Perspective and history have been absent from the MSM’s coverage of Ukraine, and we’re all going to pay the price for it. From Gillian Dymond at off-guardian.org:
When I arrived in Shanghai for a few weeks at the end of 1989, it was a heady time. Over the previous months one “iron curtain” state after another had opened its doors to the world, giving birth to newly independent countries that I’d encountered previously only in the books of fairy stories I once read to my children.
By November that great icon of separation, the Berlin Wall, had effectively, if not materially, melted away, as tens of thousands from the Ostzone surged through the checkpoints dividing east from west.
I remembered the tension, some thirty years earlier, when the wall went up and for a short while Russian and American tanks defied each other from either side of the barrier. I had just returned from Frankfurt after visiting my German boyfriend, who was about to start his national service in the Bundeswehr. His family were part of the flotsam of World War II, having fled westward before the advance of Russian troops.
