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    Wall were sometimes necessary and not a bad thing.

    History’s Most Famous Walls
    Our idiosyncratic pick of the world’s most notable walls through the ages
    By Patrick Totty

    Berlin Wall – In the 28 years (1961-1989) it stood as a grim barrier between East and West Berlin, this wall was the Cold war’s boldest symbol. The East German government that erected it claimed it was a protective barrier shielding its subjects from western agents and provocateurs. The West said the wall was a prison barrier, designed to keep people in. By 1989, the West’s view was vindicated: Once the wall came down, East Germany could no longer control its vassals and ceased to exist within little more than a year.

    Great Wall of China – No, it’s an urban myth that you can see the Great Wall from outer space. But, what the heck, if any manmade object rates oversized praise, this is it. Built or restored over a 2,000-year period by several ruling dynasties, the wall was an ambitious attempt to keep raiders and nomads out of the Chinese heartland. When it succeeded, it had worldwide repercussions: The Huns, resisted and harassed on their east by tribes that had been unable to push through the Great Wall into China, turned west instead, with disastrous consequences for Rome. When it failed, it failed spectacularly: The Mongols simply swept over and around it and seized China – en route to conquering a Eurasian empire four times the size of Australia.

    Green Monster, Fenway Park, Boston – Built in 1912, the Boston Red Sox’s Fenway Park is showing its age. A bevy of newer parks, such as Baltimore’s Camden Yards, Denver’s Coors Field and San Francisco’s SBC Park emulate Fenway’s intimate layout and short sight lines, but boast bigger seats, better bathrooms and more abundant concession stands. But the one thing they can’t imitate is Fenway’s Green Monster, the 37-foot-high left field “fence” that has intimidated generations of American League sluggers. The huge wall is so inextricably associated with Red Sox (and Major League) history that talks about replacing Fenway with a new stadium begin and end with the demand that the Green Monster have its usual pride of place in any successor park.
    Vietnam Memorial – On their first take, still sensitive to the public rebuff they’d suffered during the unpopular Vietnam War, many veterans called Yale student Maya Lin’s simple inscribed walls “a gash of shame.” But further reflection revealed the genius of her design: the walls slowly descend into the earth, much as the U.S. slowly descended into the quagmire of Vietnam, presenting more and more names of the fallen. Gradually the walls ascend, much as the U.S. slowly extricated itself from the war, and the number of names lessens accordingly. Lin’s stark visual device astutely avoided politics – it neither extols the war nor disrespects the dead. It simply says to visitors, “An important thing happened and here are the names of the men who died because of it.”Walls of

    Jericho
    – Actually, Jericho has several walls, built one atop the other. That’s because the town has been inhabited since around 8,000 B.C., and each time a flood, fire or earthquake knocked down one set of walls, or new occupants moved in, a fresh set of walls would be constructed. Nobody’s quite sure which set Joshua’s trumpeters in the Old Testament knocked down, but archaeological evidence says it’s not implausible that the Hebrews could have been in the neighborhood when something big went down. For Jericho’s inhabitants, Joshua’s arrival probably wasn’t all that big a deal. After all, the town had been a going concern for 7,000 years by the time he arrived – long enough to have established a habit of rising from the rubble.

    Walls of Troy – It took the Greeks 10 years to figure out how penetrate Troy’s walls. The solution, of course, was to be invited in rather than constantly try to crash the party. Alas, the Trojans were the original teenage girls from those schlock horror films where, despite the audience yelling out, “Don’t open the door! Don’t open the door!,” they go ahead and do it anyway. The upside: We got the Iliad and the Odyssey out of it, two of the greatest poems ever recited and the basis – along with the Bible – of western literature.

    The Western (Wailing) Wall, Jerusalem – This high, scarred wall on the western edge of Temple Mount is believed to be a remnant of one of the colonnades that enclosed the Second Temple, built by King Herod around 19 B.C. and razed by the Romans in 70 A.D. (The first great temple of the Jews, built by King Solomon around 970 B.C., was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.) For many Orthodox Jews, coming to pray at this wall is the equivalent of a journey to Mecca for Muslims or a pilgrimage to Rome for Roman Catholics. Over a 2,500-year period, the Jews have been exiled or persecuted by Babylonians, Romans, Europeans and Arabs. Here, in the heart of their ancient capital, lies a remnant from a better time.

    Walls of the Kremlin – For years the high walls of this combination fortress, palace and cathedral hid the activities of Russia’s Soviet masters from the world. From here Stalin plotted his purges and mass murders, and his successors wrestled with the long Cold War that began under his reign. For all the terrible majesty and secretiveness that the Kremlin’s walls projected, they provided an ironic occasion of post-mortem humiliation for Stalin. Originally interred after his death in 1953 next to the demigod Lenin in the hulking mausoleum at the Kremlin’s heart, Stalin was unceremoniously demoted to a niche in the Kremlin wall in 1961 after Nikita Khrushchev repudiated his predecessor’s nasty ways.

    Forbidden City – The walls around the Chinese emperor’s Beijing compound were literal boundaries between life and death. Commoners were not allowed to set foot past them and those who did, whether by accident or intent, were executed without hesitation. After the Communist Revolution of 1949, the Forbidden City was opened to all subjects of the state. Today, the huge compound remains the heart and soul of the Chinese state and the only commoners who suffer for entering it are the ones carrying picket signs asking for civil rights.

    Wall Street – Back in the 1600s, Dutch settlers, fearing an attack from the British, built a defensive wall along the northern perimeter of their settlement in lower Manhattan. As New York City expanded north, the wall was removed and the street that now ran along its former length was named Wall in its memory. Later, Wall Street was to become the ur bastion of free market economics, serving as the clearinghouse and generator of untold wealth, as well as an object of worldwide envy or malice.

    Alcatraz Prison – Nobody’s really certain if any inmate ever successfully escaped from this island prison, and for that reason its rep remains intact as one of the toughest stirs ever built in the U.S. The funny thing is, though, that by 1963, when the Feds closed it, Alcatraz’s walls had become so deteriorated from salt air that three prisoners who escaped in 1962 (fates unknown) had scraped through the concrete with spoons they’d pilfered from the prison mess.

    The Atlantic Wall – Adolf Hitler dispatched the Desert Fox, Gen. Erwin Rommel, to build fortifications facing the English Channel that would protect the Atlantic flank of “Fortress Europa.” Rommel spent two years pouring millions of tons of reinforced concrete from Belgium to La Havre, constructing gun emplacements, barriers, tank traps and forts. In the event of an Allied invasion of France, the Atlantic Wall’s huge guns, supported by crack Wehrmacht tank divisions, were to hurl the invaders back to England. However, the Allies bamboozled the Germans into thinking, even days after the Normandy invasion was underway, that the real invasion was yet to come at Calais. When the Germans finally realized they’d been tricked, their great Atlantic Wall had been breached by several hundred thousand heavily armed Allied troops.

    Pink Floyd’s The Wall – “We don’ need no edukayshun, we don’ need no thought control.” The British rock group’s 1980s anthem to school kid surliness summed up in just a few ungrammatical sentences why civilization is always just one generation away from savagery.

  2. #2
    Senior Member crazybird's Avatar
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    civilization is always just one generation away from savagery.
    Ain't that the truth.
    Join our efforts to Secure America's Borders and End Illegal Immigration by Joining ALIPAC's E-Mail Alerts network (CLICK HERE)

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