Recalling Berlin’s ugly grey smudge: “Mr Gorbachev: tear down this Wall!”
By Alec Hogg
It is popular for commentators to recall the 1960s as time of carefree love, peace signs, flower children, drugs and rock & roll. But it was also the decade of Sharpeville, Vietnam and, as we were reminded yesterday, the erection of the Berlin Wall. The "Wall of Shame" as German Chancellor Willy Brandt famously termed it, divided the two sides of Berlin for 28 years – virtually the entire period SA's icon Nelson Mandela was on Robben Island.
Built by the East Germans to ostensibly keep out Western "fascists", traffic in reality only flowed in the opposite direction. Much as Mandela was the symbol for anti-Apartheid, The Wall reflected socialist oppression – a physical barrier between those who demanded absolute control of their citizens; and those who promoted freedom.
Everyone who watched those live television pictures of citizens dismantling Berlin's ugly grey smudge will have their own memories. Mine go back a couple years earlier to Ronald Reagan's 1987 speech. Standing a few feet from The Wall, an angry US President shouted to his Russian counterpart: "My Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Reagan knew what it hid. Only once The Wall collapsed could the rest of us view what misery had been wrought by socialist-inspired economic stagnation. Like Apartheid, let's never forget it.
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