Yes, the people tore down the wall. But it was Gorbachev who made it possible to do it bloodlessly, and perhaps to do it at all.

How many people would have turned out if they knew that the first thousand or so would be machine-gunned by the Vopos? Everybody would have waited to be in the *second* thousand, or later!

We in the US are not really at risk (yet!) of being machine-gunned for our political actions. So we don't need a Mikhail Sergeevich. But we do nothing anyway--even the prospect of giving up *time and energy* is, apparently, too much.

And all the time the wall closing off our future is being made higher and thicker and more solid.

(Oh, and we have a "forward-thinking president", do we? Can I suggest you buy a compass, Ms van Gelder? "Forward" is in the other direction to his. He diet ons doed!)

As forward looking as a goosestepper.

All the populace must unite under one Consitutional Tent to defeat the 1% sucking up the working peoples energies and earths bounty.

Examine the emotions, wishes and needs of all citizens from teabags to anarchists, working to weathy to homeless, and you will see very much in common.

Free speech posting check, check, check : there is no substantial moral divide between Obama and the USA congress and your standard terrorist, check ,check, check.

Yes, yes, yes, the "we can do it" (force Obama to do it) refrain of your magazine. I don't know how much "people" protest actually led to the fall of the Berlin wall, but I hasten to note that under our "forward looking leader" we don't really have people but "sheeple" ready to do the bidding of Dear Leader whether we are being led over the cliffs of escalated Afghanistan combat, a bailout-ruined economy, a military/corporate school system or a health care "reform" plan that turns out to be a bonanza of corporate profit for insurance companies and medical providers. See how the "people's protest" in favor of single payer health insurance went over the cliff as our beloved "progressive Democrats" lined up to follow the lead sheep there. Turns out that there's no real "protest" in the sheeples of today, only a rage against Bush and the Republicans that counters the rage of the tea party Repubs and Blue Dogs against "gummint." Sometimes people distort the "lessons of history" to support their fantasies about the present and future, and this article belongs in that camp.

"forward-thinking president".

Yeah, he's moving "forward" alright...down the same path of one George W. Bush.

Not sure what you're smoking Sarah, but I'll take a toke of it.

Forward-looking president of what?

Come on! Even "looking" without the "forward" should require more than party membership.

If ever there's a time when Karl Marx's "Workers of the world unite, you have everything to gain, nothing to lose" rings true, it's now, what with these perpetual wars + global warming + economic collapse = doomsday, along time running out. And since a people united can never be defeated, our rising up en masse, with or without President Barack Hussein Obama, should be every bit as successful as the uprisings which brought down the Berlin Wall. And if we move right now, much less risky than in was in East Germany 20 years ago. Who'll lead? Same as when the East Germans rose up, everyone's a leader. After all that's what makes for revolutions.

bligh4

Kind of ironic when the workers of eastern Europe were uniting against a government based on the teaching of the same Karl Marx...

Obama is immaterial.
The wrong is clear. The right is clear.
It only takes a few to stand pointing out the wrong and indicating the right and if the people of America are powerful the crowds will grow.
The question is, are the people a power or are they a gaggle of rather stupid geese?
At the moment it is clearly and sadly the latter, pointing to a long and horrible decline.
But let us see!

Reagan's role was marginal, at best, but he did have the best publicists that money could buy, and the international community is fully aware of this.

It was Russia, with their policies of perestroika, not the US, that took the first steps necessary to bring Germany to the point where the Berlin War would be torn down. Unfortunately, the goal of the US today is to rebuild the Berlin Wall on the US-Mexican border.

It is interesting that Ms van Gelder takes her expository texts on the fall of the Berlin Wall from Forbes’ Magazine — the vade mecum of US capitalism — and a representative of atavistic superstition. Of course the GDR never had the kind of freedom these worthies desire — the freedom to exploit others, to hold down wages, cut jobs and encourage working people to ‘compete’ for crusts in the first case and the freedom to ‘console’ the exploited with promises that their present suffering will be somehow ‘compensated’ in some mythical ‘future life,’ in the case of the preacher-man.

“The GDR was more democratic, in the original and substantive sense of the word, than eastern Germany was before 1949 and than the former East Germany has become since the Berlin Wall was opened in 1989. It was also more democratic than its neighbour, West Germany. While it played a role in the GDR’s eventual demise, the Berlin Wall was at the time a necessary defensive measure to protect a substantively democratic society from being undermined by a hostile neighbour bent on annexing it. While East Germany (the German Democratic Republic, or GDR) wasn’t a ‘workers’ paradise’, it was in many respects a highly attractive model that was responsive to the basic needs of the mass of people and therefore was democratic in the substantive and original sense of the word. It offered generous pensions, guaranteed employment, equality of the sexes and substantial wage equality, free healthcare and education, and a growing array of other free and virtually free goods and services. It was poorer than its West German neighbour, the Federal Republic of Germany, or FRG, but it started at a lower level of economic development and was forced to bear the burden of indemnifying the Soviet Union for the massive losses Germany inflicted upon the USSR in World War II. These conditions were largely responsible for the less attractive aspects of life in the GDR — lower pay, longer hours, and fewer and poorer consumer goods compared to West Germany, and restrictions on travel to the West. When the Berlin Wall was open in 1989, a majority of the GDR’s citizens remained committed to the socialist basis of their society and wished to retain it. [1] It wasn’t the country’s central planning and public ownership they rebelled against. These things produced what was best about the country. And while Cold War propaganda located East Germany well outside the ‘free world,’ political repression and the Stasi, the East German state security service, weren’t at the root of East Germans’ rebellion either. ULTIMATELY, WHAT THE CITIZENS OF THE GDR REBELLED AGAINST WAS THEIR COMPARATIVE POVERTY. But this had nothing to do with socialism. East Germans were poorer than West Germans even before the Western powers divided Germany in the late 1940s, and remain poorer today. A capitalist East Germany, forced to start at a lower level of economic development and to disgorge war reparation payments to the USSR, would not have become the social welfare consumer society West Germany became and East Germans aspired after, but would have been at least as worse off as the GDR was, and probably much worse off, and without the socialist attractions of economic security and greater equality. Moreover, without the need to compete against an ideological rival, it’s doubtful the West German ruling class would have been under as much pressure to make concessions on wages and benefits. West Germans, then, owed many of their social welfare gains to the fact their neighbour to the east was socialist and not capitalist.”
— Stephen Gowans

The full article can be accessed at http://gowans.wordpress.com/2009/10/25/democracy-east-germany-and-the-berlin-wall/. Also insightful are http://www.communistpartyofireland.ie/c-Krenz.html (an interview with the last President of the GDR) and http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1221064/Oppressive-grey-No-growing-communism-happiest-time-life.html

Instead of job security and full employment, the German people (and others in the Eastern Bloc) ‘achieved’ the ‘freedom’ to scrabble for whatever wages capitalists deigned to pay, or starve; instead of free, publicly funded health and child care, education and transport, they ‘achieved’ socially divisive systems where the quality of one’s experience depends on one’s ability to pay; instead of culture and gender equality, they ‘achieved’ iPods and rap music, which teaches their boys that they should be ultra-macho pimps and their girls that they really WANT to be ‘bitches’ and ‘ho-s’’ to their male pimp-peers.

Socialism is not an idea that has failed; it is an idea whose time has not yet come.