Berlin Wall

 

Berlin Wall

 I have been in Berlin, and experienced the Berlin Wall twice.

 The first was in 1962, when the Berlin Wall was a political focal point.

 This was during the height of the Cuban Missile crisis, when we drove into Berlin from Copenhagen, Denmark, without knowing the seriousness of what was happening in Berlin until we got the news from the Armed Forces Network driving into East Berlin through the East German Corridor.  We were living in Rotterdam at the time and we had Dutch plates on our little French Simca.  We got held when entering West Berlin and the car was searched thoroughly, including under the back seat, to make sure that we weren’t smuggling any East Germans into the free world. 

 This was just after Peter Fechter, a young East Berliner was killed trying to escape through the wall into West Berlin.  There were demonstrations protesting Peter Fechter’s slow death in the “no man’s land” between the parts of the Berlin wall.  American and Soviet tanks were facing off against each other at the “Check Point Charlie” crossing point, not only because of this local incident, but also because of the international stand-off over Cuba, by the U.S. and USSR.  This link refers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Peter_Fechter

 I took a tour bus into East Berlin, through the Brandenburg Gate.  I will always vividly remember the stark contrast between bustling, modern, European West Berlin on the one hand; and drab, dismal. red-bannered, communist-faced, East Berlin on the other hand.  Seeing the contrast between free enterprise and communism first hand, was a great lesson.

 My second experience with the Berlin Wall was during my trip to Eastern Europe in 2013.  We first walked through the wall from east to west through the Brandenburg Gate, which, of course would have been impossible in 1962.  Later, I sat at a MacDonald’s and took an IPhone photo of “Check Point Charlie” at the same place where I saw the tanks in 1962.  It had become a tourist attraction, rather than a point at which two world powers nearly started World War III in 1962.

 It is amazing what fifty years of history changes physically.  It’s a shame that the altruistic aspects of the corrosive philosophies of Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky are still being taught and viewed with favor by so many academics in this country, to the point that a large number of people support the emergent “democratic socialism”.  Apparently, we have not learned that socialism and its big brother, communism, never, ever works., anywhere, anytime.  It morphs into brutal, repressive, totalitarian regimes, which sometimes mitigate into market style economies to stay economically viable, but with very few freedoms for their people.

Ray Gruszecki

November 13, 2020