The fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago

We all need to remember the Berlin Wall. We need to say to each other, “Never again.” And we have to mean it. -- OpenMarket.org, 9 November 2009

Those too young to remember the Berlin Wall have no idea the horrible conditions in East Germany during that time. As a child I very well remember hearing of people who tried to escape East Germany only to be shot and killed by guards ... families were separated by the Berlin Wall for 30 years ... wooden crosses stood along the West Berlin side of the Wall in memory of those who died trying to escape ... barbed wire fences imprisoned the country's citizens ... and I read a story in Reader's Digest about a family who stitched together a cloth hot air balloon to escape from the clutches of communism into freedom.

Twenty years ago today the Berlin Wall fell. It was amazing. All I had known of the people who lived under the East Germany regime was oppression ... a country holding its people captive under penalty of death if they tried to leave without permission. In the freedom of America, it was difficult to image someone having to live that way.

Ronald Reagan began the process on June 12, 1987, with his courgeous speech, "Mr. Gorbechev, tear down this wall!" The State Department and others did not want him to say it ... but he felt he needed to say it and did so. Anthony Dolan, who spent eight years as Ronald Reagan's speechwriter and also worked in the George W. Bush administration, added more in the Wall Street Journal:

Ronald Reagan would embarrass himself and the country by asking Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, which was going to be there for decades. So the National Security Council (NSC) staff and State Department had argued for many weeks to get Reagan's now famous line removed from his June 12, 1987, Berlin speech.

With a fervor and relentlessness I hadn't seen over the prior seven years even during disputes about "the ash-heap of history" or "evil empire," they kept up the pressure until the morning Reagan spoke the line.

The rest, as they say, is history. President Reagan insisted on saying the four words and they shot around the world in history-making warp speed causing me to gasp at the very thought of a free East Germany. A little over a year later the wall came down.

OpenMarket.org commemorated the 20th anniversary of the event with a video:

To partially right that wrong, CEI has produced a short video commemorating what the Berlin Wall’s fall symbolizes. I hope you will watch it and enjoy it. Of course, it is hard to convey in a few short minutes what the people living in that Wall’s shadow went through for 29 long years.

So put yourself in their shoes. Think what they thought. Look right in the eyes of those separated families as they try to catch glimpses of each other over that wall. And the people who risked their lives escaping. And the soldier carrying back the body of someone who didn’t make it. What was going through his mind as he carried out his grisly task? That might give you an idea of what the Berlin Wall meant.

We all need to remember the Berlin Wall. We need to say to each other, “Never again.” And we have to mean it.

The same could be said of 9/11/01 in the United States. "Never again." And we have to mean it.