(Minghui.org) The Berlin Wall looked as strong as it had been before the night of November 9, 1989. Only a month earlier, East Germany held a grand military parade on October 7 to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the founding of the state, and East Germany was second place in medal count at the Olympics held in Seoul the year before.
However, when East Germany's then leader Honecker arrested more than 1,000 demonstrators to ensure a smooth parade, even former Soviet Communist Party Secretary Gorbachev, who had been invited as a principal guest at the parade, felt uneasy.
He said to Honecker, “Life punishes those who come too late.” However, his warning didn't seem to awaken the Communist hardliner.
Two days later, mass demonstrations broke out in Leipzig, East Germany, and 77-year-old Honecker was forced to step down nine days later.
The Berlin Wall, which cut off East Germany from the free world, finally fell.
The wall was already heavily burdened with pain and misery.
The Seemingly Indestructible Wall Can’t Withstand the Push of Freedom
East Germany built the Berlin Wall in August 1961, which was 169.5 kilometers long, with an average height of 4.2 meters and 50 centimeters in thickness. A total of 192 streets were closed off and the wall was fenced with 3.5-meter-high electrified barbed wire. There was also a no-man's land area of 50 – 100 meters between the wall and the barbed wire fencing. Watchtowers and fortfiications were everywhere along the wall, vigilantly guarded by soldiers armed with live ammunition.
It used to look so strong and insurmountable, with many people having paid the price of their lives when trying to climb over to freedom.
Before the Berlin Wall collapsed, no one believed it would fall. After its fall, no one believed that it would have stood for so long.
Like the Soviet Union, before its disintegration, no one thought that the formidable giant would fall, and after it fell apart, it was hard to imagine that the Stalinist regime, which had brought great disasters to the Soviet people, could have had such a profound influence.
People began to reflect, to uncover the truth of history, and to re-understand history, even though there were so many shocking episodes that they would rather not see, because people, by instinct, did not want to believe that they had been so deceived.
But facts speak louder than words, and no matter how glamorous the rhetoric had been, they could not cover up the criminal dictatorship and its killings.
The New Berlin Wall in China
We have seen a similar situation with the current coronavirus outbreak. No matter how positive the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda has sounded, it cannot conceal the fact that its cover-up of the virus infection has led to the wide spread of the epidemic.
The CCP has always believed that its regime is indestructible, and those who have been brainwashed by the CCP doctrines also try to justify its conduct.
When the number of infected cases increased to several hundred in Italy,a Chinese blogger posted the following sarcastic message:
“You have no Huoshenshan, Leishenshan or Zhong Nanshan, not to mention the CCP as your kaoshan [solid support]. So when you are infected, you would only be carried up the shan [mountain].” (Huoshenshan and Leishenshan refer to the makeshift hospitals set up for infected patients. Zhong Nanshan is a Chinese epidemiologist and pulmonologist. This message meant to say that the Italian people, when infected, would only face death [having bodies carried up to the mountain to be buried] as they do not have the CCP or makeshift hospitals.)
Tens of thousands of people have been infected with coronavirus and China's economy has come to a standstill with the lock down of cities and households, yet the CCP is still demanding the Chinese people or even the world to be grateful to them.
In fact, the spread of the coronavirus has exposed many fundamental flaws in the CCP's bureaucracy, characterized with evasion of responsibility, incompetence and corruption.
People of insight made such comments when analyzing the “advantage” of the CCP's system: They claim they could pool resources to get major projects done quickly. It is true they were able to build the massive Huoshenshan Hospital in nine days, but they were also capable of spreading the virus around the world in a matter of few days.
Some other comments said: If the coronavirus had been properly contained at an early stage, it would not have developed into a national public health emergency. The CCP regime had to carry out “major projects” such as setting up makeshift hospitals quickly because it had done a very bad job in the first place.
In fact, the massive quickly-built makeshift hospitals, in which the CCP takes great pride, are like the Berlin Wall, looking strong and insurmountable, and built in the name of protecting people, but behind the wall is complete control of information and silencing dissenters.
Tens of thousands of WeChat accounts and microblogs were banned. The real death toll is also being covered up.
The so-called advantage of being able to “pool resources to deal with major issues” effectively reflects the CCP's totalitarian politics, which more often than not pools resources to do bad things.
Mao Zedong launched the destructive “Great Leap Forward” campaign and the “Cultural Revolution”; Deng Xiaoping characterized the “June 4th” student movement as a “counter-revolution riot”; Jiang Zemin labeled Falun Gong, a mind and body cultivation practice based on the principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance, as a “cult” and his persecution policy has resulted in practitioners being arrested, imprisoned, tortured, or even having their organs harvested while alive.
While fully aware of cases of “human-to-human transmission,” China's National Health and Medical Commission issued an order on January 3, 2020 to terminate virus testing of such patients to cover up the infection cases.
Such totalitarian dictatorship is not a sign of power, but a source of danger.
Just as Heinz Hoffmann, who took the post as East German Defense Minister, said a week after the fall of the Berlin Wall, “The Berlin Wall is not a symbol of power for East Germany, but a testament to its weakness. This wall has brought people suffering.”
It may be that precisely due to its weak nature, an authoritarian dictatorship needs rampant violence and lies to maintain its rule.
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union seem like a historical accident, but it’s not coincidental. It was what the people were yearning for.
Before the Berlin Wall fell, there had been numerous demonstrations in East Germany, and people were carefully but also constantly breaking the government's hold on them.
Prior to the disintegration of the Soviet Union, writers such as Solzhenitsyn wrote the shocking and thought-provoking “Gulag Archipelago,”in which he exposed the crimes of the Stalin era.
Although the Chinese CCP regime bans freedom of speech, people can still learn the true reality of the outside world, either through personal experience or what they hear and see, or by getting around the firewalls to browse websites blocked by the CCP's internet censorship.
They have gradually seen through the CCP's corruption and incompetence, their lies and evil. To date, as many as 350 million people have chosen to quit the CCP organizations.
A person with a pseudonym “warm breeze” said in his declaration to quit the CCP on February 25, “One day, the Berlin Wall [referring to the internet firewall to prevent the Chinese people from knowing the truth] will collapse, so long as each of us makes a voice and makes an effort, and we would soon embrace the light of dawn after darkness!”
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Category: News Commentary
