The Fall That Changed the World

The fall of the Berlin Wall, Nov. 9, 1989, catalyzed world events into an unprecedented fast pace. It brought massive geopolitical changes as few could have envisioned during the waning years of the Cold War.

As one commentator put it, “The world has been in furious flux since the fall of the Berlin Wall. A host of factors has driven it into this ever accelerating ‘fast-forward mode’” (Europe’s World, Autumn 2009).

Madeleine Albright, describing the effect of the fracturing of the Berlin Wall, declared that on that fateful day, “in the space of a historical eyewink, everything changed” (Parade, Nov. 8, 2009).

Change it certainly did, each change seemingly stimulating yet another. The resulting battery of accelerating changes occurring within just two decades took Germany from being a divided nation—symbolized by the ugly bulk of a concrete barrier fracturing its wartime capital city—to being the most powerful economic and political force dominating a new imperialist global power, the European Union.

Even more significant, that first crack in the Berlin Wall was a harbinger of the fracturing of the relationship that had held together the Western powers in a grand alliance for over 40 years following World War ii.

The fall of the Berlin Wall triggered the beginning of a realignment of German international relations. Germany’s Cold War transatlantic orientation has become an increasingly Eurasian alignment.

German-Foreign-Policy.com reported, “The close economic alliance with the usa had characterized the years of the confrontation between the two systems. Since the upheavals between 1989 and 1991, German business has been eastward-oriented to a growing degree. Today, the trade volume between Germany and Eastern Europe is reaching €307 billion annually, constituting 17 percent of German foreign trade, while the German-U.S. trade volume sank to €117.5 billion, a mere 6.5 percent. Germany has its eyes particularly focused on Russian energy resources, to which German companies have obtained direct access in the meantime. For some time, Berlin has been using again this shift in economic weights for its traditional seesaw policy between East and West. And anti-American forces are openly proposing an alliance with Russia” (Oct. 29, 2009).

But it’s not only the breaching of the Atlantic alliance that the fall of the Berlin Wall triggered. Within scarcely a year of Germany uniting, its first foreign-policy initiative as a united nation was to fracture in turn the whole Yugoslav Republic by its recognition of Croatia and Slovenia as separate nation-states apart from the greater Yugoslav federation. This triggered the illegal Balkan wars. These wars have progressively garnered the Balkan nations into the German-dominated EU as that imperialist Union’s first colonies.

One further result of the Balkan wars was the relaunching of the German Luftwaffe into combat, with ready Anglo-American assent. Since then, the German navy has drawn blood off the coast of Somalia. Most recently, the German military force in Afghanistan engaged Taliban forces in active combat.

Then, just days before the anniversary of the event that catalyzed Germany’s reunification, the nation’s defense minister, Baron Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, broke a longstanding taboo by affirming that Germany was in reality at “war” in Afghanistan. It’s the first time the term war has been used to describe postwar German combat roles.

That the fall of the Berlin Wall produced vast changes in the global order is now a matter of recorded history. Yet, no one could have forecast that these events would become today’s reality when Germany lay in ashes over 65 years ago. Except—one man did.

There was one man, a voice crying out amid the confusion in the postwar world, who tenaciously pointed not only to the inevitability of the fall of the Berlin Wall, but who so precisely prophesied the events that have followed—and he died nearly four years before the wall fell. His name was Herbert W. Armstrong.