I have a very modest beer stein collection. Just a few. One is solid brass and is made of an old German WWI artillery shell casing. It has 1915 stamped on the base. Others are souvenir steins that I picked up on my only trip to the Old Country.
But a fourth is perhaps the one I cherish the most.
Here it is in all its glory.
See the piece of concrete mounted on the cap? That’s a piece of the Berlin Wall.
A wall that was constructed by the former German Democratic Republic in 1961. A wall whose purpose was to keep those living in the former Soviet Sector of Occupied Germany, later to be known as the DDR or the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, from crossing into West Berlin.
From escaping the enslavement of the Soviet, and therefore the East German style of despotic communism to the freedom and democracy of the West.
A wall that fell suddenly and unexpectedly on November 9th, 1989 as the Cold War thawed and the Soviet Union fell into disarray and irrelevance.
This wall symbolized the ultimate in despotism. The blood of hundreds if not thousands of fleeing Germans was spilt there.
It was, in short, a nightmare that is thankfully now just an asterisk in historical texts.
Until yesterday.
Yesterday, Teabagger Alaska Senator Wannabe Joe Miller dredged it all back up when he cited this despised edifice as something to be admired. Something that we should be doing at our borders.
“East Germany was very, very able to reduce the flow. Now, obviously, other things were involved. We have the capacity to, as a great nation, secure the border. If East Germany could, we could.”
Joe Miller is one sick, sick puppy.
And not just a little ignorant of the facts.
Point of fact, the reason that the DDR built that wall was not to keep West Berliners from crossing into East Berlin and taking all those jobs, but to keep East Berliners from leaving.
Just about the only thing that Miller is correct about is the fact that the Berlin Wall was very effective in curbing the flow of fleeing citizens.
And the reason it was so effective didn’t have to do with the wall, the wire or the pit traps, it had to do with the watch towers constructed at intervals.
Watch towers equipped with machine guns.
But this apparently is what Joe Miller - and who knows who else - has in mind for the future Utopia that they envision for my country.
If that’s the case, then here is what I have to say to all the Teabaggers who “want their country back:”
Only if you take it from my cold dead hands.
2 comments:
There is a difference between a fence or a wall to keep people in and one designed to keep the unwanted and undesirable out. The one makes a prison -- the other makes for a secure home.
Interesting choice of words, Anon.
It would seem that one man's secure home is another man's prison.
That secure home you refer to, if constructed in Texas, was inevitably constructed by illegal aliens, explaining why you paid half of what you would have paid had it been constructed by a United States citizen.
Texas hypocrisy, Anon.
Post a Comment