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Old 11-07-2009, 12:58 PM
 
31,387 posts, read 36,978,939 times
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Slate.com's Michael Meyer recounts the missed phone calls and misread memos that led to the end of the Berlin Wall. I love the fact that great moments in history often happen for the most mundane reasons.


"...panicky calls flew from checkpoints up and down the wall. What was happening? What should be done? But there were no answers. No instructions came back from the Interior Ministry. Top officials had gone to the opera or to the bowers of their mistresses. As Communist East Germany entered the final, existential crisis, its leadership was AWOL."

The unanswered phone calls and misunderstood memos that helped bring down the Berlin Wall. - By Michael Meyer - Slate Magazine
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Old 11-07-2009, 03:23 PM
 
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Bascially the east germans had followed the russia in the econmic fall. Once a army starts having probems like that it end comes quickly.
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Old 11-08-2009, 12:08 PM
 
Location: Flyover Country
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If you think about the various floods of history, where a small breach of a levee or dam leads to a huge flood, the same can be said of the flood of East Germans across the border. Once it happens, it cannot really be stopped if word spreads.

There is a good show on this on the History Channel and how the wall was constructed, as well as some ingenious recreations of escape attempts and interviews with those who made it. The wall was surrounded by every defense imaginable, gun towers, land mines, ditches with remote control machine guns, German Shepard's, razor wire and electrified 12 foot fences. The wall itself was lined with a cylindrical top that made grasping it very difficult.

Rise and Fall of the Berlin Wall DVD, View All , HISTORY Shop
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Old 11-08-2009, 01:22 PM
 
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Gee, I was under the impression that Ronnie pushed it over all by himself. At least that's what my republican friends seem to think.
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Old 11-08-2009, 03:38 PM
 
Location: Saturn
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GDR (German Democratic Republic) was probably the most economically successful country in the former Eastern bloc.

But even that level of economic achievement was insufficient to stem the tide of history.
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Old 11-12-2009, 03:53 PM
 
776 posts, read 1,273,280 times
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The Berlin Wall fell when the sham of Soviet supremacy could not longer be maintained. For decades our gov’t had us scared to death of the evil commies on the other side of the Iron Curtain. All the while, the Soviets were barely capable of feeding themselves--let alone waging a war with America. They posed almost no threat to us whatsoever. The entire cold war was a big sham to dupe American taxpayers into funneling hundreds of billions of dollars into defense expenditures we did not need.
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Old 11-12-2009, 04:48 PM
 
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And not helping the ones who did set up a goverment for six months 1n 1954 even than the soviet tanks had have old german motors put in them in order crush
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Old 11-13-2009, 07:10 AM
 
Location: Orange County, CA
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Quote:
Originally Posted by monkey cabal View Post
All the while, the Soviets were barely capable of feeding themselves--let alone waging a war with America. They posed almost no threat to us whatsoever. The entire cold war was a big sham to dupe American taxpayers into funneling hundreds of billions of dollars into defense expenditures we did not need.
Oh really?So those thousands of missiles the USSR had targeted at us and our allies were just made of cardboard,right?The huge Red Army stationed in the East Bloc could have never invaded Western Europe could they?Those nearly 300 submarines the Soviets had would have been no threat at all to the worlds shipping in the event of war,correct?Then there was their large modern Air Force equipped with state of the art planes.Nothing to worry about you say?
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Old 11-13-2009, 09:29 AM
 
78,022 posts, read 60,232,230 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by monkey cabal View Post
The Berlin Wall fell when the sham of Soviet supremacy could not longer be maintained. For decades our gov’t had us scared to death of the evil commies on the other side of the Iron Curtain. All the while, the Soviets were barely capable of feeding themselves--let alone waging a war with America. They posed almost no threat to us whatsoever. The entire cold war was a big sham to dupe American taxpayers into funneling hundreds of billions of dollars into defense expenditures we did not need.
That is so historically innacurate as to be laughable.

Barring the use of nukes the Russians could have rolled through Europe quite nicely up until a few years before the wall fell.

Then there is their penchant for building countries nuclear reactors, selling long range missle tech etc.
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