How the Berlin Wall Came Tumbling Down

No one who has come of age in the twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall can understand what it felt like to be alive on November 9^th, 1989. To really understand, in the core of ones being, one would have to have been alive during the Cold War.

The Berlin Wall was the most vivid and appalling symbol of the world people had lived in since the end of the Second World War. Built in 1961 to stopper an escape for people seeking to flee the tyranny of the Soviet Empire, the Berlin Wall was a solid, ugly, horrific thing that bifurcated Berlin into two different cities and indeed two different worlds.

On the one side, free minds, free markets, prosperity. On the other side, slavery, fear, and a gray poverty imposed by the State.

A yet, on a single night, like the walls of Jericho, the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. To watch the event on TV was surreal, like watching the arrival of space aliens or the emergence of a new continent in the middle of the sea. If there was one thing people were taught during the Cold War, that was that the Soviet Empire was eternal, and an unchangeable fact because the balance of terror between two super powers with nuclear arsenals had placed the world in stasis, the upsetting of which would result in a war that would end the world.

President Ronald Reagan proved himself a true visionary by not believing that the future held either the division of the world into slavery and freedom or no future at all. When Reagan ascended to the Presidency, he initiated a multifaceted plan to bring down the Soviet Empire by any means short of war. Diplomatic and economic pressure, support of rebel groups such as the mujahidin in Afghanistan and the Contras in Nicaragua, and a military buildup that included a missile defense program known as SDI or 'Star Wars' were all part of the campaign.

By the mid 1980s, Reagan's bid for victory in the Cold War had born fruit in the ascension of Mikhail Gorbachev, a man who recognized that the position of the Soviet Empire was untenable. Launching a war to redress the balance was out of the question. So Gorbachev tried reforms, to try to make Communism a system that would work and would be less onerous for the people living under it.

But there is no such thing as giving people half freedom. By the summer of 1989 the Soviet Empire had started to crumble, with Eastern Europeans freely fleeing to the West. Then, on November 9^th, the government of East Germany announced that travel between East and West Germany would be unrestricted.

The flood gates opened. Tens of thousands of East Germans surged through Check Point Charlie, one of the gateways through the Berlin Wall. In short order, people were climbing over the wall, helped by countrymen in the West. The whole thing took on an air of celebration as people sang and danced on top of the wall. In some places people started taking hammers and pick axes to the Berlin Wall, to tear it down by hand if necessary.

President Reagan had summoned what happened on November 9^th, 1989, two and a half years before when he had stood before the Brandenburg Gate and had demanded, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

The captive nations of Eastern Europe fell one by one, most peacefully, in Romania quite violently as the supreme leader and his wife were executed by their outraged people. As 1991 came to a close, the Hammer and Sickle lowered for the last time. New nations such as Ukraine, Estonia, and Kazakstan were born.

The Cold War ended, not with a bang, nor a whimper, but in a shout of triumph. Ten years of relative peace ensued until another day, on September 11^th, 2001, brought forth the world we live in now.

Source: Walls Can Fall, Darrell Issa, American Spectator, November 9th, 2009