Tag Archives: Berlin Wall

Checkpoint Charlie

October, 1961: Checkpoint Charlie: one of those barely remembered confrontations in the early days of the Cold War.

A few months before, the Soviets, against allied protests, had built the Berlin Wall, effectively sealing off East Berlin from the rest of the world. Western diplomats were refused free access to the area, against earlier agreements that they would be allowed such access.

The confrontation escalated when Americans moved tanks to the border to support the accord. The Soviets responded with tanks of their own on their side. Would someone begin firing, triggering World War III?

Fortunately, neither U.S. President John F. Kennedy nor Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev wished to begin a war. Back channel negotiations were established. Eventually both sides began backing away their tanks. Diplomats on both sides continued to have access to the entire city.

Before these events, before the Wall was even in place, in the mid 1950’s, John Kerry was a school boy in Berlin with his father, a U.S. official there. Kerry, who would later become U.S. Secretary of State, likes to tell of the time he biked over into East Berlin, apparently using his American passport, to explore the area. His father was horrified when he discovered what his son had done and promptly grounded him. Apparently, he had visions of his son’s escapade causing an international incident.

Now, more than six decades later, the world is still subject to crises along that longer divide between east and west.

From Fall of the Wall to Quid Pro Quo

Thirty years ago, in November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. Country after country of the former Soviet Union took fledgling steps toward democracy.

Writes Louis D. Sell, a U.S. Foreign Service officer in Yugoslavia at the time: “No one who has ever had the opportunity to witness people standing with patient enthusiasm in long lines to vote for the first time in their lives . . . could ever doubt the power of democracy as an ideal.” (“1989: Seen From Yugoslavia,” The Foreign Service Journal, November 2019)

But we in Western democracies couldn’t comprehend the difficulty of people who had no tradition of democracy attempting to make it work.

Western democracies have centuries old traditions of struggle for people power, from at least 1215, when the Magna Carta limited the power of English king. A free press was a unique Western invention.

Many of the former Soviet nations lacked these traditional defenses against tyranny and against powerful oligarchies seizing wealth and power from collapsing regimes. Democratic practices in some of the countries began to reverse, governments coming under the sway of corrupted newly rich.

The United States and its allies began diplomatic policies to support the fight against corruption in these countries.

Imagine what the secret efforts of a U.S. president to bribe officials in one of those countries, Ukraine, for political gain have done to compromise these policies.

Wisdom and Information Overload

In the 1990’s my husband and I traveled through what was formerly East Germany, unified a few years before with West Germany to form a new country. We saw remains of the infamous Berlin Wall, where guards shot those who ventured to flee the East German dictatorship. In the bustling, modern German state, the idea of a government that sought such control over its citizens now appeared quaint and old-fashioned.

I’m reminded of that day when I watch news about the beleaguered country of Syria. The government of Bashar al-Assad seems stuck in the old ways: iron control, no self-determination, no free flow of information.

In the days of the Cold War between the West and the Soviet Union, the United States penetrated the “Iron Curtain” that surrounded Soviet countries with radio programs. People in Soviet countries listened to clandestine radios and hoped no government spies would report them to authorities. Radio information punched the first holes in the Iron Curtain.

The new fax machines in the 1980’s meant one could send documents instantly to another person thousands of miles away. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Boris Yeltsin led a new Russian government, beset with problems but more democratic than the Soviet model. Supporters of the old style autocracy attempted a coup to reverse the process. The coup attempt was defeated, partly because the supporters of Yeltsin were able to communicate by fax.

Fax machines were joined by email and email by cell phones and texting and the new phenomena we call social media. The story is told again and again of the role these new forms of communication now play in the toppling of dictatorships.

Information provides fuel for change, but information is not wisdom. Information may tear down, but only wisdom can build. Wisdom has to do with values and sometimes hard choices after the shouting has faded.

 

An Age of Doubt? Call It Opportunity

I turned on the car radio when I traveled as a historic preservation planner during that autumn of 1989. The broadcasts crackled with stories of nations tottering out of communism toward—we weren’t sure what. Eventually the Soviet Union split into separate nations: Russia, Romania, Bulgaria, Kazakstan, and a host of others. The Berlin Wall collapsed.

We who had lived with the threat of a third world war between the U.S. and communist countries could hardly believe it. Some talked of a peace dividend. Now, they said, we could use resources committed to the Cold War for domestic needs: schools, infrastructure, and investment in alternate energy to lesson our dependence on foreign oil.

Those days of hope collapsed with the Twin Towers on 9/ll. Today we live in age of doubt. We disagree in uncivil terms on where we as a nation are headed. We Christians have been rattled by the “new” atheism and declining numbers in some of our churches.

Yet a time similar to this one—the Renaissance—spawned the religious movement called the Reformation.

(more on these two movements)

The secular Renaissance overturned previous notions, disturbing the religious hierarchy. By doing so, it cleared the way for radical changes like freedom of religion and renewed faith communities and missionary movements.

We should resist the temptation of an ill-conceived attempt to return to a perceived golden age of “Christian” America. If Christian beliefs were more prominent in days gone by, it is because significant numbers of Americans thought Christianity made sense. If Christian beliefs are not taken seriously by a majority today, railing against unbelief will change few people’s perceptions.

Better to find God’s leadership toward new and renewed expressions of our faith or better yet to new examples of that faith.