Grumpa Joe's Place

This image was selected as a picture of the week on the Czech Wikipedia for th week, 2006. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My latest book is The Puzzle People by Doug Peterson. The story kept me on the edge of my strato-lounger from cover to cover. This story revolves around the Berlin Wall which separated East Germany from West Germany between 1961-1989. This story reminded me of the many reasons I abhor Barack Obama and his socialist policies. What is worse is that more than half the country has adopted the socialist ideology as a norm. What the young people who voted for BHO haven’t seen yet are the atrocities committed by a socialist government on its people.

After the Berlin wall fell, the East Germans tried in vain to shred all the secret dossiers they kept on people during their rule. They were in a hurry and did indeed shred enough to fill sixteen thousand bags, but they didn’t have time to destroy the bags. For whatever reason Germany established an agency to reassemble the shredded papers. They are trying to reconstruct history and to identity criminals within the East German Secret Police known as the Stasi. One estimate of the time required to reassemble all the pieces at the rate they are doing it is three hundred years.

My job took me to Germany several times in the nineteen eighties. On one trip in October, 1989, I arrived in Frankfurt ahead of my colleague. Our German division assigned their Production Manager to keep me company while waiting for Ross to arrive. Peter spoke English fluently and made the hours we spent at the airport very easy. My German is atrocious, even though I spent two years learning the language in high school.

Peter and I shared stories about our families, and I learned that he escaped from East Germany to the West. His mother and siblings were still in the East which left him free but all alone. Relations between West and East had opened a bit and Peter could visit his family twice a year, but they could not cross into the West to visit him. He told me story after story about how people used ingenious ways to escape to freedom, and I was totally engrossed. Near the end of our talk, I asked him, “Peter, do you think the Berlin Wall will ever come down?” He didn’t hesitate, “never, the communists will never allow it.”

Ross and I spent ten days at a trade show in Düsseldorf before returning to Frankfurt and home. During those ten days we heard news bits about happenings all across Eastern Europe. People were crossing borders and escaping without being shot.

One evening a week after I arrived home I saw the news broadcast the fall of the Berlin Wall. The celebrations were cautious and yet joyous. Cautious because that same month the Chinese people celebrated in Tiananmen Square when the tanks arrived and ended it all. The same happened in Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, when Russian tanks arrived to end uprisings in nineteen fifties and eighties. This time it was real, the East German regime had fallen, the people were finally free of communism.

It has taken twenty-four years for that memory to re-emerge from the depths of my mind, but reading the Puzzle People brought them back as vivid and fresh as though it were yesterday. It has strengthened my resolve to fight communism, socialism, progressivism, even harder than before. The job is huge but not impossible.  Whenever I released a new job to my toolroom supervisor Art Price he would say, “the impossible we can do right away, miracles take a while.”  Ridding our country of the Leftist takeover is still in the impossible category of projects, and even if it has progressed into the miracle stage we can still make it happen, but it will take longer.

English: An exhibit featuring a three-story guard tower used by Communist East Germany to prevent its citizens from crossing the Berlin Wall. The tower and eight twelve-foot-high concrete sections of the Berlin Wall (the largest display of portions of the Berlin Wall outside of Germany) are now located inside the Newseum, an interactive museum of news and journalism in Washington, D.C. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Related articles

• Go ahead: Bring back East Germanys little traffic light man, say researchers (independent.co.uk)
• Germany’s first guerrilla gardener (theguardian.com)
• East German soldier helps a little boy sneak across the Berlin Wall, August 1961 (dangerousminds.net)
• Berlin: Old meets New (adionatravel.wordpress.com)
• The Stasi puzzle with 600 million pieces – Reconstructing shredded files (warhistoryonline.com)

Filed under: Biography, Book Review, Conservative | Tagged: Barack Obama, Berlin, Berlin Wall, Düsseldorf, Doug Peterson, East German, East Germany, Germany, The Puzzle People | 1 Comment »