Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY) compared President Trump’s border wall with the Berlin Wall, which served the opposite purpose—to keep people from escaping to capitalist West Germany in droves and isolating communist East Germany from the rest of the world.
“No matter how you feel about the wall, I think it’s a moral abomination,” Ocasio-Cortez said during a livestream to supporters last week.
“I think it’s like the Berlin Wall. I think it’s like any other wall designed to separate human beings and block out people who are running away from the humanitarian disasters. I just think it’s wrong,” she added.
Had Ocasio-Cortez done so much as a Google search before making this argument, she likely would’ve landed on a History.com article explaining the purpose of the Berlin Wall:
On August 13, 1961, the Communist government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) began to build a barbed wire and concrete “Antifascistischer Schutzwall,” or “antifascist bulwark,” between East and West Berlin. The official purpose of this Berlin Wall was to keep Western “fascists” from entering East Germany and undermining the socialist state, but it primarily served the objective of stemming mass defections from East to West. The Berlin Wall stood until November 9, 1989, when the head of the East German Communist Party announced that citizens of the GDR could cross the border whenever they pleased. That night, ecstatic crowds swarmed the wall. Some crossed freely into West Berlin, while others brought hammers and picks and began to chip away at the wall itself. To this day, the Berlin Wall remains one of the most powerful and enduring symbols of the Cold War.
Many on social media were quick to correct the Democratic Socialist.
“Dear @AOC: Let me serve as your private professor here. The Berlin Wall was meant to keep people inside the socialist/communist utopia and stop them from fleeing to the decadent capitalist west. So as the New Millennial Lenin, you might want to refrain from using this example,” Gad Saad, an evolutionary behavioral scientist at the John Molson School of Business, tweeted, reports FoxNews.com.
Dear @AOC: Let me serve as your private professor here. The Berlin Wall was meant to keep people inside the socialist/communist utopia and stop them from fleeing to the decadent capitalist west. So as the New Millennial Lenin, you might want to refrain from using this example.
— Gad Saad (@GadSaad) February 19, 2019
“The Berlin wall was built to stop East Germans from escaping into West Germany The goal of the border wall is to stop illegal immigration and trafficking,” Daily Wire reporter Ryan Saavedra noted.
Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) says the wall is “a moral abomination. I think it’s like the Berlin wall”
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) February 18, 2019
The Berlin wall was built to stop East Germans from escaping into West Germany
The goal of the border wall is to stop illegal immigration and trafficking pic.twitter.com/MbFWitkFBi