How the Berlin Wall Really Fell
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Is this truly a belief held in the USA? As an east-german this seems equal parts baffling and insulting to me.
If so, i can only thank the author for correcting this belief in a quite public manner.
I recently read "Lies My Teacher Told Me" by J. Loewen [1], and it hits on just this, being the "heroification" of American leaders. I wouldn't doubt that this is what was the popular teaching in K-12 US.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/074...
For starters, I don't think many Americans understand any details other than the anecdote that there was a wall in Germany, and it came down. Please, rest assured east Germans, we have done worse than steal your achievement- we don't give it any real thought anymore.
Americans glibly joke about the fear culture around communism from that time, but we have no awareness of the irony of our current fears of isis or Ebola.
Reagan's speech at the wall was iconic, but you really need to be over 35 to be aware of it.
There where only one or two important speeches, may be 3 if you count Kennedy in.
One of the most important was, when Willy Brand had its visit in East Germany. The only important visit by a western politician in East Germany. The other one, which was not really a speech, but very important, was the one by Genscher for the release of the people into West Germany after occupying the West German embassy in Praha, CZ.
It had to have been terribly embarrassing to Gorbachev to be called out like that, and it strongly cut against many of his and the USSR's themes, e.g. if it's so great, why do you need that wall keeping people inside of your socialist worker's paradise?
Getting back to the 1989 fall, something stayed the hands of the USSR, unlike Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. I believe it's impossible to make an honest case that Reagan had nothing to do with that.
By no means am I arguing that these words literally tore down a wall. But if anyone can argue that a speech can ever be important, this one was, at least for American culture.
So my point here is that this author is punching at a straw man. I don't know anyone who believes this speech itself contributed to the felling of the wall. It was an event in a much larger storyline that was bigger than the wall itself: the cold war.
The story is of course much more complicated, and from my recollection the events in Eastern Europe really got started with Solidarity in Poland sometime before.
But we also know that Reagan was the first US president who was determined to end the USSR, not "contain" it (compare to e.g. G. H. W. Bush's later Chicken Kiev speech), and we did all sorts of things to help bring that about, and this included parts of our civil society like our much more industrial and to the right back then unions.
The actual events resulting in the very quick fall were something of a surprise, we didn't expect that, especially how relatively peaceful it was. But it was something we'd strived to help bring about.
Of course not counting those of us who note, as I noted in another posting in this sub-thread, that Reagan just happened to be the very first President who tried to end vs. "contain" the USSR. I.e. the difference between giving it a strong push into "the dustbin of history" as he put it, vs. "personally responsible".
You seem awfully defensive about this, given that I said nothing that indicates you are a member, or indeed that anyone in particular is a member until you asked. Are you that uncomfortable with the idea that there are crazy people in the world who hold some opinions similar to your own? That's true of all of us.
Based on my knowledge of the right, I did't know of any such "sect", your language explicitly said there's a specific group of "crazy people" with this set of beliefs. Except you can't identify any of them besides your father, and no one can claim complete clarity in viewing their parents.
A lot of US Presidents did have a hand in bringing it about, from Truman and the Berlin Airlift. without which there wouldn't have been a wall in the first place, to JFK's "Ich bin ein Berliner", to of course Reagan.
But in the end it came down to a lot of brave people on the scene. We just helped set the stage. Hmmm, along with Khrushchev and Ulbricht in creating the concrete, so to speak, symbol of the evil empire.
> In the decades since, many Americans have come to believe that the wall fell thanks to President Ronald Reagan’s direct, personal intervention. In a 1987 speech in front of the Brandenburg Gate in a divided Berlin, he told Soviet leaders to “tear down this wall” — and so, we’ve been told, they did.
> This misreading of the actual fall of the wall is, at best, incomplete; at worst, it’s dangerous, contributing to the belief that American leaders can go “from Berlin to Baghdad,” shaping world events while ignoring the complex realities of the locals.
E.g. he resumed food exports to the USSR; I can't find the quote, but I remember something like "we don't use food as a weapon".
The attacks on the USSR were, rhetoric aside, a lot more subtle: bleed it in Afghanistan, deny it hard currency by keeping the price of oil down with the help of the Saudis, and resist and sabotage the export of gas to Western Europe. Further their military bankruptcy, $$$ and capabilities (already in bad shape due to supplying the equipment for 3 complete armored armies to North Vietnam), by continuing Carter's late in the game rearmament program, and make their Strategic Rocket Forces potentially obsolete with SDI (even a partly effective strategic defense negates a counterforce first strike capability). Countering the Soviet's theater nuclear SS-23 deployment. And of course support those in Eastern Europe resisting the occupation.
Or even seemingly small things: ending the Brezhnev Doctrine by taking back the tiny island of Grenada. I've read from many behind the Iron Curtain that that sent shockwaves across it, for it was the first time the US used main force to take back a Communist country. It signaled something important, like Reagan's firm rhetoric.
Diehard Cold Warrior, yes, but a lot more subtle than would "rather start dropping the nukes". He wanted to free those trapped behind the Iron Curtain, not kill them.
I think you're extremely wrong in your character assessment. There are numerous books available on Reagan in relation to what he actually said and wrote about his time as President, none of it indicates he was eager to start a nuclear war.
As I grew up and gained some perspecitve I have come to see Reagan in a much more favorable light.
The soviet union's collapse was inevitable because their government system simply didn't work, and that reality was starting to land on them in the mid-80's when oil prices started to fall as a catalyst.
Of course, a lot can be said for not fucking it up. I'm not trying to minimize it (much) but I don't think it's fair to say the Soviet Union's fall was due in any part to any "strategy" of the west. At best our strategy helped the fall happen a little faster, but it was inevitable.
There were very few people at the time that considered it "inevitable". As late as 1989, that very year, Paul Samuelson, in the introductory university text on economics, still claimed that "[T]he Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and thrive." The conventional wisdom of our ruling class at the time was that the Soviet Union was solid enough that Reagan's material attacks on it were folly, and therefore unjustifiably dangerous.
Coincidental with what? The actual policy change of "Reagan's" that is usually credited for destroying the Soviet Union is the escalated military buildup -- a policy conceived and initiated late in the Carter Administration.
And the actual collapse of the Soviet Union occurred during the first Bush Administration.
In order for there to be even a coincidence, there'd have to be something for this alleged "first and only" status to be coincident with.
http://www.politics.hu/20140627/hungary-austria-slovakia-mar...
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/06/why...
http://mises.org/daily/6956/The-Economics-Behind-the-Fall-of...
"The timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to September 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically.
That doesn't quite fit the connotations I associate with "overwhelming macroeconomic forces at play". That was a specific policy decision ... which I don't believe you can isolate from things like the USSR's genocidal occupation of Afghanistan, and the Muslim world's many reactions to it.
As I understand it, we strongly encouraged the Saudis in this policy. Visibly, by things like selling them F-15 and E-3A AWACS planes in the early '80s before that policy change (very controversial arms deals back then).
As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, as part of Reagan's unique determination to end the Soviet Union, we the USA did everything we could to deny it hard currency, like obstruct and sabotage the export of natural gas to Western Europe.
And like good capitalists, after Reagan took office, resumed making a buck in the process by selling them grain ^_^.
ADDED: Why the bleep didn't Gorbachev et. al. allow a massive increase in household plots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_plot We always expected (see for example Red Storm Rising if I remember correctly) that when things got tight, the restrictions on them would be relaxed and the resulting productivity increase would tide them over. Or was that attempted but failed? Or is this "oil and grains" economic picture a bit too simple (as I've noted natural gas also played a role).
That's the thing - every time you see a huge increase in the cost of anything, economic forces kick in, and there is a response.
That's a long winded way of saying there were much, much bigger forces at play than Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani in 1985, and, his announcement can be seen as little more than the result of those forces.
- The political reform started 4 years earlier by Mikail Gorbatchev, which was designed to reinforce the party's strength in exchange for softening very few things.
- The disorganization of the Party and the lack of trust within the Stasi,
- The press conference of Nov 9., where the administrator said something about travels, which wasn't reported acurately but which included words like "effective immediately".
- The massive amount of people in front of the gates.
I would love to have more details about the Perestroika and the reform background. One does not simply walk up with a crowd to a checkpoint without thinking about Tiananmen. I've always wondered whether Gorbatchev had desired freedom for his people and subtely acted to make such events happen.