Salon.com > Berlin Wall

Three anniversaries

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 01:01:00 +0000

Three calendar dates. Three anniversaries. Three eras in the history of the United States and the world.

Monday marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. On Nov. 9, 1989, the Communist dictatorship in East Germany, following weeks of protests, allowed the citizens of East Berlin to enter West Berlin. Ever since its construction began in 1961, the wall had symbolized the division not only of Germany but of Europe as a whole between the dreary, tyrannical Soviet bloc and the imperfectly democratic and vibrant West. Over the decades several hundred East Germans had been slaughtered by their own government as they tried to escape to freedom in the West. Now, on the night of Nov. 9, jubilant crowds streamed through the wall, and East Germans and West Germans collaborated to begin to tear the monstrous edifice down. The liberation of Eastern Europe from the Red Army and the reunification of Germany, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the final collapse of belief in the secular religion of Marxism-Leninism, even in nominally communist countries like China, Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam, quickly followed.

Wall Street’s bailout gives me déjà vu

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 01:02:00 +0000

On the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall's fall I think back to the electrified atmosphere on the streets of Berlin. I was there, watching throngs of East Germans swarm through border crossings. A Fulbright scholar and social anthropologist based in Warsaw in November 1989, I drove with a friend through gas-rationed Poland and East Germany to bear witness. Back then many of the excited East Germans I interviewed -- even some border guards -- looked to the United States as a beacon of democracy.

Flash forward 20 years and many of the hopes of those who were present at the breaching of the Wall have not been realized. In much of the former Soviet bloc the intervening decades have been distinguished not only by young democracies, but also by corruption and shady insider dealing. But for Americans what may be more disheartening is that the roles of East and West have been, to some extent, reversed. Ironically, instead of the ex-Eastern Bloc looking to the U.S. as a model, the U.S. seems to be modeling its behavior on post-communist Eastern Europe. And nothing less than America's public interest is at stake.

Fence? Security barrier? Apartheid wall?

Fri, 01 Aug 2003 23:52:00 +0000

The newest and most controversial piece of architecture in the Middle East will stretch a total of 300 miles through Israel and the West Bank, a $1 billion combination of trenches, electronic fences, concrete walls and razor coil rising in some places to 25 feet high. When completed, it will cut off Jerusalem from Palestinian areas to the north and south -- a requirement, Israeli officials say, to stop Palestinian suicide bombers from entering their country.

After months of construction and simmering conflict, the project has emerged this week as a high-profile flash point in the ongoing, White House-led Middle East peace talks.

For journalists though, the barrier poses another problem: What does one call it? A wall? A fence? The choice may seem trivial, but as with everything else connected to the Israeli/Palestinian struggle, the topic stirs deep passions and fierce debate.

"It's a reflection of the whole Middle East quandary," says Mark Jacob, foreign/national news editor at the Chicago Tribune. "They can't even agree on a word."

The logic of illogic

Wed, 25 Jun 2003 19:00:00 +0000

Some writers have to inflate their subject to make it worthy of them. Others take what I call the wrong-end-of-the-binoculars approach: They shrink what they're talking about so they can seem superior to it. The prime exponent of that school is Louis Menand. A few months back, the Incredible Shrinking Critic brought his method to bear on George Orwell in a New Yorker essay. In a sustained misreading of nearly every major Orwell work from "Down and Out in Paris and London" to the great essay "Politics and the English Language," it was inevitable that Menand would find fault with "1984." Treating it mistakenly as a prophetic (that is to say, clairvoyant) fable, Menand basically dismissed the book because its warnings hadn't come true. It's embarrassing to have to point out that by the time Orwell published the book, in 1948, his portrait of a totalitarian future, where thought as well as action is controlled, where the leaders have bought into the essentially religious notion that thought is the same thing as action, had already come close to being completely true in Stalin's USSR.

Talkin 'bout a revolution

Thu, 07 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

After several years of merger mania -- including this week's $129 billion MCI Worldcom-Sprint deal -- we're looking at some pretty huge telcos. But up-and-coming fiber-optic network RCN is trying to buck the trend -- at least with its latest marketing campaign. It's portraying itself as the anti-monopoly alternative, offering you a chance to thwart the telecom giants that control your bills. The trouble is, RCN's new advertising insert goes to such extremes to make its point that it can't help but backfire.

RCN is currently laying fiber-optic cable across the country, putting together the infrastructure for a network offering Internet, cable and phone access. The company has already launched a cable network between Boston and Washington; currently, it's working on the San Francisco and San Diego markets.

It's a daunting task to strip consumers away from the monolithic companies dominating the telecom
industry. So, in an ongoing advertising campaign
that recently reached the San Francisco Bay Area, RCN is appealing to the rebellious sides of the local post-hippie techies by pitching itself as a new revolution. Witness the insert that came in the local Sunday paper -- a monstrous folded poster, featuring images of revolutionary German mobs tearing down the Berlin Wall in defiance of their communist rulers.