This Vodkapundit post brings up a great perspective shift in the Red vs Blue state debate and also notes that "the reader comments added to my post just below are a facinating read. Many of them are first-person accounts of time in Berlin, before and after the Wall. Most of the writers are American military veterans who were stationed in Germany during the Cold War."
One of those comments: "historians will look back at 1989 as one of those pivotal years in human history. That year, the Warsaw Pact countries broke from the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall came down, and the dictator of Romania was overthrown (and killed). Within 2 years, the Soviet Union would collapse under the weight of a failed system."
Be sure to check out Vodkapundit - Ten Fifteen Years After and Wills_World_Commentary
More comments and perspectives at: Weekend Pundit: Experience Tells, Mudville Gazette, Let's Try Freedom, Jeff the Baptist: Military Travels, baldilocks: Who Sees the World?, baldilocks: Wow! Fifteen Years, and dustbury.com: That night in Berlin
That last one brough back memories of crossing the border via subway back in 1986 (the subway was built prior to the War and you could take the subway from West Berlin under East Berlin and from there go through to East Germany via a border control checkpoint). The chill of uncertainty - in both passing into and out of East Germany (and via the utter everyday familarity of a subway!) is still very fresh in mind.
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