25th Anniversary: When the Berlin Wall Fell

Lasrick writes Today is the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. This retrospective describes how quickly the Wall was erected, and how Berliners were completely caught off guard by its construction: "Berlin's citizens woke up one morning in August 1961 to find coils of barbed wire running down the middle of their streets; the first inkling some people had that anything was amiss was when their subway train didn't stop at certain stations. Later, the first strands of wire were replaced with a cement wall, along with watchtowers, a wide 'death strip,' and an electrified fence."

Comments

Concrete, not "cement".

[Anonymous Coward]

Concrete is made of sand, gravel, cement, and water.

Reminder of who not to credit

[damn_registrars]

From Reagan to Hasselhoff: 5 people who didnâ(TM)t bring down the Berlin Wall

In particular, even though the official American narrative is that Ronald Reagan personally tore it down with his death-ray eyes, the article has a more balanced view on the matter:

But one also shouldn't ignore that Reagan gave his speech on 12 June 1987, a good 29 months before the actual fall of the wall. And there is little evidence that it had much impact on the dynamics of the dissident movement in East Germany, or on Soviet politics at the time.

Re:Reminder of who not to credit

[timeOday]

Nations don't fall because of (un) diplomatic gestures. They fall because they are conquered, or go bankrupt. The Soviet Union fell because of its bad economy. However, the USSR did not increase military spending in response to the US buildup. There was never any reason to think they did, other that it was a nice story.

The USSR's 9-year Afghanistan misadventure, on the other hand, was extremely costly (look at the above graph from '79 to '89). US support for the Mujahideen surely increased that pain. But the American president who started backing them was, in fact, Jimmy Carter.

Re:Reminder of who not to credit

[Sique]

Spoken as an East German: The Berlin Wall Speech was a gesture towards the own people in the U.S., nothing more, nothing less. It worked. The majority of the U.S. still believes this speech had a big impact on the East. We, the East Germans knew that the Berlin Wall was evil, we didn't need Ronald Reagan to point this out to us. We already had 200 shot dead who were trying to get over the Wall. We had thousands of people in prison who were caught planning to cross the Wall. We had singer-songwriter singing about the Wall, and how it cut us off most of the world. When those singer-songwrites sung about not being able to travel to Paris, we cheered, and we were looking up to them for having the braveness to do so. When Ronald Reagan did this, we were annoyed about the big posture and grandstanding and the arrogance of the most powerful man of the world, and we felt like he stole our symbol from us.

Re:Reminder of who not to credit

[Sique]

You as a Westerner are surely taught: Yes, only the freedom you earn for yourself is true freedom. You might earn it by overthrowing your oppressors or you may earn it by fending off the attempts to take your freedom. And we have seen again and again: Freedom that was brought from somewhere else didn't stay very long. Despite the claims of many ideologues, you can't export freedom. Yes, you can lead by example. Yes, you can overthrow an oppressor. But for a group of people to stay free they have to be able to earn their freedom themselves.

Yes, the U.S. helped very much to make 1989 happen, but not by giving speeches on the safe side of the Wall. They made 1989 possible by being much more successful in economics, building the much better cars, the better computers, creating the better clothing and the better movies and music. They helped by bankrupting the Soviet Union which was awash in oil money in the 1970ies and early 1980ies, by forcing the oil price down and getting the Soviet Union to waste their money in an arms race.

But at the same time, the U.S. made things worse by supporting every dictator who was crying "I'm against communism" loud enough. It made things worse by toppling democratically elected governments if they weren't anti-communist enough. It was easy for the communist propaganda to point at South America or Southeast Asia and say: If you are supporting the U.S., you are supporting Imperialism and suppressing people.