Top 10 Border Walls and their Effectiveness

[Music] he's safer here I'm sure all of my viewers no matter what nation you're from have been keenly aware of what's going on over here in America during this election season one of the main sticking points for Donald Trump's campaign is his constant talk of building a wall between us and Mexico now there's been no LAN to talk about the efficacy of building a wall mostly about the economics of doing so and the diplomatic fallout of doing such a thing there is no way that makes you go convey a wall like that but I think the pundits and the politicians are missing the most important thing in terms of border walls and their effectiveness and that is the history of whether or not previous border walls have been effective or not but of course that would require research but that's why I'm here so here's a top ten list of border walls throughout time and their effectiveness as a sidenote this list is necessarily arbitrary one has to first define what a wall is second no all walls that have ever been made and third choose a way of excluding walls that aren't for borders so this is obviously not definitive but it is a significant way to show the effectiveness of border walls starting us off at number 10 we're going back nearly two thousand years to the third dynasty of earth one of the many dynasties of the first civilization in history the Sumerians but they dealt with the same problems that any other Empire deals with mainly being able to control wide patches of territory and the Western tribes of their empire called the amorite s-- revolted against the emperor named shu sin so he had a wall built from the Tigris to the Euphrates in 1960 BC yet 1960 before Christ and of course the whole idea was to keep the revolt from crossing that border it didn't work of course and the amorite s-- overthrew that wall in only a couple of years this wall was a hundred and forty miles or 225 kilometers and these walls are only going to get longer from here office Dyke is kind of a weird one we actually don't know that much about it despite its name it probably wasn't created by alpha archaeological evidence shows that it probably predates him but in either case it is between the borders of the medieval kingdoms of Mercia and Powis which are now between England and Wales it runs a hundred and seventy-six miles or 280 kilometers and was most likely meant for demarcation and is definitely not defensively it's pretty much just a mound and a ditch there are theories about it being built by the Romans but another case there's a lot of debate about it and it never functioned as much more than demarcation and number eight we have chela jang seong now this might actually refer to two separate walls I'm just going to include both of these under number eight they're actually both roughly the same distance somewhere around 300 miles or 480 kilometers the first was built in 631 ad it was mostly a bunch of forts to keep out the Tang Dynasty who had been making incursions into Korea at that point in time but it was quickly abandoned because of trade agreements the second was built in 1044 and it was meant to keep out northern barbarians especially the darshan people who would later morph into the Manchus and it seems like this wall might have been fairly effective for a short period time though there's no real evidence to show this but another case the one was abandoned for further expansion and even made obsolete by the Mongol invasion of China it's hard to ascertain these walls effectiveness because they were both basically abandoned rather quickly they're building the wall so this one is actually fairly recent as in within the last two decades now the Israelis and the Palestinians do get out every once in a while on a near constant basis so the Israelis started building a wall around the Palestinians it currently runs 440 miles or 675 kilometers both around the West Bank and Gaza and they're planning on adding an extra 30 miles to West Bank this has actually been highly effective since these walls have gone up suicide bombings have gone tremendously down and typically come from different areas of course terrorists just simply rewrapped through Jordan Israel is of course trying to create border fences between them and Jordan but this has been longer to take effect and they're mostly fences rather than walls I chose to exclude fences since they're kind of hazily defined but in terms of stopping suicide bombing and it has worked tremendously well but at a very heavy cost warfare has changed between Israel and Palestine now works primarily with airborne weapons such as rockets there's also a lot of tunneling under these walls which is fairly hard to fight against Egypt itself has actually started trying to create walls that would stop the tunneling and actually engage in water warfare where they flood tunnels it is completely a mess let alone the toll it has taken on the Palestinians who now suffered because of the border between them and who would be their most significant trade partner they're building and that's such a cost and money and safety all the lives lost coming in at number six we have the Baltic Way and it is a very different kind of wall it was the longest human chain in history and it was meant to form a symbolic barrier on August 23rd of 1989 citizens of the Baltic States formed a human chain for 420 miles which is 675 kilometers through the middle of the Baltic States which are Estonia Latvia and Lithuania the symbolic wall was meant to show solidarity on the part of the Baltic States against the Soviet Union and because of their patriotism shown on this day they were the first States to fall out of the Warsaw Pact the fall of communism began with these people just holding hands [Music] there was no violence associated with it and it went off splendidly [Music] sitting at number 5 we have the serpent's wall also known as Trajan's wall these are miles of earthen walls in Ukraine without any known purpose or precise dating it is often assumed to be Roman hence Trajan but that is probably incorrect since there is archaeological evidence pointing to the contrary we have no evidence to show that these walls were of any use to anyone since they never formed the borders to any lasting Empire but many archaeologists assume that these walls were part of a competitive measure between various tribes in the area at the time but they were constantly duking it out and probably these were completely ineffectual the total distance of these walls is estimated to be around a thousand miles or 1600 kilometers at number four we have the Moroccan wall it forms a border in the disputed territory of Western Sahara Morocco controls most of that area but West Saharan nationalists controlled the eastern portion so the Moroccans started building a very extensive wall that runs about 1700 miles or 2700 kilometres demarcating the difference in controlled territory the project was began in 1982 and completed in 1987 it is heavily mined and militarized and built mostly out of sand so it's kind of like a long berm so one could think of it like a deadly version of the no-touching boundary between the US and Canada but in the middle of the desert and on land that is technically not an actual border but forms a real border because nobody wants to get blown up as they cross it so this wall has actually been highly effective in creating this difference in control but mostly because of people not wanting to get killed it also makes it so that the West Saharan nationalists control the least useful territory in the East which is pretty much nothing but uninhabited sand dunes it also costs Morocco a great deal to keep on Manning this wall for number three we have the inland customs line of India it also goes by the name of the great hedge who was originally built in 1843 and it ran for 2,500 miles or 4,000 kilometers and it was mostly set up to be able to collect salt tax for people coming into India it was originally just a bunch of custom houses but then they started building a fence and then nature kind of took over and it became more and more of a hedge it was extremely hard to enforce and they had to employ at least 14,000 staff members to be able to man this wall and keep on collecting tax it was originally meant to form a border between different Indian states some of which were under direct British rule and others under the system of the British Raj but after the Indian rebellion of 1857 the Raj was passed on from the British Indian company into direct rule and so these borders had less and less significance so the inland customs line became obsolete and it was eventually abandoned in 1879 yep you saw it right the Great Wall of China is number 2 we'll get to why that is with number 1 but let's talk about the great wall first of all there's not just one Great Wall of China there are many some of them meet some of them are branches off of each other some of them are completely separate but we can call them all one great wall the first one was built as early as the 7th century BC they were constructed in a bend and over and over again for centuries not being completed until the 17th century depending on what archaeological evidence you go with they could all be a total of 5,500 miles or 8850 kilometers or as long as 13,000 miles or 21,000 kilometers now 5,500 miles or 13,000 miles seems like a pretty huge difference but a lot of these walls have been destroyed over the years the original ones were meant to keep one dynasty that was fighting another separate sometimes even used as siege tactics but later they became more and more used to keep out northern barbarians those dishes that we talked about before were one of the enemies that they tried to keep out and then the Mongols although it is interesting to note that the Huns as in the Huns who would eventually be led by a Attila the Hun might have been one of the earliest barbarians that they had to keep out those guys will come up again by the way but as you might remember the Mongols and the Jurchens ended up taking over good chunks of China first the Jurchens came in then the Mongols and ultimately the Manchus invaded you know how I said that the wall was completed in the 17th century well it was supposed to stop the Manchus from invading Ming China but they failed miserably and so the Ming were taken over by another dynasty that were called the Ching and they ruled all the way until the revolution of 1911 so yeah the Great Wall of China is a magnificent engineering feat but it completely lacks practicality so number one is probably longer than the Great Wall of China but we just don't know because most of it has been destroyed it is the Roman Li mace this was a huge amount of fortification the Romans love building stuff in Great Britain alone there were two separately mates most of you have probably heard of Hadrian's Wall it was one of the two the other one being the Antonine wall the Antonine wall fell pretty quickly but Hadrian's Wall seems to have done well but Rome's main focus was not on Britain Britain was very far outside of their consideration in fact it was one of the first places that they pulled out of as they started getting invaded by more and more barbarians know the LeMay system was not just Britain it was throughout the empire that's right one of the largest empires with one of the most crazy land borders ever created had huge walls built throughout their empire some of these walls weren't really much of walls they were just kind of forts built in parallel to each other so that they could maintain eye contact and make sure that barbarians wouldn't cross those borders this was a gargantuan project and there were Lemay's throughout the empire even separating different regions and while Hadrian's Wall is definitely the best preserved and most famous it certainly wasn't the longest in fact it wasn't even the longest in Britannia but probably the longest of these Lemay's was the Lima astre Paulo Tennis there were long walls as in walls where they're covering just a singular passage that went for miles and miles and miles and all of it basically against the desert not the kind of Roman fortification that you think of very often but probably the most important LeMay was the leamas Germanicus specifically meant to keep out German barbarians well for those who know worm in history they're probably chuckling to themselves because the Romans were besieged by German barbarians towards the end and was basically part of what brought down the entire empire the failure of these lemis was what led to the Empire falling of course there's a whole bunch of stuff in terms of what caused these things to fail let alone the fact that they needed to stop this in the first place so there's a lot more to the fall of Rome than simply not having adequate fortifications but their fortifications did fail to keep out the German barbarians so yeah the greatest and most extensive network of walls ever in the history of the world were complete failures and their failure led to Rome falling now I'm by no means an expert in ancient history so I won't say what they could have done to do this whether it meant fortifying their borders even more and making the wall that was already pretty much the greatest wall in human history even more extensive or simply figure out another tact in order to deal with their enormous empire funny enough towards the end of the Roman Empire when they were dealing with the Saxon invasions of Britannia they also built walls as border walls along the English Channel that certainly didn't work well either so yeah greatest wall in human history completely ineffective and most of it doesn't even exist anymore that's why we have no estimate as to how long these limits actually were well I think I detect a bit of a pattern among all these really long barriers only work under a very particular conditions but those conditions are probably not and what is part of the rhetoric in all of this wall building stuff that is going on with the Trump campaign we're going to build the wall it's going to be built you see the only way long barriers actually work is if we're willing to kill a lot of people lethality is what makes these barriers work it also takes a lot of money a lot of work and just an inordinate amount of people to illustrate this point there's one barrier that I did not include on this list the us-mexico border fence we already have 518 miles or 935 kilometres of fence between the u.s. and Mexico it works so well that we need to build more we know in terms of the ones that have worked the best in this list that were border walls between people and we're not symbolic were extremely deadly specifically the Israeli Palestine barrier and the Moroccan wall yet they're only effective because they're lethally enforced now given the immunity that the Trump campaign has in terms of stupid statements I always want to get the Purple Heart this was much easier okay you got to see this guy oh I don't know what I said but you're invoking his race when talking about he can do his job I don't know how they would fare with this but I think that we might want to reconsider the rhetoric when suddenly it involves a lot of killing [Music] you [Music]

Channel: The Cynical Historian

Views: 76,239

Rating: 4.1724138 out of 5

Keywords: history, documentary, US-Mexico Border, Roman Limes, Great Walls of China, Inland Customs Line, Moroccan Wall, Serpent's Wall, Trajan's Wall, Baltic Way, Israeli Palestinian Barrier, Gaza Wall, West Bank Wall, Cheolli Jangseong, Offa’s Dyke, Shu-Sin Wall, border wall, border walls, top 10, effectiveness, Great Hedge, longest, walls, border fence, us-mexico border fence, trajans wall, cynical historian, top 10 border walls, serpent’s, great walls, trump, Donald Trump

Id: 1GNES9BUSoM

Length: 18min 43sec (1123 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 22 2016