Fall, Wall, Fall
AND FALL IT DID
Because it was pushed:
“We’ve got to find a way to knock this thing down.”–Gov. Ronald Reagan, staring at the Berlin Wall, Nov., 1978
It’s a sad, sad day for the Obama administration. The president is so distraught over the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall that he has refused to attend the ceremonies. Instead, he’s sent a minor, low-ranking official; Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Which is fitting. As P.J. O’Rourke said, “Hillary has the mind of a prison matron and the soul of an East German border guard.”
[UPDATE: What was I thinking? Obama wasn't just sad about Communism being defeated. He stayed home because the ceremony wasn't about him. After all, he didn't mind going to Germany to campaign. Not only that, going would have required him to praise America, not apologize. And, worse, to praise Reagan. And worse worser, to stand in Reagan's shadow and suffer horribly by comparison.]
On August 23, 1989 Hungary opened the Iron Curtain to Austria.
Months before East German tourists used their chance to escape to Austria from Hungary and in September 1989 more than 13 000 East German escaped via Hungary within three days. It was the first mass exodus of East Germans after the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961.Mass demonstrations against the government and the system in East Germany begun at the end of September and took until November 1989. Erich Honecker, East Germany’s head of state, had to resign on October 18, 1989. The new government prepared a new law to lift the travel restrictions for East German citizen.
At 06.53 pm on November 9, 1989 a member of the new East German government was asked at a press conference when the new East German travel law comes into force. He answered: “Well, as far as I can see, … straightaway, immediately.”
Thousands of East Berliners went to the border crossings. At Bornholmer Strasse the people demanded to open the border and at 10.30 pm the border was opened there. That moment meant the end of the Berlin Wall.
“I want emphatically to state tonight that if the outrages in Poland do not cease, we cannot and will not conduct “business as usual” with the perpetrators and those who aid and abet them. Make no mistake, their crime will cost them dearly in their future dealings with America and free peoples everywhere.”–Ronald Reagan, Christmas, 1981
“…[W]hen American military men approach some serious situation they are wont to write at the head of their directive the words “over-all strategic concept”. There is wisdom in this, as it leads to clarity of thought. What then is the over-all strategic concept which we should inscribe to-day? It is nothing less than the safety and welfare, the freedom and progress, of all the homes and families of all the men and women in all the lands. …Our supreme task and duty is to guard the homes of the common people from the horrors and miseries of another war. We are all agreed on that.
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in some cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.
In front of the iron curtain which lies across Europe are other causes for anxiety. … Except in the British Commonwealth and in the United States where Communism is in its infancy, the Communist parties or fifth columns constitute a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization. These are somber facts for anyone to have recite on the morrow a victory gained by so much splendid comradeship in arms and in the cause of freedom and democracy; but we should be most unwise not to face them squarely while time remains.
“Nobody intends to put up a wall!”–Chairman Walter Ulbricht, two months before he put up the Berlin Wall, 1961.
Right up to the very last minute, the East German state security service kept under surveillance those compatriots of theirs who spent their summer holidays by Lake Balaton. Twenty years ago, in the summer of 1989, the local Stasi-detachment tried to keep an eye on those citizens of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) who were planning to defect to the West, and the Hungarian ministry of the interior was less and less eager to assist them. History sometimes happens on beaches and campsites. [...]
On November 9th, the working masses were busy not building, but breaking down Socialism, when they started taking the Berlin Wall apart with their bare hands.
There are several types of defection-stories listed in the documents of the German state security. One of the recurring cases goes as follows: On a warm summer evening, by the Lake Balaton, a West German young man with a good car and fashionable clothes wins the heart of one of the girls from the GDR, known for their “generosity”. Following the summer romance, the young man and the girl exchange letters; after 1972 the boy was allowed to enter East Berlin for 24 hours. There was a good chance of the Stasi noticing their ordinary story by then (by opening and reading their letters, for example). The following summer, they once again meet by Lake Balaton, where the boy persuades the girl to defect to the West. If she tries to cross the border towards Austria or Yugoslavia, there’s a good chance that the Hungarian authorities will catch the girl, upon the request of the resident Stasi agent, who has received all details of their relationship, and after a short interrogation, they hand her over to the East German state security service. The “criminal” is then transported home and interrogated by the local directorate nearest her home, and at the end of the court procedure, is usually imprisoned.
“The Balaton-file, kept in the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security Services, shows us with what meticulousness they observed undesirable relationships,” Krisztina Slachta tells us. The following measure had to be taken by the informant of department III/II, whose code name was “Balaton”, and who worked as the doorman of the Napsugár Camping site in Fonyód between 1970 and 1979, keeping an eye on the guests (only the initials of the names mentioned are shown, the original spelling of the text has been retained).
“It was the informant’s task to check the behaviour of the citizens from the GDR and the FRG vacationing at B’s. He was to keep under surveillance West German citizen M. H., and his fiancée, and observe their behaviour. He was to talk to them if they accidentally met. Keeping in mind that the girl is a citizen of the GDR, try to find out where they intend to settle down when she marries M, for the border stands between them at the moment. In this way, the informant will have a chance to determine whether there is any intention of defecting. If possible, the informant should try to get personal data regarding the East German woman.”
The East German Ministry of State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, in other words Stasi) is the synonym for one of history’s most effective secret police systems. When the communist regime collapsed, there were, beside the official staff of 90 thousand, another 180 thousand informants, who supplied the organisation – called the “sword and shield of the Party” – with information. If we are to list the estimated half a million occasional informers, what we get is a society that is even more thickly enmeshed than Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. The Stasi, who used brutal methods even in the 1980’s and funded left-wing terrorist organisations, controlled every area of citizens’ lives.
“The word Berliner can mean two things in Germany: a resident of Berlin, or a pastry similar to a jelly doughnut. Which meaning is intended can be derived from the context — in this case, it was clear that Kennedy wasn’t talking about snack foods. But it had been only two years since the building of the wall, and many West Germans couldn’t stomach the man who they felt let it happen saying that he was one of them. They mocked his words by emphasizing a meaning he never intended: “I am a jelly doughnut.”"–Ed Grabianowski
Plans for armed repression certainly existed. Instead, as often seems the case at historic turning points, accident took over. Gyula Horn, on behalf of the Hungarian Communist party, decided to open the Hungarian section of the Iron Curtain. To a certain extent, the Hungarians wanted to make life difficult for the Soviets, but more generally, they hadn’t perceived that from that moment East Germans would come and go as they pleased in huge numbers. The moment the Soviet bloc was no longer a properly controlled entity the Berlin Wall became a relic.
That November 20 years ago, Günter Schabowski was the East German Politburo member who had the task of explaining to the world’s press this sudden and unexpected breech in the Soviet empire. He had drawn the short straw. Maybe he was even an honest man, as such types go. Once he was no longer a Communist apparatchik, he took a job as a lowly journalist in Rothenburg, an unspoilt little town in West Germany, and there I interviewed him. At the outset of his famous press conference, he was to say, he had had no intention of declaring that the Berlin Wall was now open. But the questions threw him off balance, (Daniel Johnson, son of Paul Johnson, was one of the questioners) and he misspoke — as politicians like to put it — giving the unintended impression that people could indeed now cross the Wall freely.
Within a short time, the picks and jack-hammers were out and cheering people were dismantling the Wall. In another interview, I questioned the Stasi officer who had been on duty that night at the crucial point. When Schabowski’s press conference brought the demonstrators charging towards him and his men, he would willingly have opened fire but needed the order to do so to cover himself. His urgent telephone call to his superiors for instructions went unanswered. What is the likelihood that this was deliberate rather than incompetent? So this officer and his bewildered Stasi men were overrun with their weapons in hand, and so Schabowski played the sort of minor role on whom the plot turns that Shakespeare loved to write about…
There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin. …Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect. But we have never had to build a wall to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us.”–John F. Kennedy, 1963
* People Murdered by Progressive Socialist Movements: 100,000,000
* People Freed from Communist Tyranny by Ronald Reagan and Worldwide Freedom Movements: 425,574,817Although the fall of the Berlin Wall led to the freedom of millions of people from authoritarian rule, more than two billion people still live under oppressive regimes today. “Freedom Week” encourages young Americans to support those who seek to lead their people toward freedom and out of oppression. From Burma to Cuba, North Korea to Sudan, citizens of many countries still suffer under repressive governments.
Today, “Freedom Week” is needed more than ever. A Rasmussen survey showed that 33% of young people prefer socialism over capitalism and another 30% were undecided. “Freedom Week” is that clarion call for all who care about liberty, individual responsibility, and economic opportunity.
“Here’s my strategy on the Cold War: We win, they lose.”–Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan would never dream of taking credit for the Fall of the Wall.
Which is just one more reason why he deserves it.
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