"From a column by Terrence Moore, professor of history at Hillsdale:
On pages 403-4 of Pearson/Prentice Hall’s LITERATURE, Grade Ten, Common Core Edition, we see an editorial written on the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It appeared in The New York Times. It begins, “The Berlin Wall was bound to fall eventually.” That’s interesting. Was the editorial board of The New York Times writing in 1980 that the Berlin Wall was “bound to fall eventually”? The editorial continues:
"But that it came down as bloodlessly as it did 10 years ago this week is largely a tribute to one leader. Today Mikhail Gorbachev is a political pariah in Russia and increasingly forgotten in the West. But history will remember him generously for his crucial role in ending the cold war and pulling back the Iron Curtain that Stalin drew across Europe in 1945. [Emphasis added.]"
So there you have it. Gorbachev brought down the Wall. Why? Well, evidently because he was a good guy. In one line of the editorial we are treated to a masterful use of elliptical prose: “As political pressures began to build in the late 1980s, Mr. Gorbachev was left with two options.” Etc. What political pressures? Who or what brought those pressures? We are not told. The New York Times editors assign the words “enlightened,” “idealism,” and “pragmatic” to Gorbachev. Indeed, the General Secretary of the Communist Party is said to have had “a wisdom and decency that is sadly rare in international power politics.” Does that comment extend to American participants in international power politics, particularly at that time?
Those of us who lived through those years and kept up with events might wonder what role, if any, Ronald Reagan played in this drama, according to the textbook editors. Will the adjectives “enlightened,” “pragmatic,” “wise,” and “decent” be applied to him? His name is not to be found in any of the documents concerning the fall of the Berlin Wall. But on page 449, we do find, as promised in the Common Core, his Address to the Students of Moscow State University held up as a model “exemplar text.” Unfortunately, the address is so heavily highlighted with shades of green, blue, orange, gray, purple, and pink—and so buried under the jargon of two-bit literary criticism (central idea and point of view, methods of development, organizational structures, rhetorical devices, figurative language, tone and word choice)—that it is hardly readable. Worse still, in the textbook editors’ introduction to the speech, students are told the following:
"Led by Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviets were blazing through the greatest changes they had seen since the 1917 revolution. Although reforms were rapidly taking root, they were not far enough from communist ideology for Reagan. . . . In this excerpt, notice how Reagan restrains his strongly anti-communist sentiments while still extolling the ideals he represents.".............
I have hacked up sputum that more accurately portrays American history than this drivel!
The Berlin wall fell mostly because of OUTSIDE pressures being foisted upon Russia. The Russian people had been told for YEARS that America and the west were dying out, they had no money, they had no inventions, they had nothing to offer the Russian people, etc...
Well, you can only contain the truth for so long and the truth was rapidly filling the vacuous depths of East Germany and the rest of Russia. It was getting easier for the Russian people to see that they were being lied to on a grand scale. The world was passing Russia by and THAT progress from outside Russia was a greater influence on the fall of the Berlin Wall than anything that Gorbachev actually accomplished!
To be honest, I think Gorbachev was hoping that the massive influence of the west would scare the Russian people back into the controlling arms of Socialism - and it almost worked, considering how many people despise Gorbachev and his actions.
It reminds me of Obama completely, utterly FAILING with the Obamacare system, hoping the American people will RUN to the Government, begging for a single-payer solution!