Thursday Screening: February 29, 2024
East Berlin's underground escape route and the Catholic terrorism of years past
Happy Thursday. As I write this on Wednesday, news just broke that Mitch McConnell will step down as the Senate Minority Leader in November. I have incredibly mixed feelings about McConnell but there is no question he has been instrumental in the United States’ aid to Ukraine during the war. I’ll leave it to the more qualified to write about the complicated legacy he’ll leave as the chamber’s longest serving Republican leader but I will say hopefully while he’s still here he can persuade his colleagues in the House to pass the supplemental Ukraine aid bill the Senate sent them weeks ago.
On to the screening—This week we’ve got a short explanation of how enterprising East Germans attempted to flee the German Democratic Republic via the Federal Republic’s metro system and an overview of The Troubles.
Mind the Map: East Berlin’s Riskiest Escape Route: Cold War Ghost Stations Explained
Abandoned subway stations have always fascinated me, like the closed City Hall station in New York. But unlike the tourist attraction in Manhattan, it turns out parts of the Berlin metro were sealed up entirely during the Cold War. West German trains ran under East Germany necessitating the GDR to pave over the entrance and exits to the stations to stop any would-be escapees from utilizing the transit network to reach freedom in the West. But people desperate to escape the Iron Curtain still found ways to access the ghost station network:
IMPERIAL: The IRA’s War on London
It’s amazing how some five-hundred years after the Protestant Reformation kicked off the world is still grappling with the end of the Papacy’s monopoly on Christian theology. And yet the violence between Ireland’s Catholic and Protestant populations only ended twenty-six years ago. Modern terrorism conjures images of Salafi-Jihadists attempting to violently reconstitute a Caliphate or lone-wolf mass shootings in the United States, but in the back half of the twentieth century, the world was full of terrorism from plane hijackings to sectarian violence spurred by a desire for a united Ireland:
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The return of Shōgun to the small screen might direct interest back to the whole Catholic-Protestant schism.