Op-ed, The true post World War 2 reasons for the building of The Berlin Wall and The Cold War, by Andrew Taylor, Nov 17, 2009

Op-ed, The true post World War 2 reasons for the building of The Berlin Wall and The Cold War, by Andrew Taylor, Nov 17, 2009

The Soviet Union strictly honoured the post war agreement to have Berlin occupied by the four Allied victorious allied powers, although at the close of the war it alone was in occupation of the city. In the early post- War years the US re-militarized western Germany and enriched it through Marshall Plan aid. Anti-Communism had became the ideology of the U.S. once again as it had been before the War; in western Germany anti-communism became state law and the German communist party was made illegal in 1957. A decree banned Communists from being government officials or teaching in Schools.

The division of Europe into hostile Blocs was not a consequence of the Allied victory in WW 2. In the interests of preventing a new catastrophic war Stalin had bent over backwards reassuring the western Allies by urging the massively popular communist parties of Italy and France to cooperate as partners and ministries within capitalist coalition governments rather than attempt to form communist governments. In a number of countries in eastern Europe that had been liberated by the Red Army, centrist and even right parties shared government with communist parties. With every move Stalin pursued world peace just as he had destroyed the German invaders in an all-out war of patriotic self-liberation.

But this balance was destroyed by the new American president, Harry Truman, who in March 1947, in effect declared war on the USSR by announcing that the US would support any nation crushing their domestic communist parties. In Greece where a royalist British bankrolled government has been unable unable to resist the popular communist insurgency. President Truman offered a dictate: he would never “allow” Greece's civil war to end in a Greek Communist victory.

These factors are the real background to the Berlin crisis and the first crisis was ignited by a new arbitrary monetary regime imposed by the US and UK on the western zone of Germany without any consultation with the other Ally, the Soviet Union. It was then that the USSR imposed a blockade on Berlin in order to secure the whole city (Berlin is located in the eastern Soviet zone). The West responded with the Berlin airlift, which broke the Soviet blockade and from thereafter Berlin was the centre-point of the Cold War.

The Hitlerite Second World War had killed 27 million Soviets and bled the USSR economy dry, and it insisted on reparation for its destroyed infrastructure by remittances from eastern Germany in money and industrial machinery. This caused a lower living standard in eastern Germany. In addition the US, enriched by WW2 was pouring millions into the west. The disparity in living conditions between "the two Germanys" caused thousands of skilled East German workers and engineers to move to the West in subsequent years. In response to the brain drain the Berlin Wall was constructed as a last-ditch self-preservation effort by the GDR in August 1961.

The wall became a symbol of "communist totalitarianism" in the Cold War script, and its fall in 1989 was viewed as the final triumph of western 'capitalism and democracy' . But for eastern Germany, the 'liberation' has brought in 20 years of chronic unemployment and massive social dislocations in the wake of the capitalist market economy. So if one wants to find celebrations of the fall of the Berlin Wall eastern Germany is not the place to visit at present. Gone is the guarantee of a job. Gone are the myriad 24/7 daycare for working families. Gone are a people's progressive arts and culture. 'Berlin Is in Germany'.