“Walls”Essay by Antonio Calipjo Go, Forum Contributor
On November 9, 2019, Germany celebrated the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the guarded concrete barrier that physically and ideologically divided the city of Berlin during the Cold War from 1961 to 1991. Construction of this “Wall of Shame” began on August 13, 1961, cutting off West Berlin from East Berlin and surrounding East Germany to prevent the exodus of East Germans into West Berlin. A series of revolutions in Poland and Hungary in 1989 caused a chain reaction in East Germany that led to the demolition of the Wall in June 1990 and paved the way for German reunification.
Elsewhere in the world, however, such physical or ideological walls, or both, continue to rise.
The most recent is the United States-Mexico Border Wall, a series of vertical barriers along the border between Mexico and the U.S that are intended to reduce and eventually stop illegal migrant crossings from Mexico to the other side. Construction of this wall started in 1990 and continues to this day.
World history is replete with stories about the rise and fall of such walls and barriers.
The Walls of Troy (circa 1250 B.C.) served to protect the Trojans from the Greeks, their historical enemies. When Paris, a Trojan prince, kidnapped Helen, the beautiful wife of a Greek king, the Mycenaeans set sail for Troy to retrieve her. For the next 10 years, the two sides fought bitterly until the Greeks, through the use of subterfuge, finally seized Troy and burned it to the ground.
Hadrian’s Wall was a defensive fortification in the Roman province of Britannia. Begun in AD 122 during the reign of the Emperor Hadrian, it was the northernmost boundary of the Roman Empire meant to keep at bay the various tribes of ancient Britons, like the Picts.
The Great Wall of China, built from as early as the 7th century B.C., is the collective name of a series of walls built by the ancient kingdoms of China across their northern borders to defend themselves from the many nomadic and barbaric groups that lived on the steppes and deserts of Mongolia.
At the time of the Spanish colonization of the Philippines, Intramuros (Walled City) was synonymous to the City of Manila, which was then the archipelago’s seat and center of political power, religion, education, and economy. The Spaniards started to build those defensive walls in the late 16th century to protect the city from foreign invasions.
The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) divided all newly-discovered lands outside Europe between the Spanish Empire and the Portuguese Empire along a meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands off the west coast of Africa. All lands to the west would belong to Spain while all lands to the east would go to Portugal.
The Mason-Dixon Line (1763-1767) in North America was the informal border between the free Northern States (Union) and the slave-owning Southern States (Confederates). Today, that line is still used in the figurative sense to separate the U.S. North and U.S. South politically and socially.
A Demilitarized Zone is an area in which treaties and agreements between nations forbid military installations, activities or personnel; the zone lies along an established boundary between two or more military powers and often forms a de facto international border. The 38th Parallel between North Korea and South Korea, drawn by treaty at Panmunjom on July 27, 1953, is an example that persists to this day.
The Iron Curtain was a non-spatial boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1991. On the east side of the Iron
Curtain were countries allied with the Soviet Union; to the west, countries that were members of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
In the Asian mainland during the so-called Cold War, the Bamboo Curtain politically demarcated the Communist states of East Asia like China and Vietnam, on the one hand, and the non-communist countries of East, South and Southeast Asia, on the other.
On December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, in the United States, a black woman by the name of Rosa Parks rejected a white bus-driver’s order to relinquish her seat in the “colored section” of the bus to a white passenger when the “whites-only section” had already been filled. When she was arrested for civil disobedience, the Black community reacted by boycotting the Montgomery buses for over a year. Rosa Parks became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation.
When police raided the Stonewall Inn in Manhattan, New York City, on June 28, 1969, members of the enraged gay community spontaneously retaliated with a series of violent demonstrations. This marked the birth of the Gay Liberation Movement in the United States.
During the White minority rule in South Africa (1948 to 1990), Apartheid was the operative political and social system in that country, enforcing racial and ethnic discrimination against non-Whites based mainly on skin color. Under this system, the people of South Africa were segregated according to race and forced to live separately from each other.
Over the years in many countries, ghettos would grow in parts of cities where members of a minority group are forced to live through social, legal, or economic pressure. In Germany during the Holocaust (1941 to 1945), more than 1,000 Nazi ghettos were established to isolate Jewish populations for exploitation and eventual extermination as part of the dictator Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution.”
Even if they are abstract, non-spatial and intangible, walls are nevertheless concrete and real manifestations of extreme bias and prejudice, indifference and intolerance, meanness and wickedness. As so often spoken of in Scripture, these walls could only have been built with deaf stones. Still and all, the human heart remains the hardest wall to break and is the very last wall to fall.
Walls that wall off, of course, wall in just as well. Walls that keep us out also wall up and imprison us. Walls are good if they are meant to keep winter and wild beasts at bay, but wouldn’t humanity be undoubtedly much better off building bridges and roads that allow people to pass over instead of walls that obstruct and restrict their movements?
In sum, we need to eventually let all physical or ideological walls and barriers between peoples fall for the greater good. Only then can we fully appreciate the overarching hopeful message of this haiku by the 17th-century Japanese poet and samurai Mizuta Masahide:
“Now that my storehouse has burned down, nothing obstructs the view of the brightest moon.”As similarly told in the Book of Joshua in the Bible, we have to bring down the walls of Jericho for us to see the Star of Bethlehem.
Mr. Antonio Go, retired academic supervisor of the Marian School of Quezon City, is an advocate of good English usage who has been waging a lonely crusade against badly written English-language textbooks in the Philippines for many years now. Several of his no-nonsense critiques have appeared in the Forum’s “Advocacies” section.
A shorter version of "Walls" was published in the December 25, 2019 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
