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Talk:Ronald Wilson Reagan (view source)
Revision as of 18:34, March 14, 2007
, 18:34, March 14, 2007→Can we limit the speculation and the removal of facts/sources to include unsubstantiated opinion?
***I think you confuse this place for Wikipedia. This is the Conservative version. Therefore like values are tensed more than those which oppose, otherwise what is this place for? I also think you mistake personal things for purely historical ones. I am not making you, personally less valid, however this place is the place for debating your personal ideas, and the failure to go the extra mile and inform the people who will use this as a resource, of the whole story, not a fragment of it. You are using, in my opinion, the same tired liberal sources those of us in the States have grown to mistrust. --[[User:TK|TK]] 03:11, 14 March 2007 (EDT)
***I think you confuse this place for Wikipedia. This is the Conservative version. Therefore like values are tensed more than those which oppose, otherwise what is this place for? I also think you mistake personal things for purely historical ones. I am not making you, personally less valid, however this place is the place for debating your personal ideas, and the failure to go the extra mile and inform the people who will use this as a resource, of the whole story, not a fragment of it. You are using, in my opinion, the same tired liberal sources those of us in the States have grown to mistrust. --[[User:TK|TK]] 03:11, 14 March 2007 (EDT)
*** Evidently I confused this place for an encyclopedia interested in facts. I see you arbitrarily removed the information about how Honecker could and did ignore Gorbachev's entreaties for reform. The fact that several Soviet troops were stationed in East Berlin was quite ancillary to the issue at question, namely the status of the Berlin Wall. Were, as you (or whoever added the line about the Soviet troops) suggested, Gorbachev to have exercised military pressure on Honecker to reform, he would've ceased to be a reformer. You can't force through those sorts of liberalizing measures through violent and oppressive measures. The French Revolution attempted that, and in ended in the Reign of Terror and, later, with military rule under Napoleon. Your decision to willy-nilly ignore the realities of internal dynamics, both within the Eastern bloc and within individual countries of the bloc, makes your own ''opinion'' regarding the importance of Gorbachev (and what he potentially could have done) to the fall of the Berlin Wall exceedingly groundless and unsubstantiated. Even though the first incarnation of the Berlin Wall was erected in 1961 with Soviet assistance, this was what the East German government at the time wanted as well, in order to triage the massive population loss and brain drain of East Germans who went to West Berlin and from there to the West. Those desires held true into 1989, and it was only when popular pressures began to mount within East German for opening the borders that things began to change. Moreover, the fall of the Wall itself was not the product of deliberate policy on anyone's part; on November 9, 1989, the party head in Berlin read (or perhaps misread, as scholars have debated) an announcement on television in somewhat unclear language (if you see a clip of the broadcast, you can even see him looking a bit surprised and what he thought he was reading) to the effect that the border would be opened for private trips abroad, which the East Germans watching on television interpreted to mean the complete opening of the border, prompting thousands to storm the checkpoints and begin tearing down the Wall. In the end, not Gorbachev nor Honecker nor Reagan, for that matter, played a key role in tearing down the Wall. Credit a bureaucrat's vague words and the initiative of the thousands of East Germans who made it so.
And I don't know why you keep making thinly veiled illusions suggesting that I'm some sort of foreigner. You keep using that canard to try to discredit me, but it only reflects poorly on you because 1) I'm an American, born and raised, and 2) your implication that anyone who bothers to learn about the other side of an issue (or in this case to pay attention to what was actually happening on the other side of the Iron Curtain rather than accepting a bunch of poorly supported opinions as the gospel truth) must not be American suggests that anyone who's American is also ignorant with respect to the rest of the world. -- "KW"