Few people much younger than their mid-30s can have any real memory of what the world used to call, in an almost desperate whistling-past-the-graveyard euphemism, the “Cold” War.
Except for brutal winters, there was nothing cold about it for the troops fighting in Korea, only a few years after World War II had supposedly settled the world’s major quarrels for a while. Certainly Vietnam was more than hot enough, in both temperature and intensity.
But in the age that began at Hiroshima, the threat of war now carried a new, apocalyptic implication. The next major confrontation might be in grim fact what the naively optimistic victors of World War I hoped that horrific conflict had been: the War to End All Wars.
The victors of World War II had divided up the human and geographic spoils of Europe and separated roughly into communist East and democratic West. British Premier Winston Churchill declared in 1946, “An Iron Curtain has descended across the continent.”
Yet the most visible manifestation of the East-West divide, specifically in Europe, was not iron but concrete: In 1961, communist authorities in East Berlin, a partitioned city in a conquered and partitioned country, strung a barbed wire fence along the border, soon replaced by a more durable barrier — the Berlin Wall.
It was erected at the height of an era when the fear of communist infiltration and/or nuclear annihilation haunted the deliberations of political leaders and the nightmares of children; when schools drilled their charges not just in orderly escape from fire, but also in crouching under desks in the event of a nuclear attack. In October 1962, the U.S. and the Soviet Union came to the brink of war over the discovery of Soviet missiles in Fidel Castro’s Cuba.
It was still there 25 years later, when President Ronald Reagan exhorted his Soviet counterpart, Premier Mikhail Gorbachev: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Though unrest in Eastern bloc countries was growing bolder and demonstrations in East Berlin louder, Gorbachev, author of the new Soviet policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reform), refused to crack down on dissenters, a response he said could have started World War III. It was a decision that cost him politically, but won him the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize — a distinction many still believe should have been bestowed on, or at least shared with, Reagan.
Then, on Nov. 9, 1989 — 20 years ago Monday — an extraordinary thing happened: With Soviet communism bankrupt, economically as well as morally, East Germany threw in the towel and threw open the borders. People stood atop the wall — singing, laughing, crying, drinking, shouting, embracing, dancing, as the world watched on TV. Some took hammers to the wall and broke off chunks as souvenirs. (Three panels of the Berlin Wall are on display here, at the National Infantry Museum and Soldier Center at Patriot Park.)
Germany was reunified. Russia again became Russia. The communist “blocs” of eastern Europe began breaking up into nations again, in some cases violently. The abrupt removal of one kind of tyranny does not protect against another; repression imposes a dark sort of order, and chaos and lawlessness often rush into the void created by its collapse.
But the Cold War, by any practical assessment, was over.
Its end, of course, did not render the world a safe, secure and harmonious place. Communism still persists, in forms as exasperating as Cuba and as daunting as China. The violent reality of international terrorism has succeeded the Red Menace as the dominant threat. The terrifying images of Sept. 11, 2001, are burned into the American mind as indelibly as any 1950s cold war nightmare of nuclear holocaust.
But Monday marks the 20th anniversary of a day people broke through a barrier that had represented the division of human beings into Us and Them — physically for 28 years and symbolically for much longer. It’s a moment the whole world should still have reason to celebrate.
— Dusty Nix, for the editorial board
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