20 years later, more walls than ever

November 10, 1:20 PMPittsburgh Grassroots ExaminerMike Boda

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Tearing down the wall-Active Stills.org

In Sensurround sound in a two inch wall
I was waiting for the communist call
I didn't ask for sunshine and I got World War three
I'm looking over the wall and they're looking at me
-Sex Pistols "Holidays in the Sun"

I would be lying if I said that I don't sometimes pine for the Cold War; it was so much easier. The Soviets seemed like a formidable threat and popular culture had me convinced that not only was an exchange of nuclear weapons inevitable, but it was survivable and the survivors could zip around the post-apocalyptic wasteland, in crudely decorated, heavily armed dune buggies, like the Manson family in happier times.

As it turns out, there would be no surviving that: between the US first strike combo of Minuteman missiles to destroy as many Soviet missile sites as possible and the "Star Wars" system intended to eliminate a significant portion of a counter-strike from the USSR followed up by the various Soviet doomsday weapons, the state-capitalist regimes in Washington and Moscow were serious about ending life on Earth. This is why I am unable to pretend to be too worked up about the "Saracen hordes," who were the USSR's understudy for the role of "enemy of the US." When it comes to car bombs or jetliner spectacles, I like my odds, as opposed to mutually assured destruction.

"Our leaders" are no more capable of protecting civilians from rag-tag cells of religious kooks, any more than they could save us from being vaporized by the once seemingly inevitable exchange of nuclear hostilities. I know first-hand, that since US authorities can barely contain anarchists who do not want to be arrested, there is little or nothing they can do against religious fanatics chasing martyrdom. Giving cops fully-automatic rifles and telling them to hang out in train stations and freak out commuters does not alter this reality. The gun lobby must really like it, though.

Odds are, if you are reading this, you are probably aware that yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the German peoples' tearing down of the Berlin Wall. Aside from an end to the "Berlin albums" of the Lou Reeds, David Bowies, and Iggy Pops of the world, other pop stars took credit for this event, and generally the dissolution of the USSR. While I am no historian and certainly no physicist, empires are subject to decay. Even this one.

Aside from holy fools like Pope John Paul II and Genesis P-Orridge of Psychic TV, their contemporaries, advocates of political Islam and Straussian US neo-conservativsm, took credit for this event, as chronicled in the must-see, BBC documentary by Adam Curtis, called The Power of Nightmares.

Like most historical events of the 20th century, the strange cult of Ronald Reagan attributes it to him, despite the fact that by 1989, his drooling would have made him ineligible to be a decent paperweight. It was actually the "liberal," Jimmy Carter, actually goaded the Soviets into that hospice for empires known as "Afghanistan."

We may have lost one wall in 1989, but hydra-like, it has been replaced by others:

The new wall takes many forms - virtual and physical, high tech and low tech. This has ranged from tighter visa restrictions and carrier sanctions to expanding border guard forces and physical barriers. In the case of Germany, the new wall has even been propped up by those guarding the old wall: many former East German border guards have been incorporated into a mushrooming federal border force, this time with the mission to keep people from entering rather than leaving. Germany’s border police more than tripled in size in the decade after the Berlin Wall came down. To deter “undesirables,’’ Germany has also dramatically tightened its asylum laws - forcing some would-be asylum seekers to try more clandestine entry methods. Germany has also been the most forceful advocate of “Europeanizing’’ border controls, creating a shared EU space (“Schengenland’’) with a fortified outer perimeter (dubbed “fortress Europe’’).

Since most borders, that are not bodies of water tend to be imaginary, like nation-states themselves, governments have to make expensive efforts to make them seem real. The wall erected between certain parts of the US and Mexico is one such effort. Politicians in the US have engaged in immigrant bashing for as long as there have been US politicians. Amnesiac xenophobes point to the signifier "illegal" as the root of their grievance, but it is no different than the contempt that was likely shown toward my ancestors. This wall also carves up the lands of indigenous peoples, in a effort to prevent free-trade refugees from the South, displaced by NAFTA and similar agreements, from trying to earn a living in the US.

Another such apartheid wall, erected between Israel and the West Bank has also been met with opposition. Yesterday, in the village of Ni'ilin, despite the use of chemical agents and automatic weapons fire by the Israeli soldiers, demonstrators manged to topple a section of the wall, a fitting tribute to the events in Berlin 20 years ago:

One of the demonstrators, Moheeb Khawaja, said during the protest: "Twenty years ago no one had thought the monster that divided Berlin into two could be brought down, but in only two days in November, it did. Today we have proven that this can also be done here and now. It is our land beyond this wall, and we will not give up on it. We will win for a simple reason - justice is on our side."