Tearing down the curtain

Published: Sun, 02/07/21

I have shared this story before, but I think it is time to share it again. In 1997 I spent a few weeks of the summer working on a language school teaching English as a foreign language. In fact it was just after the events I described a couple of weeks ago when I failed to keep a job as a teacher because I wasn’t a Catholic. Link here if you missed it https://archive.aweber.com/iceandfire/B.hdx/t/My_lesson_in_discrimination.htm As I recall it TEFL was a lot more fun than teaching in a normal school and I had a pretty good summer. Many of the students attending were teenagers from Russia and other countries which had been part of the former Soviet Union. The Berlin wall had come down less than 8 years previously so this freedom of movement was still quite a novel. These young people were healthy, smartly dressed, generally intelligent, and surprisingly articulate. As I recall most already had a pretty good grounding in English
and they were very much there to improve their spoken English rather than learn from scratch. Teaching these young people was a very different experience to working with often unmotivated and reluctant British School Children I was used to dealing with.

The group of Russian youngsters had come over with two women who were supposed to act as their chaperones. One of the women didn’t seem to speak speak much English and definitely liked her vodka. We didn’t see much of her. The other lady spoke excellent English and was happy to get to know the other adults administrating or teaching the programme. I had some interesting conversations with her myself. One evening we discussed what it was like growing up on either side of the ‘Iron Curtain’ which had divided Europe into mutually antagonistic camps since before either of us were born. It sounded like our lives had really not been all that different socially and materially. I said that I had grown up believing that one day the red hordes would swarm over the East German boarder, destroy our way of life, and enslave us all. My Russian friend thought that was rather strange as she had grown up believing exactly the same about the
threat the West presented to her country and way of life. At that moment we both realised that it was propaganda which had caused us to live the first 35 years or so of our lives in fear of the ‘other’ beyond the iron curtain.

The Berlin wall was a real physical barrier of concrete about 20 feet high which divided East and West Berlin. It stood for for nearly 30 years as a symbol of the impenetrable divide between East and West. And yet, once the people of Eastern and Western Europe stopped believing the story which justified the divide between their cultures, the wall was pulled down literally overnight. The real iron curtain had been built in our minds. Once the mental curtain was pulled back the physical version could be easily broken down.

The good news is that the physical Berlin Wall is now just a historical curiosity. The bad news? Remember how the Great War of 1914 to 1918 was supposed to be the war to end all wars? We now refer to that conflict as World War one, which suggests it didn’t work out quite like that. Likewise, the control of narrative for controlling the world did not end with the fall of the Berlin Wall but is in fact used with more determination and sophistication than ever. The sad part is that, although a great many people are aware that the Berlin Wall existed and that it physically collapsed, far fewer people understand that the wall was just a symbol of a far more effective barrier which was erected in the minds of hundreds of millions of people. We all know how to recognise a physical barrier, but how many people can see when a much more formidable barrier is being constructed in their own mind? Part of the problem is that far too few
people know history in any depth. I would go further and suggest that even those who know history as it is conventionally presented, such as the dates of the Berlin wall, (1961 to 1989), have no real understanding that history is actually created by manipulation of minds and the physical events and constructs are just the manifestation of the controlled narrative.

Of course it is easier to understand events in hindsight than when living through the experience. For most of my life I was taken in by the Iron Curtain myth and I didn’t really start to see through it until September 1989 when I took part in the last major military exercise in West Germany. We were trying to take the Soviet ‘threat’ seriously, but it was obvious that we were just going through the motions. The conversation with my Russian friend 7 or 8 years later just confirmed that both sides had been fed the same story.

Are we currently living through a ‘pandemic’ or just acting out a story? Time will tell.

Regards

Graham

PS Another great post from Catlin Johnson comparing the management of old people’s homes to the way our political system manages the rest of us. After seeing what my mother went through in the last year of her life I know Catlin is spot on https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/02/07/electoral-politics-use-the-same-containment-strategies-as-alzheimers-facilities/