Today is the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I always thought the wall was taken down in response to purposeful social change. But read the linked story. It was all the result of a colossal chain of clumsy bureaucratic error.
One tiny anecdote from a much larger story:
When one of the regime’s most loyal subordinates, a Stasi officer named Harald Jäger who was working the Nov. 9 night shift at a crucial checkpoint in the Berlin Wall, repeatedly phoned his superiors with accurate reports of swelling crowds, they did not trust or believe him. They called him a delusional coward. Insulted, furious and frightened, he decided to let the crowds out, starting a chain reaction that swept across all of the checkpoints that night.
Fascinating.
That’s only part of the story. Gorbachev was planning to do it, however it happened faster than planned.
That’s the way most of Gorbachev’s reforms worked – he could of easily became leader and dropped all of the suppressive policies overnight, but he knew ‘perestroika’ and ‘glasnost’ needed to be implemented slowly. Slowly because the Soviet public didn’t understand the concepts of capitalism, a free press and most importantly, democracy.
It was thanks to Boris Yeltsin and Co. sweeping the countries of the union from under Gorbachev’s feet that the process of perestroika was cut short and Eastern Europe was left in the mess it is in today. As Gorbachev said upon his departure from office, “we haven’t learned how to use freedom yet”.
And here I thought it was the sanctified power of Saint Reagan’s magic speech that had done the job. At least, that’s what the Discovery Institute told me.
“It was all the result of a colossal chain of clumsy bureaucratic error.”
But David Hasselhoff gets all the credit. Because he sang “Looking for Freedom” at the Berlin Wall on New Year’s Eve 1989. East Germans thanked him for bringing down the wall.