BERLIN WALL
As already been known, the Western and Eastern worlds for some decades as if had been separated by strong " Berlin Wall ", so that between both parties there are always prejudice, unknowingness, and misunderstanding. In addition, people are frequently trapped in shallow generalization.
For majority of the Western people, the Eastern world is deemed as the world of backwardness, indolence, poverty, over-population, natural disaster and famine. On the contrary, for most of the Eastern people, the Western world means the world of advancement of technology, state of being established, freedom, liberal and capitalism. Starting from this contradiction, the meeting between the West and the East so far is more in the forms of suspecting, competing, conflicting, and having a war to each other rather than having good mutual understanding, knowing, cooperating, and respecting each other.
Due to heavy current of modernization, commencing from the end of decade in 1980s, the strong " Berlin Wall " between the West and the East can be considered as having collapsed. Accidentally the actual Berlin Wall itself had collapsed as well due to the same reason. Isn't this a kind of indication, symbolism, signal, or whatever it is, for the educated people in Western and Eastern worlds to be prepared to enter into a stage in history, in which each party can mutually know, understand, cooperate and respect each other ?
All forms of competitions and conflicts between the West and the East can be deemed as belonging to the past time when the world was not yet transparent, when the information was not yet running smoothly, so that it could be easily covered up or deviated. The materialization of community having awareness for information, logically the meeting between the West and the East can provide better outcomes for mankind in the future. Moreover, all of us have understood that the advanced technology, state of being established, freedom and liberal certainly do not always guarantee the welfare as expected. For example, the occurrence of various kinds of natural disasters, and various types of new diseases such as AIDS and Cancer ( for more than 27 years still can not subjugate AIDS, for more than 38 years still can not subjugate Cancer ), whose solution is possibly the need to use " wisdom " owned by the East.
The West and the East, each cannot stand alone or mutually nullify. Both mutually need and complete each other. The thing required is the effort to find a way of life constituting a synthesis of both idealism visions.
The strong " Berlin Wall " fell .......Is it possible that two dimensions - West and East - meet and unite ? Is it possible to materialize the mutual understanding, a harmonization of vision and perception, so that it can establish The Universal Future Human Culture ?
The Wall and the End of History
More than just communism ended in 1989; 2,000 years of bloodshed came to a close.
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Twenty years ago, a few months before the Berlin Wall fell, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama predicted "not just the end of the Cold War … but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."
He was wrong, of course, as were all the "end of" prophets of the past. Liberal democracy is hardly what inspires current forces like Iranian Khomeinism, global jihadism, the caudillismo of Latin America, or the neo-tsarism of Russia. But what about Europe?
The collapse of the 3.7-meter-tall monster in Berlin on Nov. 9, 1989, did bring about—or, more accurately, complete—a momentous transformation of the Old Continent. For the past 2,000 years, Europe had been the source of the best and the worst in human history. It invented practically everything that matters: from Greek philosophy to Roman law, from the Renaissance to the fax machine, from Brunelleschi to Bauhaus. But this was also where the world's deadliest wars erupted, killing tens of millions. It was in Europe that the most murderous ideologies were invented: communism, fascism, and Nazism, complete with the Gulag, the Gestapo, and Auschwitz.
That history truly ended with the Berlin Wall. Gone are the million soldiers who once manned a line running from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and so are thousands of nuclear weapons. The French and Germans no longer fight over Alsace-Lorraine, and it's impossible to imagine another partition of Poland, or mass murder in the name of the Lord, or a flood of refugees like the tens of millions who crisscrossed Europe in the 20th century. Yes, we recently saw ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, but that was a cottage industry compared with what Hitler and Stalin wrought, and it was quickly bankrupted by the U.S. Air Force.
Post-wall Europe, meanwhile, has come to mean peace, social democracy, and the EU Commission, which has made Karl Marx's prediction come true at last: after the final class struggle, "power over men" would yield to the "administration of things." So it has: regulation has replaced revolution, and the welfare state has trumped the warfare state. Marx got only the timing wrong; it would take 140 years from the Communist Manifesto to the fall of the wall.
But the wait was worth it. The wall fell without bloodshed; the Soviet Union was the first empire that died in bed, so to speak, with barely a shot being fired. The Velvet Revolutions that made Europe whole again truly ended European history as we knew it. Traditional revolutions beget counterrevolutions and new rounds of repression and revolt. That cycle was broken in 1989, a miraculous first that bodes so well for the future. Yes, conflict continues in Europe, but not the kind that sets fire to history. Today the clashes are over taxes and spending, zoning and shop-closing hours, the sway of Brussels and the reserve rights of national capitals, abortion and same-sex marriage. Politics hasn't been abolished, but the really touchy items have been safely outsourced to the courts—far from the streets and even from parliaments.
The fall of the wall did not create this brave new world; it sped it up and ratified it. But as a revolution without victims (except for the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who was shot, and a few other leaders who served short prison terms), Nov. 9, 1989, deserves a towering monument in every European capital—a marker of something completely new under the European sun. Unlike in 1789, the promise of peace and liberty was truly delivered. Unlike in 1919, when the continent erupted in revolutions that spawned totalitarian counterrevolutions, 1989 brought an end to the worst part of European history. That's not bad when you consider the origins: a flustered East German functionary looking into the TV cameras and announcing, well, yes, as far as he knew, East Berliners could freely cross into the West—right now.
Elsewhere in the world, history continues in its bloody fashion. But if you want to know how to end it nice and smoothly, check out what Europe managed 20 years ago.
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