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There is a version of this story that is simply funny — a bureaucrat misreads a note and accidentally ends the Cold War. And there is something genuinely absurd about it, something that feels almost like a punchline to a very long joke that history had been building toward for decades. But the more you sit with it, the less like a joke it feels. Think about what was actually required for November 9th, 1989 to happen the way it did. You needed Schabowski to be handed the note at the last minute.