate countries) were among the “satellites” of America’s most powerful adversary, their internal politics dominated by Soviet influence. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the leadership of people such as Lech Wałęsa in Poland and Haclav Havel in the Czech Republic, formerly communist lands would join NATO and become allies of the United States.
Earlier today, thousands gathered in Berlin to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the wall coming down. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the first person raised in formerly communist East Germany to hold that office, welcomed world leaders to the celebration. While calling November 9, 1989 the happiest day of her life, she also pointed out a somber historical irony.
Merkel also recalled the tragic side of Nov. 9 for Germans — the Nazis’ Kristallnacht, or Night of Broken Glass — an anti-Semitic pogrom 71 years ago. At least 91 German Jews were killed, hundreds of synagogues destroyed and thousands of Jewish businesses vandalized and looted in the state-sanctioned riots that night.
“Both show that freedom is not self evident,” Merkel said. “Freedom must be fought for. Freedom must be defended time and again.”
Sounds like advice well worth remembering.
Also recalling the fall of the Berlin Wall are
YnetNews and
