"To know what the West stood for during most of those years, one merely had to go to Berlin, see the Wall..."

"... consider its purpose, and observe the contrasts between the vibrant prosperity on one side of the city and the oppressive monotony on the other. Those contrasts were even more apparent to the Germans trapped on the wrong side of the Wall. Barbed wire, closed military zones and the machinery of communist propaganda could keep the prosperity of the West out of sight of most people living east of the Iron Curtain. But that wasn't true for the people of East Berlin, many of whom merely had to look out their windows to understand how empty and cynical were the promises of socialism compared to the reality of a free-market system."