It's different if you've been there back in the days when they'd shoot you for walking over a line... or guarding a border built to keep people in... instead of people out.
It's different if you've stood a post, staring at the fricking Wall. And how quickly we forget.
Many thanks to the Jawa Report for reminding me so I can remind you.
November 9th, 1989 The Berlin Wall Falls
On June 12, 1987 President Ronald Reagan said to Soviet Leader Mikkail Gorbachev: tear down this wall!
In a speech at the Brandenburg Gate commemorating the 750th anniversary of Berlin, by the Berlin Wall on June 12, 1987, Reagan challenged Gorbachev, then the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, to tear it down as a symbol of Gorbachev's desire for increasing freedom in the Eastern Bloc[...]At the time, the speech received "relatively little coverage from the media."Communists were also unimpressed by the speech, and the Soviet press agency Tass accused Reagan as giving an "openly provocative, war-mongering speech."
Twenty-nine months later, on 9 November 1989, after intense East German protest, East Germany finally opened the Berlin Wall. By the end of the year, official operations to dismantle the wall began. With the collapse of the Communist governments of Eastern Europe and, eventually, the Soviet Union itself, the tearing down of the wall epitomized the collapse for history. In September 1990, Reagan, no longer President, returned to Berlin, where he personally took a few symbolic hammer swings at a remnant of the Berlin Wall.
By AllahSHakchew at November 9, 2010 08:45 PM Comments (5) l digg this
1 comment:
I never made it to Berlin to see the Wall, but my 3 years in Germany with the 2nd ACR were spent flying our side of the fence between East & West Germany as well as Czechoslovakia.
People might not want to believe it today, but there definitely was a tall fence separating the countries.
It wasn't there to keep us out, but to keep their people in.
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