Walls of misunderstanding

Ryszard Kapuscinski writes in Travels with Herodotus about the Great Wall of China

"That is how the world's energy is wasted. In complete irrationality! Complete futility! For the Great Wall -and it is gigantic, a wall-fortress, stretching for thousands of kilometers through uninhabited mountains and wilderness, an object of pride and, as I have mentioned, one of the wonders of the world- is also proof of a kind of human weakness, of an aberration, of a horrifying mistake; it is evidence of a historical inability of people [...] to communicate, to confer and jointly determine how best to deploy enormous reserves of human energy and intellect. [..]
The worst aspect of the wall is to turn so many people into its defenders and produce a mental attitude that sees a wall running through everything, imagines the world as being divided into an evil and inferior part, on the outside, and a good and superior part, on the inside"

Not just the Great Wall, but any wall would be the signature of a failure, the failure of human understanding. Ryszard Kapuscinski, a Polish, was writing this piece in the 50's, about 10 years before the Berlin Wall started to be built. Think this is Past? Walls are still being built or reinforced at the time of writing. Examples are the Israeli West Bank Barrier, The United States-Mexico barrier or the European fences in Ceuta and Melilla among many others.