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One-hundred-and-seventy-four years after a bunch of American slave owners made their fuck-you-Britain freedom document saying pasty penisfolk are all created equal, they began filling the Eastern European airwaves with all sorts of news about how awesome that freedom is and how their commie overlords were totally shitty. And it worked.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: July 4, 1950--
Radio Free Europe launched on July 4, 1950, paid for by the good ol’ U.S. of ‘murica. Now while America hasn’t exactly been the beacon of freedom and justice and BBQ that you see in the movies, the Soviet Union was, comparatively speaking, not a fun place to live. Extremism sucks. On one side we have right-wing extremism, which is called fascism, and that’s bad. Hitler was the epitome of just how bad that can get. Trump wanted to be like Hitler, but fortunately America had its shit together enough to prevent him from fulfilling such dreams.
Communism is another form of political extremism at the other end of the spectrum, and as we’ve seen in places like the USSR, China, Cambodia, and North Korea, their autocratic communist regimes can be murderous as fuck. Cue the “tankies” who say “tHaT’s nOt rEaL cOmMuNisM”. Shut the fuck up, tankie. What’s a tankie? Someone who thinks Stalin was awesome. ‘Nuff said.
Anyway this fucking radio station.
Yeah our media may not be free from biases, but in Eastern Europe it wasn’t just biased, it was tightly controlled by the government. There was a lot of information and news that people just did not have access to in Eastern Europe because the government wanted to keep them ignorant. So Radio Free Europe blasted news eastward in order to alleviate that ignorance, reaching an estimated 35 million listeners.
Broadcasting from Munich in West Germany, RFE told the news stories to Eastern Europe that their governments didn’t want them to hear: tales of anti-Soviet protests, nationalist movements, and stories of defections of popular figures to the West. After an uprising in East Berlin in 1953, which was brutally suppressed by the Soviet army, RFE listeners grew substantially.
There was a major fuck up in 1956 though. Hungarians started to rebel against the Soviets and RFE started broadcasting messages of fuck yeah do it and the USA will be there to help you and President Eisenhower was all no we fucking won’t shut the fuck up you’re gonna start World War III.
RFE is credited with playing a critical role in the death of communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe. After the end of the cold war it significantly curtailed operations. Also going by “Radio Liberty,” it still operates broadcasting to 23 countries in 27 languages, including to areas of Asia and the Middle East where, according to the RFE, “the free flow of information is either banned by government authorities or not fully developed.”
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This is just such a great piece; just love your writing-style.*
I learn something new about events I thought I already knew much about.
*You reach out and grab the reader and I dig that about you. ✊