Comments on: How the Wall Really Fell

By: Brett

Brett — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 21:08:54 +0000

Campus Reform is sponsored by The Leadership Institute…C.R.’s goal is to indoctrinate young people toward neo-Con and Neo-Libertarian views through events of “activism.” Think of a Tea Party event for kids, only more propagandist. Take the current rhetoric you hear about the US moving toward Socialism and multiply that by the power of ten and you have Campus Reform!

By: Brett

Brett — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:33:49 +0000

That was a moronically funny website, there, Campus Reform! The ideas are, shall I say “sophomoric.” I particularly laughed at the ‘host a communism vs. capitalism lunch’ idea. You forgot to mention, when serving the “capitalist” lunch, you should make the food riddled with an array of toxins and maybe also sell it to the participants for an exorbitant price. If they complain, ignore them and charge them a fee to leave…hahahaha! You armchair neo-Libertarian types are so amusing. By suggesting this website, you appear not to know anything about communism if you think the US is determined to make its society a communist one–and has done so since the Berlin Wall came down; that is laughable…

By: Campus Reform

Campus Reform — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:52:48 +0000

Check out this activism response to the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall: http://www.campusreform.org/take-action/activism-ideas/rebuilding-the-berlin-wall

By: John Hamilton

John Hamilton — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 04:04:24 +0000

This was an enjoyable story, full of human touches. It would make for a great movie. I’m impressed by the absence of ideology and bluster. He actually made me feel kindlier towards Reagan, though I still believe he was one of our worst presidents.

It was nice to hear about the dynamics of other countries. We rarely hear anything about “Hungary,” a place with history and people whose lives are every bit as interesting and valuable as our own. This segment should go on your all-star list for fundraising.

By: Ellen Dibble

Ellen Dibble — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 23:52:40 +0000

The lady in the blue slippers (fluffy) who first made it through to freedom, as Michael Meyer saw it, might well have been the outgoing woman I had met there who corresponded. We both had breast cancer within a few years. I remember her husband was tall and young, more like an estranged son-in-law, and in a strange language I could not understand that at all. But I’d wish her to have that first step. Then again, I heard about the reputation of the Easterners in West Germany — they had been simultaneously thwarted, cheated, and sort of coddled for a couple of generations; there was a huge broadcast tower in East Berlin, and I suppose it was illegal to bring in western broadcasts, but I think it was done. Think fluffy pink “teddies” and shiny sleek “stuff.” I tried to photograph the Brandenburg Tor (behind the Reichstag, to the East), and found out someone had been shot for setting foot on the grass there, or it was mined or something. A tourist trap/attraction?
A couple more points about the disintegrating Czech economy. At the airport the phones would not work; people did not “man” the desks. When I took a long walk to the TWA office to confirm my return ticket, I found a tiny office at the back of a building, down an alley. The door was wide open, and no one was sitting in there. The office was empty.
Just about everyone in Prague had an elegant fur coat. (Siberia had plenty of large animals apparently.)
The Old New Synagogue was open, and no one was inside to guard it or otherwise. The entire Jewish quarter was mine to explore. Pre-tourist. On the bus coming into town from the plane, the blonde presumed “minder” spoke to me, told me how to get to my hotel from the last stop, and all the while every pair of eyes in the very full bus were upon me. Obviously nobody but the blonde minder had permission to speak (in any language). No one spoke to anyone, actually.
Breakfast downstairs was cheese and bologna. Dinner in the basement dining room next door was pickled vegetables and mystery meat. The only people with money were Arabs looking for prostitutes (apparently). I accepted a Pepsi in an elegant hotel lobby with one Arab, got invited to his camp in Syria, and wondered what his business was in Prague. As I say, this was a few months after Chernobyl. All sorts of handwriting was on the wall, I’d say.

By: Brett

Brett — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 21:40:00 +0000

I think what I’ve enjoyed most about this thread is hearing people recollect where they were and what they were thinking, doing, etc., when the wall came down. It has also been good to hear direct descriptions of what it was like living or traveling in places that were under a communist regime.

By: Janet

Janet — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:49:57 +0000

American gave up alot to fight the evil from Russia over the 50 years of the cold war. They are responsible for the defeating communism and setting free millions of people. All Americans should have received the Peace award for that.

By: Arnold

Arnold — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:08:45 +0000

I thought Obama got the Nobel for bringing it down, no?

By: G. stanley Collyer, Ph.D

G. stanley Collyer, Ph.D — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 19:44:51 +0000

I lived in Berlin as a student at the F.U. and student from 1959 to 1973. From my sources, some of the earliest signs that Gorbachev would be different than his predecessors were twofold:
1. A western visitor to his office before he became party secretary noted that he had only modern Scandinavian furniture.
2. He was friends (and sympathetic to) the Czech reformers of 1968.

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:39:25 +0000

I agree with those here that the U.S.S.R. fell because of the internal reasons. To me, the biggest reason was that that empire consisted of dozens of nationalities conquered and held together by force. Many of them hated Russia and each other. In this respect it was much different from China, N. Korea or Cuba. The force necessary to hold all those peoples together was financed by oil dollars. When oil prices plummeted in the 80s Soviet Union was left practically with no means to hold the Balts, Ukranians, Georgians, Chechen and so on and so forth, not to mention the Poles, East Germans, etc.

If Soviet People had to wait for Reagan to liberate them as their only hope, I think they would still be behind that Iron Curtain.

By: Ellen Dibble

Ellen Dibble — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:28:30 +0000

What amazes me (besides the speed with which something like democracy appeared in Eastern Europe — and did not then appear in Iraq as if by the same magic, or for that matter in much of Yugoslavia) was the way the secret police folded into society.
I suppose some of Eastern European literature covers that reintegration, but the extent to which the Communist bloc was riven with informers is legendary. Man against wife and so on.
There is much that is amazing beyond the fact that the iron grip of the Party let go, ab nun fort, “starting now,” or whatever the words turned out to be.

By: Brett

Brett — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:12:31 +0000

To continue Elizabeth Block’s thread a little, I heard Gorbachev was really pissed that Reagan turned the whole thing into a self-promoting photo-op. The sentiment when media scrambled to get the opinions of upper echelon Americans was that Reagan had bankrupted the USSR with the SDI program, which was pure crap. They never spent any money on a program and we never spent any money on a program. Gorbachev worked very hard to unify leaders and people in eastern Europe. I believe he saw the USSR collapsing, and he and others wanted some Solidarity.

By: Elizabeth Block

Elizabeth Block — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:37:31 +0000

In the spring of 1990 I was on the New York Thruway, and tuned in to the middle of an interview on NPR. The interviewee was clearly an elder statesman, because he was treated with great deference. He was talking about the fall of the wall, and he credited it all to the US policy of containment, our arms buildup, Reagan’s (and other people’s) tough talk. NOT A WORD about Gorbachev, Solidarity, the leaders and people of eastern Europe who created the civil society that brought the wall down and filled the hole left by communism.
The elder statesman was Gerald Ford.

I think some Americans believe that everything that happens in the world is caused by America – everything good, that is – and therefore, what the US wants, the US will get. Not true.

By: David

David — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:05:45 +0000

Blue robe, blue slippers, blue curlers.

The look of Freedom from a totalitarian goverment.

Maybe if we woke up from our sleepwalking here in America we would regain our Freedom from corporations.

By: Wayne Abercrombie

Wayne Abercrombie — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:57:18 +0000

A couple of observations.
- The people in Leipzig and surroundings who kept up the peace prayer services at the Nikolaikirche had something to do with the dissolution of E. Germany.
- These things keep me hoping: who would have predicted, in 1975 or so, that the Berlin Wall would fall, and with it, the U.S.S.R., or that one could eat dinner in a restaurant in 2009 without being surrounded by cigarette smoke.

- That the model of success of democracy was a huge factor in the fall of U.S.S.R. is both hopeful and troubling. What does this mean as we watch the heart of U.S. democracy – the legislature – become so dysfunctional because of greed (read: lobbying power).

By: A. Oery

A. Oery — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:51:25 +0000

In the summer of 1989, my siblings and I spent the summer in Hungary, our parents’ native country; we were highschoolers at the time. (My father is a ‘56er”.) It was the summer of the reburial of Imre Nagy, the martyred leader of the 1956 Hungarian revolution. Our grandparents were adamant that we not attend the reburial ceremony – so great was their fear that something terrible would happen, that the police or army would suppress this important, historical ceremony. My brother, the oldest and probably the most naively fearless “American” out of the 3 of us, told one set of grandparents he was visiting the other and vice versa and attended this ceremony, camcorder in hand, unbeknownst to all of the family. He was able to record the days’ events for our own history. It was, to us, a sign of the change to come and the bravery, hope, and determination of a new generation of Hungarians.

By: Marion Hayden

Marion Hayden — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:45:27 +0000

The fall of the Soviet Union was economical. Pres. Carter should get credit for halting wheat shipments to Russia that caused a food shortage

By: E Frazey

E Frazey — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:45:23 +0000

I remember it very clearly. I was on a plane headed to San Francisco from England where I was living at the time. The SF earthquake had happened a month before (anniversery this Saturday) and I was headed home to see friends and my US home.

The pilot came on the intercom and told us all to wake up, the wall was being torn down right that minute, and that he had found the BBC and put it on one of the channels. Cheers and laughter from all over the plane, the trip took on an excited, party atmosphere somewhere over that polar flight.

It was a good day.

By: Kit Kimberly

Kit Kimberly — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:44:38 +0000

Having lived and worked as a journalist in Prague for 7 years from 1992, I picked up the Czech’s sensitivity to their geographic location as well as pronunciation of their names.

Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, citizens of the states of the former Yugoslavia, Slovaks, and East Germans consider themselves CENTRAL Europeans, not East Europeans. And in fact, geographically, Prague is in the Centre of Europe.

The Czech dissident who became president, Vaclav Havel, never corrects people; but his name is pronounced:

Vats laf, not Vaklaf.

The Czech/Slavic “c” is pronounced “ts” as all of us who learnt Czech learnt from the very beginning.

I’m surprised your author doesn’t correct you or clarify on these two points.

By: Ellen Dibble

Ellen Dibble — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:44:02 +0000

I was talking about Prague, not East Berlin in that last post.