Speyside wrote:I have always felt that slipping the cash flow, illegal employment, would be the best solution to stopping the incentive for illegal aliens to be here. Quacker, the stratigic defense initiative put a huge cash burden on communism and was one of the causes of its downfall. Also peristroika and glasnost allowed Gorbachev a way out of the coldwar. In May of 1988 Reagan spoke of his support of this during a speech to Russian students before a summit meeting with Gorbachev in Russia.
Branch out a little Spey and Neutered, It started in Poland and other Warsaw Pact countries because no matter where you are Liberty and Freedom will always be the driving force. Thank goodness Gorby was in power at the time. Putin would have launched jets.
Who Really Tore Down the Berlin Wall?
By Christopher A. Preble
This article appeared on Rare on November 14, 2014.
https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/who-really-tore-down-berlin-wall
Twenty-five years ago this week, the world watched as the Berlin Wall, one of the most enduring symbols of the Cold War, came down.
American mythology often credits Ronald Reagan with the Wall’s collapse, as if its concrete crumbled under the shattering power of his rhetoric. During Reagan’s speech at the Brandenburg Gate, he famously implored, “Mr.Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
The reality in the autumn of 1989 was more complicated. The speech had occurred more than two years earlier, and the Wall wasn’t actually Gorbachev’s to tear down.
The East German government had no plans to do so. And yet the Wall fell. In The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall, Mary Elise Sarotte tells the story of who actually did the deed, and why. It is a story of courage and persistence in the face of a brutal police state, with a dash of bureaucratic incompetence thrown in for good measure.
I think President Reagan would approve.
Pressure from the outside helped to break open Eastern Europe, to be sure. It is true, for example, that international institutions such as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, and its Helsinki Final Act of 1975, had set the stage for a slow but inexorable expansion of human rights behind the Iron Curtain in the late 1970s and into the 1980s. Gorbachev then pushed through a number of reforms in his own country, and those reforms had been copied in a few Warsaw Pact countries.
Meanwhile, other Western leaders, including West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and his Foreign Minister Hans-Deitrich Genscher of the Liberal Party (FDP), had sought practical ways to allow more East Germans to emigrate to the West.
Still, it was not inevitable that the Wall would come down in the autumn of 1989. Not all Soviet satellites were happy with Gorbachev’s glasnost, and several were determined to resist — with violence, if necessary.
AND, from the liberal bibles,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/12/opinion/reagan-at-the-wall.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/06/12/tear-down-this-wall-how-reagans-forgotten-line-became-a-defining-presidential-moment/?utm_term=.fc7b5c44cdb4
