Berlin Wall Falls! Twenty-five Years Later…

1989 was a banner year. It was the year of the Tiananmen Square Massacre and of the Danish enacting the first Domestic Partner registry giving same sex couples the rights and responsibilities of marriage. It was the year of Solidarity coming to power in Poland and South Africa beginning to dismantle Apartheid. It seemed realistically that we were going to enter a new age of peace and prosperity. There were countless articles written on the subject of the Peace Dividend promised by President H.W. Bush and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

The world ?changed in 1989 and we were promised a better peaceful world by our leaders. It’s a fair question to ask “What happened?” ?While we celebrate the reunification of Germany (actually October 3rd 1990 but the falling Wall is the iconic image us non-Germans remember.) We are less safe, less rich, less secure ?in our “persons ?and papers” (thanks NSA), and the list could go on. The promised Peace Dividend never came and instead has become perpetual war with ever newer and scarier enemies than the last. We are stuck in a 1984 parody with no end in sight.

Before November 9, 1989 Potsdamer Platz looked like this:
 

StandingWall
Image from:?http://www.german-architecture.info/BER-016.htm

 

Shortly after November 9, 1989 it looked like this:
 
BerlinWallberlin_potsdamer_platz
 
Twenty-five years later Potsdamer Platz looks ?like this:
 
AfterBerlin_wall_at_Potsdamer_Platz_March_2009
 

For those of us alive when this happened it was a magical and euphoric moment in history.

And today it still represents what was the “hope” for a new era. We thought it would lead to the end of the Cold War and, it must be emphasized, the Wall came down because the Soviet Union decided not to send troops to prevent it.

However twenty-five years later the Russians are having second thoughts.

From 1984:

The primary aim of modern warfare… is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods…..when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations

But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction–indeed, in some sense was the destruction–of a hierarchical society….wealth would confer no distinction… the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.”

We are now living in a world where many people think the political musings of Russell Brand make more sense than that of our elected/selected leaders. The Wall has fallen but things are worse not better. The Wall has fallen but instead of peace NATO is now sitting on the doorstep of Russia with more tanks, more troops, more missiles and no plan to de-escalate. Mainly because so many “jobs” depend upon never-ending war.

The “Wall” fell twenty-five years ago. We are still waiting for the “New Day” promised.

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Images from Wikipedia and Wikimedia