This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, September 17, 2012. I'm Caleb Brown.

It's easy to talk about what you would do in the face of an oppressive government

determined to keep you from enjoying freedom.

It's quite another to do it.

David Bowes at Cato University in August detailed some of the everyday heroism that helped

hasten the fall of the Berlin Wall more than 20 years ago.

This story starts about 30 years ago, and I always wonder for the youngest people in the

audience how much of the backstory do I need to tell.

Once upon a time, the world was divided by an iron curtain into a more or less free world and a completely unfree world, the world of

the Soviet Union and Communist China.

And in 1978, as part of the Cold War, the United States decided it should place nuclear weapons in Europe,

and understandably the communist in Central Europe and Eastern Europe didn't like this idea.

And the East German communists encouraged their people to protest.

They were very big on protest in East Germany. If you wanted to

come out and protest against the United States, you could do that. So they wanted to

encourage protests and people did come out and they marched, no nuclear weapons in Europe. But some of these people

started talking about peace and what it meant. And a small peace movement grew up based in the remaining Protestant churches, which were attended mostly by old women.

There were a few Protestant churches, Lutheran churches still there.

And some people started going to these churches and praying for peace and they prayed against nuclear weapons in Europe, but they

also started praying against mandatory army service in East Germany and

against military classes that their children had to attend in grade school.

And that was not what the East German government had in mind and they started watching and persecuting these activists.

...