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>Let's not forget that KGB, under Gorbachev rule were still financing the anti-US/Nato demonstrations in western Europe.
You mean US government or it's agencies never ever financed pro-US movements and demonstrations in other countries? Really? Sauce for the goose... |
Bonzo went to Bitburg in 1985. If he visited again in 2005, it was spectrally; he died in 2004.
Lest we forget: 4/11/85 The White House announces that President Reagan will lay a wreath at the Bitburg, West Germany, military cemetery housing the graves of both American and Nazi soldiers. It is quickly noted that there are, in fact, no Americans buried there. 4/18/85 While Michael Deaver is in West Germany searching for an "appropriate" concentration camp for the President to visit, President Reagan defends his visit to Bitburg by claiming the German soldiers "were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps." They were in fact largely Waffen SS. 4/29/85 President Reagan defends the Bitburg visit as "morally right," adding, "I know all the bad things that happened in that war. I was in uniform for four years myself." President Reagan spent his time during World War Two in Hollywood, making training films. 5/5/85 After having visited the Bergen-Belsen death camp, President Reagan makes an eight minute stop at Bitburg. During the ceremony, he cites a letter from 13-year-old Beth Flom who, he claims, "urged me to lay the wreath at Bitburg cemetery in honor of the future of Germany." In fact, she urged him not to go at all. |
Yes CIA and some other agencies did finance some pro-US/western European groups, but guess what?
What system turned out to be the better one and which economic/political system did the majority of Eastern Europeans fighting for? and eventually got, and are reaping the rewards? I would love to see the western Europeans living in the Socialist/Communist world. That would have been lovely.... |
DAX, the "NATO Doppelbeschluss" was the enemy "we" did fight at the time. In person it was the Schmidt government. His party wa deeply devided because of it. New Cruise Missiles and Pershing II were to be stationed in western Germany and at the same time talks with the SU on the limitation of mid range missiles should take place. Our point of view was simply why do we need more wapons to kill eachother when both parties already kann kill eachother a thousand times. We didn't want to be nuked. All those missiles in our woods could only kill ourselves (in west and east) and nothing more. When the alternative to being dead is being red, being red doesn't sound so scary anymore...
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That's interesting. I only read about Reagan, John Paul II or Gorbatchev being responsible about the fall of the wall. Did one of you give a thought to the idea that maybe the common people living in the former Communist Countries could have contributed a bit to that?
What about the many Polish workers who made the Solidarnosc so powerful? The people who demonstrated for a change in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary? And all these courageous guys who fought in the underground since the early 1980s? I don't know anyone in East Germany who thinks Reagan's speech was of any relevance. It was not noticed at all. Btw, here in Saxony we call this delicious food 'Pfannkuchen'. If someone says 'Ich bin ein Berliner' we know he's from Berlin and hope he goes back to where he's from asap. |
Agreed 100%, Ingo!
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Politican's take credit..it's genetic.
History is simpler when you can point to one event and say...that's what caused this. I've read that it was the massive losses on the Russian front that was more the cause of the German defeat than what was happening on the Western front. I will assume that the Berlin Wall coming down was also more of a combination of what was going on in Eastern Europe and in the West.... |
I did mentioned "eastern WEuropeans fighting for" and Reagan, JP2 and "some other factors"....
btw, I was born in Poland and still have family there. Some of my cousins were involved with Solidarnosc and not one will deny the fact that the Reagan administration + JP2 were not the turning point for the Warsaw pact at that time. I was also privilaged to have met many of the Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, and Hungarians that were deeply involved in the counter revolution back in the 60s, 70s and 80s. I give any and all of them a great deal of credit, but to say that they would have done it on their own is ridiculous. All, and I mean all still give thanks to the west for the support when the support was most needed, and Reagan administration was on the forefront of the support. (at least according to the people I've met since), but the Monday morning quarterbacks know better, I guess? |
<b>I meant to say "were THE turning point at that time"....</b>
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>Reagan administration was on the forefront of the support
For Iran it surely was ;-). |
What exactly was the support for the East Germans, Czechs, Hungarians etc.? Ah, I see you didn't mention East Germans. On purpose?
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Ingo: You brought up a good point. Yes, we must absolutely recognize the brave & timely actions of the Czechs, East Germans and the Poles, but we also know that the most powerful politicians have the final say as far as guns & tanks(left or right). Gorbachev could have easily made an order to crush the commoner bravados. One may also consider Reagan's rhetoric as lending support to encourage/instigate the Eastern commoners to rebel against Russia.
logos: Thanks for clarifying Doppelbeschluess. I don't know much of the details but I can see it as a simple logic of bargaining. The west was just trying to put a couple more chips on the table to raise the bet and bluff. All's well as it ends well but I never thought about the effects it had on the people who were living on the betting table at the time. It's not something we give much thought of as we've been so fortunate that all the betting has been occuring elsewhere not in our backyard. |
Gorbachev let it happen. It was mostly an economic and consumer goods revolution that caused the wall to fall.
Yes Zeus, the Soviet Union was a huge threat, but they were and still are a third world country with nuclear weapons. |
Yes, Reagan's speech was just grandstanding. Communism sort of imploded from within. It had more to do with Pope John Paul sort of setting it off when he went to Poland and the Solidarity protests got going than it did with Reagan. As with much of what Reagan "did", it was great theater but not much else.
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I have long been surprised that no one offers this analogy, to explain the Kennedy "slip"...
If you were giving the same speech in Copenhagen, and said "I am a Danish" instead of "I am Danish" - - well that's the kind of thing that (if Bush delivered it) would get added to David Letterman's "Great American Presidential Speeches"... I head the same aforementioned piece on NPR today, and found it interesting that someone gave his account of a recent visit to the Museum of the History of the Berlin Wall (I might not have that exact name right) - - and said that he found no reference to the Reagan speech there. A fairly thoughtful commentary on the "famous" Reagan speech appears today in http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/opinion/10mann.html - - "Tear Down That Myth". As the NPR intereview pointed out this morning, if Reagan got it right when he said "Mr. Gorbachev..." it was due in no small part to the fact that he had studied foreign relations at the knee of Lady Margaret Thatcher. It was she who... "was the first Western leader to respond warmly to the rise of the future reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, declaring that she liked him and describing him as <<a man we can do business with>> after a meeting in 1984, three months before he came to power." (cited from Wikipedia, whose entry is no doubt assembled from many sources). Best wishes, Rex |
A couple of posters mentioned Solidarity, but I read no mention here of Lech Walesa. Surely he had great influence on events in the Eastern bloc.
It seems to me a gross misjudgement to credit Reagan with any real effect on the fall of the Soviet Union. |
Peg: Amen to your second statement if you're talking about the rhetoric alone, but I still think that it wouldn't have happen if Carter had a second presidential term. Reagan did make the US a stronger threat to the USSR even if it was a bluff.
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Looking at the film clips of Kennedy making his Berlin speech, I think the crowds had no problem understanding his point, they react with a roar! And he managed to keep his watch in that crowd....
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Saw a BBC documentary some years ago with interviews with various East German leaders, which claimed that in many ways the actual fall of the wall was accidental.
There had been demonstrations all over East Germany, and the leaders figured if they came up with a 'sweetener' they could perhaps cool things down. So they decided people could go over to visit relatives, and sent their spokesman to the television station with a press release. While on the air, someone asked when this was going to happen - I guess as of now, he says, having had no direction. And of course there was no protocol drawn up as to how it was to be handled. So people started swarming to the wall, where the guards had also had no direction. They tried calling HQ, where no one was on duty, and the senior guard on the wall at that time (also interviewed) looked at all the people outside his cabin, and said, 'Either I have to shoot all these people, or let them through.' So he opened the gates, and as he watched thousands of people massing through, asked himself why he had spent the last 20 years trying to keep them all out. |
Hungary was actually the first country to break off from Russia. The others followed soon after.
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Carlux: That is a really interesting BBC documentary that I wished I had seen. I wonder if INGO or other people who lived in Germany through that time period have heard of such a recap.
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Yes, that's quite accurate. Mr Schabowski wasn't informed well himself too. It wasn't intended to enable the people to visit relatives, but make it possible to leave the GDR for good. The party didn't want those "troublemakers" to return.
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I'm just glad Nancy and her astrologer gave Ronnie permission to go to Europe and give his marvelous line reading.
Of course we idiots know that economics had nothing to do with "ending" the Cold War...how could anyopne possibly think it wasn't Ronnie who did it all by himself with his threats? |
I remember reading a London Times front page article written by the former head of the KGB in Britain stating that Reagan caused consternation and terror in Moscow when he pushed through the Starwars initiative. The author claimed that the Soviet leaders were convinced that the USA might attack shortly. And the rest is history.
His words, not mine. You can check it out. Article written in 1990 or 1991. Jinx Hoover |
Hi Palenq. I must say that on our last visit to Berlin, in March, we finally got round to visiting the East Side Gallerey on foot (as opposed to seeing it from a bus) and were very disappointed - most of the original artwork has been spoiled by just plain old graffiti added more recently.
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Gosh, don't people have short memories?
Early in the evening of November 9, 1989 (9/11 to many of us at the time, and still 9/11) an announcement that Schabowski had said they could go appeared on Teletext in a London bar I was drinking in. Anyone with the slightest interest in the world around (which meant practicaly everyone in the bar) then spent the next four hours glued to their TV sets, as it became clear that did indeed mean the wall would have to be breached. The real heroes? First, and above all others, the 70,000 people of Leipzig who a month earlier, and only 3 months after the Chinese had massacred umpteen thousand at Tien An Men, assembled to demonstrate. Especially Pastor Ulrich Seidel who addressed them, persuaded them to be non-violent and knew the risk he was taking. How did he know? Well, a couple of weeks before, I'd been in an East Berlin Ratkeller, nibbling the sawdust sausages and sipping the gnatspiss beer that were all they had. The local daily ran two pages of stories glorifying the "socialist heroism" of the Chinese leaders and the "manly realism" in the industrial-scale murder of their own citizens. Seidel and the Leipzig 70,000 must have read that too: like the sawdust sausages, it was the only thing on offer. The other heroes? The 260 British soldiers, sailors and airmen whose deaths in the Falklands we're commemorating the 25th anniversary of at present. For the first time since we halted Communist expansion in Malaya in 1960, the West had demonstrated it was prepared to stand up to foreign bullies, and had the leadership and public support to stick at it till the bullies had been soundly thrashed and sent home packing. Reagan's bombast in Berlin contributed nothing to that. His firmness back home contributed greatly. |
Caroline Edinburgh - that's sad that graffiti types could not appreciate the art on the Eastside Gallery - those portraits often said a 1000 words themselves.
Funny how various folks can have hardened impressions about such a silly thing as bonzo's Tear Down That Wall statement - reports are that he had said the same thing for years. NPR interview with Weekly Standard or some other right-wing rag was pointing to the speech as being THE reason the wall came down. I'd rather listen to theories of those who actually lived on the other side of the wall - and like flanner says the Heroes of Leipzig, whose successful protest it seems was a domino effect to smashing down the wall. And from what i read i'm not sure everyone from the old East Bloc is better off - not nearly as many have descended into poverty, health care gone down, etc. - the poor workers left behind after the cradle-to-grave security was taken away. The successor to the Communist Party of the DDR still i think gets 25% or so of the ex DDR vote. Some, not a few, appear worse off, but hopefully this will only be in the short term as these countries gain a prosperity on par with much of Europe and this could only be achieved with the fall of the Ancien Regime, who refused to change with the times. |
Flaneruk: I think it was 400 thousand protesters in Leipzig by November. Honestly, I'm not sure how many of us in the US were aware of the details on how and why the walls came down, but we knew we had won the cold war, thanks to Reagan's clever starwars strategy. That summed up my perception at that time since there was no news/details of why it happened.
On Nov 9, 2003, George W. Bush commemorated the Fall of the Berlin Wall by signing a declaration that November 9 shall be celebrated as World Freedom Day in conjunction with his efforts to work with other nations to bring more freedom throughout the world. |
I remember it well. The 9th November is my birthday. It made the evening go with a bang.
My recollection of the fall of communism is that it was people power that finally brought it down. The large numbers of East Europeans who went to Hungary - who had opened their borders. The very brave German protestors with their candle lit parades and so on. That was the point at which the likes of Honaker realised it was all over and decided to go gently How did we get to the point where this could happen? Step forward Margaret Hilda Thatcher, for whom communism was the ultimate evil. It was her who put some backbone into Reagan, her who allowed the USA to station it's cruise missiles within striking range. Her who destroyed the Russians proxies in our trades unions. Her who showed that the West could actually fight a war and hadn't gone soft after Vietnam. Her who allowed the USA to take off and land in Britain when it bombed Libya and so on. Blair's not fit to lace her scotch. |
Bbbb BbblllaatthherThatcher!
I loathe everything Margaret Thatcher stands for or stood for - son Dennis and Africa? Corrupt on both ends. Global warming from the UK would be much less if Maggie hadn't practically dismantled British Rail - a latter day Beeching - and neglected transport systems like London's Tube so that it can't cope now to do the job and with an estimated 1,000,000 more folks residing in London in the next decade or so will be inadequate to cope with the influx on an already beleagured public transport. Thatcher being responsible for the fall of Communism, which imploded because of its own shortcomings - Thatcher - an evil evil force in the world IMO |
Bob - you've been drinking paint again haven't you.
Thatcher had nothing to do with rail privitisation - that was major. London has had a labour administration almost solidly since the war - they run the tube, not thatcher and in any case the labour party have been in power for 10 years now. They can't keep blaming the Tories. That's the equivelent of "a big boy did it and ran away". And the reason that so many people want to live in London is because of the reforms she put in place. Briitain pre-thatcher was not an attractive place to live. She is a living saint. |
And Margaret Thatcher gave the police big pay rises so that they would fight on her behalf against the miners and anyone else who got in her way.
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you say that like it's a bad thing!
Audere - with a vested interest. |
A Saint She Ain't
Under her 'regime' the railways were allowed to deteriorate and also public transit systems when funds were cut. Britain has had an unparalleled (in post Colonial Days - propserity during the Blair decade - something like 28% growth - so why not give credit where credit is due. of course the paint i'm drinking is pink |
Pal: i think you've put too much turps in the paint.
Public spending went up under Mrs Thatcher. The current "economic success" is simply us Brits mortgaging our futures for a happy time now. Poor old Gordon Brown (texture like sun) is going to inherit the most unholy mess - mind you it's his fault too. So sod him |
<Public spending went up under Mrs Thatcher.>
yes probably defense and to fight that silly war, which flanner by the way i believe the US invasion of Granada may have been a prior war the West won to recover its military prowess after Viet Name fiasco. |
texture like sun...Excellent
Emptying the mental hospitals onto the streets was a neat Thatcher trick. |
audere est farce: don't you have someone to arrest?
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There's a pint in my local that I may have to take into protective custody.
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DAX, like logos said, this BBC report is 100% accurate. The fall of the wall on 9/11 was really by accident. Schabowski misinterpreted the actual decision of the leading politicians in the DDR. They meant to allow every citizen of the DDR a visit of the West after going through a procedure (getting passport, visa etc.) and he said that everyone could go right then without any restrictions.
It's still amazing to me what happened that night. One of the greatest miracles at all. The number of demonstrants in Leipzig was between 70 000 and 100 000 before that day. Later it increased to somewhere near 400 000. Some weeks later about a million demonstrated in Berlin. |
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