Weblog Entry - 10/06/2003: "Falling Walls"

[Previous entry: "Alternative Energy Home Tour"]
Green Consciousness Archive Index
[Next entry: "they want to train their dogs on live animals/they probably have used your "lost" pet/the world is filled with these people who are protected by YOUR legal system"]

Click Here to Sign the Safe Space Petition

10/06/2003 "Falling Walls"

10/3/03 The German American Council brought the three players to an conference:
Germany's Unification & the End of the Cold War.
C-Span is showing it. Fascinating, 13 years after reunification, I see former president G Bush Senior and the former West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl (1982-90) (Chancellor Reunified Germany 1990-98) and Mikhail Gorbachev (USSR 1885-91) all together describing their roles at a remembrance of the falling of the Berlin Wall, Nov. 9, 1989.
I think Gorbachev is a great under appreciated hero. I think of him and his wife fondly as a good team. I remember them in their visits to the White House, one sparkling evening of music and culture at a televised white house social. The two presidential couples singing an old Russian folk song,their eyes all moist, their earnestness, all of them conscious of the preciousness of the new friendship between our countries. I felt the west was trying to support and comfort Gorbachev as he let go of power for the good of the world. So they sang the folk songs to remind each other that it was the people who they served by the actions they were taking.
I learned from the moderator Tom Broshaw's introduction that "his beloved Raeisa(sic)" died. I didn't know this - do not remember hearing about it.
Kohl said that without Bush and Gorbachev, the east and west would not have been united. He said they needed the airlift's food from America. He said it was about time someone thanked the US of America for helping Germany through the Marshall Plan.
And he said what I feel toward Gorbachev, no one knows what you wrestled with and what you contributed, and how you stood on the square with us. Your policy of opening doors that made it possible for movement in the Warsaw Pact, especially at the Paris Troika.
On the day after the wall fell the KGB tried to persuade Gorbachev to quell the people and send tanks into the crowd. Gorbachev trusted the masses to not hurt the soviet troops in east Germany and said to let the people be.
But the ex-chancellor also said east & west Germany did it peacefully, implying Iraq could have been likewise freed without force. WAKE UP - Syria is on the security council - the UN sat through 5 genocides since the holocaust (read A Problem From Hell by Samantha Powers).
With two members of the U N Security Council having loaned Saddam money, having conflicting interest in debt repayment and having trading interests with an otherwise isolated Iraq and having been promised a share in the oil fields when sanctions were lifted, the U N was not going to help with regime change in Iraq. That whole effort was/is proposed by the ignorant and those who support the aims of the Islamic Brotherhood.
The Germans have all ready forgot how good liberation felt when the East Germans were freed. They turned their backs when we needed them to help free another people simply to protect their financial relations (loans) with the dictator. I am glad we are reminding them about democracy today. Someone should confront them about the duty to pass on the good that was done for you.
Oh good - they are starting talking about the invasion now and it is really a good dialogue. Bush is reminding them about how the UN can never be moved to action, sat through 5 genocides, has Syria on the security council. The UN will never agree to fight terror as the economic interests of the majority of the nation states are tied to the terror producing states.
Should we do nothing in the face of terror and oppression? Where would France and Germany be today, if we had that attitude during WWII or afterward? Bush Senior is taking on the European arguments and speaking more frankly then I ever thought he was capable of doing. Of course, he didn't mentioned how he urged the Iraq people to rise up against Saddam after the Gulf War and then abandoned them when Saddam took revenge.
This seminar will be run again - go to the C-Span website to find out when. I support all wars of liberation and the middle east is a place where the the theoracies keeps women as slaves. I support freeing the slaves wherever they live.

Web design by GetSirius