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17 episodes with communist east
CLOSE OF THE COLD WAR: 1/4: The Picnic:A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain by Matthew Longo (Author) https://www.amazon.com/Picnic-Dream-Freedom-Collapse-Curtain/dp/0393540774/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists organized a picnic on the border of Hungary and Austria. But this was not an ordinary picnic―it was located on the dangerous militarized frontier known as the Iron Curtain. Tacit permission from the highest state authorities could be revoked at any moment. On wisps of rumor, thousands of East German “vacationers” packed Hungarian campgrounds, awaiting an opportunity, fearing prison, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The Pan-European Picnic set the stage for the greatest border breach in Cold War history: hundreds crossed from the Communist East to the longed-for freedom of the West. Drawing on dozens of original interviews―including Hungarian activists and border guards, East German refugees, Stasi secret police, and the last Communist prime minister of Hungary―Matthew Longo tells a gripping and revelatory tale of the unraveling of the Iron Curtain and the birth of a new world order. Just a few months after the Picnic, the Berlin Wall fell, and the freedom for which the activists and refugees had abandoned their homes, risked imprisonment, sacrificed jobs, family, and friends, was suddenly available to everyone. But were they really free? And why, three decades since the Iron Curtain was torn down, have so many sought once again to build walls? Cinematically told, The Picnic recovers a time when it seemed possible for the world to change. With insight and panache, Longo explores the opportunities taken―and the opportunities we failed to take―in that pivotal moment. 1956 BUDAPEST
CLOSE OF THE COLD WAR: 2/4: The Picnic:A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain by Matthew Longo (Author) https://www.amazon.com/Picnic-Dream-Freedom-Collapse-Curtain/dp/0393540774/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists organized a picnic on the border of Hungary and Austria. But this was not an ordinary picnic―it was located on the dangerous militarized frontier known as the Iron Curtain. Tacit permission from the highest state authorities could be revoked at any moment. On wisps of rumor, thousands of East German “vacationers” packed Hungarian campgrounds, awaiting an opportunity, fearing prison, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The Pan-European Picnic set the stage for the greatest border breach in Cold War history: hundreds crossed from the Communist East to the longed-for freedom of the West. Drawing on dozens of original interviews―including Hungarian activists and border guards, East German refugees, Stasi secret police, and the last Communist prime minister of Hungary―Matthew Longo tells a gripping and revelatory tale of the unraveling of the Iron Curtain and the birth of a new world order. Just a few months after the Picnic, the Berlin Wall fell, and the freedom for which the activists and refugees had abandoned their homes, risked imprisonment, sacrificed jobs, family, and friends, was suddenly available to everyone. But were they really free? And why, three decades since the Iron Curtain was torn down, have so many sought once again to build walls? Cinematically told, The Picnic recovers a time when it seemed possible for the world to change. With insight and panache, Longo explores the opportunities taken―and the opportunities we failed to take―in that pivotal moment. 1837 BUCHAREST
CLOSE OF THE COLD WAR: 3/4: The Picnic:A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain by Matthew Longo (Author) https://www.amazon.com/Picnic-Dream-Freedom-Collapse-Curtain/dp/0393540774/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists organized a picnic on the border of Hungary and Austria. But this was not an ordinary picnic―it was located on the dangerous militarized frontier known as the Iron Curtain. Tacit permission from the highest state authorities could be revoked at any moment. On wisps of rumor, thousands of East German “vacationers” packed Hungarian campgrounds, awaiting an opportunity, fearing prison, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The Pan-European Picnic set the stage for the greatest border breach in Cold War history: hundreds crossed from the Communist East to the longed-for freedom of the West. Drawing on dozens of original interviews―including Hungarian activists and border guards, East German refugees, Stasi secret police, and the last Communist prime minister of Hungary―Matthew Longo tells a gripping and revelatory tale of the unraveling of the Iron Curtain and the birth of a new world order. Just a few months after the Picnic, the Berlin Wall fell, and the freedom for which the activists and refugees had abandoned their homes, risked imprisonment, sacrificed jobs, family, and friends, was suddenly available to everyone. But were they really free? And why, three decades since the Iron Curtain was torn down, have so many sought once again to build walls? Cinematically told, The Picnic recovers a time when it seemed possible for the world to change. With insight and panache, Longo explores the opportunities taken―and the opportunities we failed to take―in that pivotal moment. 1994 ROMANIA
CLOSE OF THE COLD WAR: 4/4: The Picnic:A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain by Matthew Longo (Author) https://www.amazon.com/Picnic-Dream-Freedom-Collapse-Curtain/dp/0393540774/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists organized a picnic on the border of Hungary and Austria. But this was not an ordinary picnic―it was located on the dangerous militarized frontier known as the Iron Curtain. Tacit permission from the highest state authorities could be revoked at any moment. On wisps of rumor, thousands of East German “vacationers” packed Hungarian campgrounds, awaiting an opportunity, fearing prison, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The Pan-European Picnic set the stage for the greatest border breach in Cold War history: hundreds crossed from the Communist East to the longed-for freedom of the West. Drawing on dozens of original interviews―including Hungarian activists and border guards, East German refugees, Stasi secret police, and the last Communist prime minister of Hungary―Matthew Longo tells a gripping and revelatory tale of the unraveling of the Iron Curtain and the birth of a new world order. Just a few months after the Picnic, the Berlin Wall fell, and the freedom for which the activists and refugees had abandoned their homes, risked imprisonment, sacrificed jobs, family, and friends, was suddenly available to everyone. But were they really free? And why, three decades since the Iron Curtain was torn down, have so many sought once again to build walls? Cinematically told, The Picnic recovers a time when it seemed possible for the world to change. With insight and panache, Longo explores the opportunities taken―and the opportunities we failed to take―in that pivotal moment. 1967 BERLIN
HAS THE IRON CURTAIN RETURNED? 1/4: The Picnic:A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain by Matthew Longo (Author) https://www.amazon.com/Picnic-Dream-Freedom-Collapse-Curtain/dp/0393540774/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists organized a picnic on the border of Hungary and Austria. But this was not an ordinary picnic―it was located on the dangerous militarized frontier known as the Iron Curtain. Tacit permission from the highest state authorities could be revoked at any moment. On wisps of rumor, thousands of East German “vacationers” packed Hungarian campgrounds, awaiting an opportunity, fearing prison, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The Pan-European Picnic set the stage for the greatest border breach in Cold War history: hundreds crossed from the Communist East to the longed-for freedom of the West. Drawing on dozens of original interviews―including Hungarian activists and border guards, East German refugees, Stasi secret police, and the last Communist prime minister of Hungary―Matthew Longo tells a gripping and revelatory tale of the unraveling of the Iron Curtain and the birth of a new world order. Just a few months after the Picnic, the Berlin Wall fell, and the freedom for which the activists and refugees had abandoned their homes, risked imprisonment, sacrificed jobs, family, and friends, was suddenly available to everyone. But were they really free? And why, three decades since the Iron Curtain was torn down, have so many sought once again to build walls? Cinematically told, The Picnic recovers a time when it seemed possible for the world to change. With insight and panache, Longo explores the opportunities taken―and the opportunities we failed to take―in that pivotal moment. 1882 BUCHAREST
HAS THE IRON CURTAIN RETURNED? 2/4: The Picnic:A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain by Matthew Longo (Author) https://www.amazon.com/Picnic-Dream-Freedom-Collapse-Curtain/dp/0393540774/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists organized a picnic on the border of Hungary and Austria. But this was not an ordinary picnic―it was located on the dangerous militarized frontier known as the Iron Curtain. Tacit permission from the highest state authorities could be revoked at any moment. On wisps of rumor, thousands of East German “vacationers” packed Hungarian campgrounds, awaiting an opportunity, fearing prison, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The Pan-European Picnic set the stage for the greatest border breach in Cold War history: hundreds crossed from the Communist East to the longed-for freedom of the West. Drawing on dozens of original interviews―including Hungarian activists and border guards, East German refugees, Stasi secret police, and the last Communist prime minister of Hungary―Matthew Longo tells a gripping and revelatory tale of the unraveling of the Iron Curtain and the birth of a new world order. Just a few months after the Picnic, the Berlin Wall fell, and the freedom for which the activists and refugees had abandoned their homes, risked imprisonment, sacrificed jobs, family, and friends, was suddenly available to everyone. But were they really free? And why, three decades since the Iron Curtain was torn down, have so many sought once again to build walls? Cinematically told, The Picnic recovers a time when it seemed possible for the world to change. With insight and panache, Longo explores the opportunities taken―and the opportunities we failed to take―in that pivotal moment. 1904 SERBIA CORONATION
HAS THE IRON CURTAIN RETURNED? 3/4: The Picnic:A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain by Matthew Longo (Author) https://www.amazon.com/Picnic-Dream-Freedom-Collapse-Curtain/dp/0393540774/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists organized a picnic on the border of Hungary and Austria. But this was not an ordinary picnic―it was located on the dangerous militarized frontier known as the Iron Curtain. Tacit permission from the highest state authorities could be revoked at any moment. On wisps of rumor, thousands of East German “vacationers” packed Hungarian campgrounds, awaiting an opportunity, fearing prison, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The Pan-European Picnic set the stage for the greatest border breach in Cold War history: hundreds crossed from the Communist East to the longed-for freedom of the West. Drawing on dozens of original interviews―including Hungarian activists and border guards, East German refugees, Stasi secret police, and the last Communist prime minister of Hungary―Matthew Longo tells a gripping and revelatory tale of the unraveling of the Iron Curtain and the birth of a new world order. Just a few months after the Picnic, the Berlin Wall fell, and the freedom for which the activists and refugees had abandoned their homes, risked imprisonment, sacrificed jobs, family, and friends, was suddenly available to everyone. But were they really free? And why, three decades since the Iron Curtain was torn down, have so many sought once again to build walls? Cinematically told, The Picnic recovers a time when it seemed possible for the world to change. With insight and panache, Longo explores the opportunities taken―and the opportunities we failed to take―in that pivotal moment. 1916 WARSAW
HAS THE IRON CURTAIN RETURNED? 4/4: The Picnic:A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain by Matthew Longo (Author) https://www.amazon.com/Picnic-Dream-Freedom-Collapse-Curtain/dp/0393540774/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists organized a picnic on the border of Hungary and Austria. But this was not an ordinary picnic―it was located on the dangerous militarized frontier known as the Iron Curtain. Tacit permission from the highest state authorities could be revoked at any moment. On wisps of rumor, thousands of East German “vacationers” packed Hungarian campgrounds, awaiting an opportunity, fearing prison, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The Pan-European Picnic set the stage for the greatest border breach in Cold War history: hundreds crossed from the Communist East to the longed-for freedom of the West. Drawing on dozens of original interviews―including Hungarian activists and border guards, East German refugees, Stasi secret police, and the last Communist prime minister of Hungary―Matthew Longo tells a gripping and revelatory tale of the unraveling of the Iron Curtain and the birth of a new world order. Just a few months after the Picnic, the Berlin Wall fell, and the freedom for which the activists and refugees had abandoned their homes, risked imprisonment, sacrificed jobs, family, and friends, was suddenly available to everyone. But were they really free? And why, three decades since the Iron Curtain was torn down, have so many sought once again to build walls? Cinematically told, The Picnic recovers a time when it seemed possible for the world to change. With insight and panache, Longo explores the opportunities taken―and the opportunities we failed to take―in that pivotal moment. 1930 MINSK
FLIGHT FROM THE DIMWITTED: 3/4: The Picnic:A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain by Matthew Longo (Author) https://www.amazon.com/Picnic-Dream-Freedom-Collapse-Curtain/dp/0393540774/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists organized a picnic on the border of Hungary and Austria. But this was not an ordinary picnic―it was located on the dangerous militarized frontier known as the Iron Curtain. Tacit permission from the highest state authorities could be revoked at any moment. On wisps of rumor, thousands of East German “vacationers” packed Hungarian campgrounds, awaiting an opportunity, fearing prison, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The Pan-European Picnic set the stage for the greatest border breach in Cold War history: hundreds crossed from the Communist East to the longed-for freedom of the West. Drawing on dozens of original interviews―including Hungarian activists and border guards, East German refugees, Stasi secret police, and the last Communist prime minister of Hungary―Matthew Longo tells a gripping and revelatory tale of the unraveling of the Iron Curtain and the birth of a new world order. Just a few months after the Picnic, the Berlin Wall fell, and the freedom for which the activists and refugees had abandoned their homes, risked imprisonment, sacrificed jobs, family, and friends, was suddenly available to everyone. But were they really free? And why, three decades since the Iron Curtain was torn down, have so many sought once again to build walls? Cinematically told, The Picnic recovers a time when it seemed possible for the world to change. With insight and panache, Longo explores the opportunities taken―and the opportunities we failed to take―in that pivotal moment. BERLIN 1967
FLIGHT FROM THE DIMWITTED: 4/4: The Picnic:A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain by Matthew Longo (Author) https://www.amazon.com/Picnic-Dream-Freedom-Collapse-Curtain/dp/0393540774/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists organized a picnic on the border of Hungary and Austria. But this was not an ordinary picnic―it was located on the dangerous militarized frontier known as the Iron Curtain. Tacit permission from the highest state authorities could be revoked at any moment. On wisps of rumor, thousands of East German “vacationers” packed Hungarian campgrounds, awaiting an opportunity, fearing prison, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The Pan-European Picnic set the stage for the greatest border breach in Cold War history: hundreds crossed from the Communist East to the longed-for freedom of the West. Drawing on dozens of original interviews―including Hungarian activists and border guards, East German refugees, Stasi secret police, and the last Communist prime minister of Hungary―Matthew Longo tells a gripping and revelatory tale of the unraveling of the Iron Curtain and the birth of a new world order. Just a few months after the Picnic, the Berlin Wall fell, and the freedom for which the activists and refugees had abandoned their homes, risked imprisonment, sacrificed jobs, family, and friends, was suddenly available to everyone. But were they really free? And why, three decades since the Iron Curtain was torn down, have so many sought once again to build walls? Cinematically told, The Picnic recovers a time when it seemed possible for the world to change. With insight and panache, Longo explores the opportunities taken―and the opportunities we failed to take―in that pivotal moment. 1956
FLIGHT FROM THE DIMWITTED: 1/4: The Picnic:A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain by Matthew Longo (Author) https://www.amazon.com/Picnic-Dream-Freedom-Collapse-Curtain/dp/0393540774/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists organized a picnic on the border of Hungary and Austria. But this was not an ordinary picnic―it was located on the dangerous militarized frontier known as the Iron Curtain. Tacit permission from the highest state authorities could be revoked at any moment. On wisps of rumor, thousands of East German “vacationers” packed Hungarian campgrounds, awaiting an opportunity, fearing prison, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The Pan-European Picnic set the stage for the greatest border breach in Cold War history: hundreds crossed from the Communist East to the longed-for freedom of the West. Drawing on dozens of original interviews―including Hungarian activists and border guards, East German refugees, Stasi secret police, and the last Communist prime minister of Hungary―Matthew Longo tells a gripping and revelatory tale of the unraveling of the Iron Curtain and the birth of a new world order. Just a few months after the Picnic, the Berlin Wall fell, and the freedom for which the activists and refugees had abandoned their homes, risked imprisonment, sacrificed jobs, family, and friends, was suddenly available to everyone. But were they really free? And why, three decades since the Iron Curtain was torn down, have so many sought once again to build walls? Cinematically told, The Picnic recovers a time when it seemed possible for the world to change. With insight and panache, Longo explores the opportunities taken―and the opportunities we failed to take―in that pivotal moment. 1961 BERLIN
FLIGHT FROM THE DIMWITTED: 2/4: The Picnic:A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain by Matthew Longo (Author) https://www.amazon.com/Picnic-Dream-Freedom-Collapse-Curtain/dp/0393540774/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists organized a picnic on the border of Hungary and Austria. But this was not an ordinary picnic―it was located on the dangerous militarized frontier known as the Iron Curtain. Tacit permission from the highest state authorities could be revoked at any moment. On wisps of rumor, thousands of East German “vacationers” packed Hungarian campgrounds, awaiting an opportunity, fearing prison, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The Pan-European Picnic set the stage for the greatest border breach in Cold War history: hundreds crossed from the Communist East to the longed-for freedom of the West. Drawing on dozens of original interviews―including Hungarian activists and border guards, East German refugees, Stasi secret police, and the last Communist prime minister of Hungary―Matthew Longo tells a gripping and revelatory tale of the unraveling of the Iron Curtain and the birth of a new world order. Just a few months after the Picnic, the Berlin Wall fell, and the freedom for which the activists and refugees had abandoned their homes, risked imprisonment, sacrificed jobs, family, and friends, was suddenly available to everyone. But were they really free? And why, three decades since the Iron Curtain was torn down, have so many sought once again to build walls? Cinematically told, The Picnic recovers a time when it seemed possible for the world to change. With insight and panache, Longo explores the opportunities taken―and the opportunities we failed to take―in that pivotal moment. AUGUST 1961 BERLIN
FBI- The American Stasi (Communist East German Secret Police) The Jesse Kelly Show. The FBI was just filmed raiding another medical whistleblower. Can the bureau continue to exist, or must it be ended? Jesse Kelly has some hard-hitting thoughts on the state of the FBI and gets reaction from FBI whistleblower Steve Friend. The Communist East German Stasi motto was “Shield and Sword of the Party”. How apt. The Jesse Kelly Show Jun 19 2024 Other Episodes ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jesse Kelly has written a new book, “The Anti-Communist Manifesto”. He discusses the daily assault Americans are facing on our freedoms from the insidious communist movement in this country. From weaponizing race, sex, and gender to hijacking our schools, communism threatens to destroy our cherished American way of life. Newt's guest is Jesse Kelly. He is a U.S. Marine veteran, a former Congressional candidate, and hosts Premiere Network's The Jesse Kelly Show and First TV's I'm Right with Jesse Kelly. Visit Jesse Kelly website at https://www.jessekellyshow.com/ Jesse Kelly is highly recommended by ACU. Subscribe for free. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Check out our ACU Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/ACUPodcast -------------------------------------------------------------------- HELP ACU SPREAD THE WORD! Please go to Apple Podcasts and give ACU a 5 star rating. Apple canceled us and now we are clawing our way back to the top. Don't let the Leftist win. Do it now! Thanks. Also Rate us on any platform you follow us on. It helps a lot. Forward this show to friends. 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ESCAPING THE FIRST COLD WAR TO LAND IN THE SECOND COLD WAR: 1/4 The Picnic: A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain Hardcover by Matthew Longo (Author) https://www.amazon.com/Picnic-Dream-Freedom-Collapse-Curtain/dp/0393540774/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists organized a picnic on the border of Hungary and Austria. But this was not an ordinary picnic―it was located on the dangerous militarized frontier known as the Iron Curtain. Tacit permission from the highest state authorities could be revoked at any moment. On wisps of rumor, thousands of East German “vacationers” packed Hungarian campgrounds, awaiting an opportunity, fearing prison, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The Pan-European Picnic set the stage for the greatest border breach in Cold War history: hundreds crossed from the Communist East to the longed-for freedom of the West. Drawing on dozens of original interviews―including Hungarian activists and border guards, East German refugees, Stasi secret police, and the last Communist prime minister of Hungary―Matthew Longo tells a gripping and revelatory tale of the unraveling of the Iron Curtain and the birth of a new world order. Just a few months after the Picnic, the Berlin Wall fell, and the freedom for which the activists and refugees had abandoned their homes, risked imprisonment, sacrificed jobs, family, and friends, was suddenly available to everyone. But were they really free? And why, three decades since the Iron Curtain was torn down, have so many sought once again to build walls? Cinematically told, The Picnic recovers a time when it seemed possible for the world to change. With insight and panache, Longo explores the opportunities taken―and the opportunities we failed to take―in that pivotal moment 1956 HUNGARY
ESCAPING THE FIRST COLD WAR TO LAND IN THE SECOND COLD WAR: 2/4 The Picnic: A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain Hardcover by Matthew Longo (Author) https://www.amazon.com/Picnic-Dream-Freedom-Collapse-Curtain/dp/0393540774/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists organized a picnic on the border of Hungary and Austria. But this was not an ordinary picnic―it was located on the dangerous militarized frontier known as the Iron Curtain. Tacit permission from the highest state authorities could be revoked at any moment. On wisps of rumor, thousands of East German “vacationers” packed Hungarian campgrounds, awaiting an opportunity, fearing prison, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The Pan-European Picnic set the stage for the greatest border breach in Cold War history: hundreds crossed from the Communist East to the longed-for freedom of the West. Drawing on dozens of original interviews―including Hungarian activists and border guards, East German refugees, Stasi secret police, and the last Communist prime minister of Hungary―Matthew Longo tells a gripping and revelatory tale of the unraveling of the Iron Curtain and the birth of a new world order. Just a few months after the Picnic, the Berlin Wall fell, and the freedom for which the activists and refugees had abandoned their homes, risked imprisonment, sacrificed jobs, family, and friends, was suddenly available to everyone. But were they really free? And why, three decades since the Iron Curtain was torn down, have so many sought once again to build walls? Cinematically told, The Picnic recovers a time when it seemed possible for the world to change. With insight and panache, Longo explores the opportunities taken―and the opportunities we failed to take―in that pivotal moment. 1956 HUNGARY
ESCAPING THE FIRST COLD WAR TO LAND IN THE SECOND COLD WAR: 3/4 The Picnic: A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain Hardcover by Matthew Longo (Author) https://www.amazon.com/Picnic-Dream-Freedom-Collapse-Curtain/dp/0393540774/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists organized a picnic on the border of Hungary and Austria. But this was not an ordinary picnic―it was located on the dangerous militarized frontier known as the Iron Curtain. Tacit permission from the highest state authorities could be revoked at any moment. On wisps of rumor, thousands of East German “vacationers” packed Hungarian campgrounds, awaiting an opportunity, fearing prison, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The Pan-European Picnic set the stage for the greatest border breach in Cold War history: hundreds crossed from the Communist East to the longed-for freedom of the West. Drawing on dozens of original interviews―including Hungarian activists and border guards, East German refugees, Stasi secret police, and the last Communist prime minister of Hungary―Matthew Longo tells a gripping and revelatory tale of the unraveling of the Iron Curtain and the birth of a new world order. Just a few months after the Picnic, the Berlin Wall fell, and the freedom for which the activists and refugees had abandoned their homes, risked imprisonment, sacrificed jobs, family, and friends, was suddenly available to everyone. But were they really free? And why, three decades since the Iron Curtain was torn down, have so many sought once again to build walls? Cinematically told, The Picnic recovers a time when it seemed possible for the world to change. With insight and panache, Longo explores the opportunities taken―and the opportunities we failed to take―in that pivotal moment. 1956 BUDAPEST
ESCAPING THE FIRST COLD WAR TO LAND IN THE SECOND COLD WAR: 4/4 The Picnic: A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain Hardcover by Matthew Longo (Author) https://www.amazon.com/Picnic-Dream-Freedom-Collapse-Curtain/dp/0393540774/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists organized a picnic on the border of Hungary and Austria. But this was not an ordinary picnic―it was located on the dangerous militarized frontier known as the Iron Curtain. Tacit permission from the highest state authorities could be revoked at any moment. On wisps of rumor, thousands of East German “vacationers” packed Hungarian campgrounds, awaiting an opportunity, fearing prison, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The Pan-European Picnic set the stage for the greatest border breach in Cold War history: hundreds crossed from the Communist East to the longed-for freedom of the West. Drawing on dozens of original interviews―including Hungarian activists and border guards, East German refugees, Stasi secret police, and the last Communist prime minister of Hungary―Matthew Longo tells a gripping and revelatory tale of the unraveling of the Iron Curtain and the birth of a new world order. Just a few months after the Picnic, the Berlin Wall fell, and the freedom for which the activists and refugees had abandoned their homes, risked imprisonment, sacrificed jobs, family, and friends, was suddenly available to everyone. But were they really free? And why, three decades since the Iron Curtain was torn down, have so many sought once again to build walls? Cinematically told, The Picnic recovers a time when it seemed possible for the world to change. With insight and panache, Longo explores the opportunities taken―and the opportunities we failed to take―in that pivotal moment. 1956 HUNGARY
1/4 The Picnic: A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain Hardcover by Matthew Longo (Author) https://www.amazon.com/Picnic-Dream-Freedom-Collapse-Curtain/dp/0393540774/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists organized a picnic on the border of Hungary and Austria. But this was not an ordinary picnic―it was located on the dangerous militarized frontier known as the Iron Curtain. Tacit permission from the highest state authorities could be revoked at any moment. On wisps of rumor, thousands of East German “vacationers” packed Hungarian campgrounds, awaiting an opportunity, fearing prison, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The Pan-European Picnic set the stage for the greatest border breach in Cold War history: hundreds crossed from the Communist East to the longed-for freedom of the West. Drawing on dozens of original interviews―including Hungarian activists and border guards, East German refugees, Stasi secret police, and the last Communist prime minister of Hungary―Matthew Longo tells a gripping and revelatory tale of the unraveling of the Iron Curtain and the birth of a new world order. Just a few months after the Picnic, the Berlin Wall fell, and the freedom for which the activists and refugees had abandoned their homes, risked imprisonment, sacrificed jobs, family, and friends, was suddenly available to everyone. But were they really free? And why, three decades since the Iron Curtain was torn down, have so many sought once again to build walls? Cinematically told, The Picnic recovers a time when it seemed possible for the world to change. With insight and panache, Longo explores the opportunities taken―and the opportunities we failed to take―in that pivotal moment. 1956 Hungarian Revolution
2/4 The Picnic: A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain Hardcover by Matthew Longo (Author) https://www.amazon.com/Picnic-Dream-Freedom-Collapse-Curtain/dp/0393540774/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists organized a picnic on the border of Hungary and Austria. But this was not an ordinary picnic―it was located on the dangerous militarized frontier known as the Iron Curtain. Tacit permission from the highest state authorities could be revoked at any moment. On wisps of rumor, thousands of East German “vacationers” packed Hungarian campgrounds, awaiting an opportunity, fearing prison, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The Pan-European Picnic set the stage for the greatest border breach in Cold War history: hundreds crossed from the Communist East to the longed-for freedom of the West. Drawing on dozens of original interviews―including Hungarian activists and border guards, East German refugees, Stasi secret police, and the last Communist prime minister of Hungary―Matthew Longo tells a gripping and revelatory tale of the unraveling of the Iron Curtain and the birth of a new world order. Just a few months after the Picnic, the Berlin Wall fell, and the freedom for which the activists and refugees had abandoned their homes, risked imprisonment, sacrificed jobs, family, and friends, was suddenly available to everyone. But were they really free? And why, three decades since the Iron Curtain was torn down, have so many sought once again to build walls? Cinematically told, The Picnic recovers a time when it seemed possible for the world to change. With insight and panache, Longo explores the opportunities taken―and the opportunities we failed to take―in that pivotal moment 1956 Hungarian Revolution
4/4 The Picnic: A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain Hardcover by Matthew Longo (Author) https://www.amazon.com/Picnic-Dream-Freedom-Collapse-Curtain/dp/0393540774/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists organized a picnic on the border of Hungary and Austria. But this was not an ordinary picnic―it was located on the dangerous militarized frontier known as the Iron Curtain. Tacit permission from the highest state authorities could be revoked at any moment. On wisps of rumor, thousands of East German “vacationers” packed Hungarian campgrounds, awaiting an opportunity, fearing prison, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The Pan-European Picnic set the stage for the greatest border breach in Cold War history: hundreds crossed from the Communist East to the longed-for freedom of the West. Drawing on dozens of original interviews―including Hungarian activists and border guards, East German refugees, Stasi secret police, and the last Communist prime minister of Hungary―Matthew Longo tells a gripping and revelatory tale of the unraveling of the Iron Curtain and the birth of a new world order. Just a few months after the Picnic, the Berlin Wall fell, and the freedom for which the activists and refugees had abandoned their homes, risked imprisonment, sacrificed jobs, family, and friends, was suddenly available to everyone. But were they really free? And why, three decades since the Iron Curtain was torn down, have so many sought once again to build walls? Cinematically told, The Picnic recovers a time when it seemed possible for the world to change. With insight and panache, Longo explores the opportunities taken―and the opportunities we failed to take―in that pivotal moment 1956 Hungarian Revolution
3/4 The Picnic: A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain Hardcover by Matthew Longo (Author) https://www.amazon.com/Picnic-Dream-Freedom-Collapse-Curtain/dp/0393540774/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists organized a picnic on the border of Hungary and Austria. But this was not an ordinary picnic―it was located on the dangerous militarized frontier known as the Iron Curtain. Tacit permission from the highest state authorities could be revoked at any moment. On wisps of rumor, thousands of East German “vacationers” packed Hungarian campgrounds, awaiting an opportunity, fearing prison, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The Pan-European Picnic set the stage for the greatest border breach in Cold War history: hundreds crossed from the Communist East to the longed-for freedom of the West. Drawing on dozens of original interviews―including Hungarian activists and border guards, East German refugees, Stasi secret police, and the last Communist prime minister of Hungary―Matthew Longo tells a gripping and revelatory tale of the unraveling of the Iron Curtain and the birth of a new world order. Just a few months after the Picnic, the Berlin Wall fell, and the freedom for which the activists and refugees had abandoned their homes, risked imprisonment, sacrificed jobs, family, and friends, was suddenly available to everyone. But were they really free? And why, three decades since the Iron Curtain was torn down, have so many sought once again to build walls? Cinematically told, The Picnic recovers a time when it seemed possible for the world to change. With insight and panache, Longo explores the opportunities taken―and the opportunities we failed to take―in that pivotal moment 1956 Hungarian Revolution
In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists did the unthinkable: they entered the forbidden militarised zone of the Iron Curtain - and held a picnic. Word had spread of what was going to happen. On wisps of rumour, thousands of East German 'holiday-makers' had made their way to the border between Hungary and Austria, awaiting an opportunity, fearing prison, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The stage was set for the greatest border breach in Cold War history: that day hundreds would cross from the Communist East to the longed-for freedom of the West. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Soviet Union - the so-called end of history - all would flow from those dramatic hours. Drawing on dozens of original interviews with those involved - activists and border guards, escapees and secret police, as well as the last Communist prime minister of Hungary Matthew Longo's book "The Picnic - An Escape to Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain" reconstructs this world-shaping event and its tumultuous aftermath. Freedom had been won but parents had been abandoned and families divided. Love affairs faltered and new lives had to be built from scratch. The Picnic is the story of a moment when the tide of history turned. It shows how freedom can be both a dream and disillusionment and how all we take for granted can vanish instantly... Book giveaway info here https://coldwarconversations.com/giveaway/ Buy the book and support the podcast here https://uk.bookshop.org/a/1549/9781847927798 The fight to preserve Cold War history continues and via a simple monthly donation, you will give me the ammunition to continue to preserve Cold War history. You'll become part of our community, get ad-free episodes, and get a sought-after CWC coaster as a thank you and you'll bask in the warm glow of knowing you are helping to preserve Cold War history. Just go to https://coldwarconversations.com/donate/ If a monthly contribution is not your cup of tea, we welcome one-off donations via the same link. Find the ideal gift for the Cold War enthusiast in your life! Just go to https://coldwarconversations.com/store/ Follow us on Twitter https://twitter.com/ColdWarPod Instagram https://www.instagram.com/coldwarconversations/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/groups/coldwarpod/ Youtube https://youtube.com/@ColdWarConversations Love history? Check out Into History at this link https://intohistory.com/coldwarpod 0:00 Introduction to the episode by Ian Sanders 4:47 Discussion on the political situation in Hungary in the late 80s 13:11 Gorbachev's view on Hungary's reforms and changes 23:26 Reaction of Hungarian hardliners to Imre Nagy's reburial 29:41 The tense atmosphere at the Warsaw pact meeting in Bucharest 37:49 The origin of the idea for a European picnic at the border 48:02 The impact on the Berlin Wall 57:23 The fatal shooting of Werner Schultz 1:00:38 The rapid changes that followed the opening of the border 1:07:42 Victor Orban's reimagining of history 1:11:53 Conclusion and promotion of Matthew Longo's book, The Picnic 1:12:33 Acknowledgements and closing remarks Chapters powered by PodcastAI✨ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
TONIGHT: The show begins in the future after a Russian victory in Ukraine, asking what would Ukraine look like, what would Europe look like, what of NATO? From the panicky factory managers of Shanghai to the new Senior Scientist of Astrobiology at NASA in DC. From the tunnels of Gaza to the Yemen mountains hiding the Houthis. From the evacuated North Border of Israel to the stringest horse in the Middle East. From Ottawa to Santiago. From the Red Sea to the South China Sea. With special attention to the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. 1849 China cat market CBS EYE ON THE WORLD WITH JOHN BATCHELOR FIRST HOUR 9-915 1/2:: #Ukraine: Simon Kuper aska what a Russian victory means for Ukraine, for Europe, for NATO? Anatol Lieven, Quincy Institute. https://on.ft.com/3NAyIim 915-930 2/2:: #Ukraine: Simon Kuper aska what a Russian victory means for Ukraine, for Europe, for NATO? Anatol Lieven, Quincy Institute. https://on.ft.com/3NAyIim 930-945 #PRC: #ScalaReport: Factory managers panic; Beijing blocks rare earth exports. Chris Riegel, Scal.com #Stratacache. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-21/china-bans-exports-of-some-rare-earth-processing-technologies-lqf1pzw8?sref=5g4GmFHo 945-1000 #"HotelMars: #NASA: Welcoming the new Senior Scientist for Astrobiology Strategy, Dr. David Grinspoon, NASA. https://funkyscience.net/news/# SECOND HOUR 10-1015 #Gaza: Sinwar in his private tunnels. Major Doron Spielman is a reservist spokesman in the IDF's spokesperson's unit. In his capacity as an IDF spokesperson,.. Malcolm Hoenlein @Conf_of_pres @mhoenlein1 https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/israel-offers-one-week-cease-fire-in-exchange-for-more-hostages-336ae59a?mod=hp_lead_pos4 https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/gazans-are-starting-to-blame-hamas-for-wartime-suffering-066256b0?mod=mhp 1015-1030 #Houthis: Thugs from the mountains looking for pelf. Haisam Hassanein, FDD. .His current research focuses on commercial diplomacy in the Middle East.. Malcolm Hoenlein @Conf_of_pres @mhoenlein1 https://nationalinterest.org/feature/can-saudi-arabia-forge-israel-palestine-peace-208044 https://www.reuters.com/world/us-red-sea-taskforce-gets-limited-backing-some-allies-2023-12-20/ 1030-1045 #Hezbollah: "It's not normal." Lieutenant Colonel (Res.) Sarit Zehavi is the founder and president of Alma – a nonprofit and an independent research and education center specialized in Israel's security challenges on its northern border. Malcolm Hoenlein @Conf_of_pres @mhoenlein1 https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/israel-hits-hezbollah-with-fresh-strikes-after-attacks-on-north/ https://israel-alma.org/2023/12/20/daily-update-israel-at-war-day-75-dec-20-2023-2000-pm-israel-time/ https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/mapping-clashes-along-israel-lebanon-border 1045-1100 #Israel: The strongest horse. Jonathan Ruhe- Jonathan Ruhe is Director of Foreign Policy at JINSA, the Jewish Institute for National Security of America. Malcolm Hoenlein @Conf_of_pres @mhoenlein1 https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/gaza-diplomacy-cements-qatars-global-mediator-role-29e0ffb7 https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/red-sea-attacks-on-ships-are-alarmingbut-markets-arent-panicking-07f32936?mod=hp_lead_pos5 https://www.fdd.org/analysis/op_eds/2023/12/20/deterring-the-houthis-wont-be-easy-for-the-red-sea-maritime-task-force/ THIRD HOUR 1100-1115 #Canada: #Israel: Justin Trudeau disappoints with a ceasefire remark. Conrad Black, National Post. https://nationalpost.com/opinion/no-excuse-for-trudeau-turning-his-back-on-israels-just-war 1115-1130 Two steps forward, two steps back. Mary Anastasia O'Grady, WSJ https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-chile-escape-stagnation-new-constitution-economic-deregulation-freedom-6c165b0c 1130-1145 The number of ships at sea cannot meet guarantee the freedom of the seas. Jerry Hendrix, Sagamore Institute Jerry Hendrix, Sagamore Institute https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-naval-deterrence-is-going-going-maybe-even-gone-iran-houthi-attacks-red-sea-097cf61f?mod=commentary_article_pos7 1145-1200 #USN: #RedSea: What is to be done? Jerry Hendrix, Sagamore Institute. Jerry Hendrix, Sagamore Institute https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-naval-deterrence-is-going-going-maybe-even-gone-iran-houthi-attacks-red-sea-097cf61f?mod=commentary_article_pos7 FOURTH HOUR 12-1215 1/4 The Picnic: A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain Hardcover by Matthew Longo (Author) https://www.amazon.com/Picnic-Dream-Freedom-Collapse-Curtain/dp/0393540774/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists organized a picnic on the border of Hungary and Austria. But this was not an ordinary picnic―it was located on the dangerous militarized frontier known as the Iron Curtain. Tacit permission from the highest state authorities could be revoked at any moment. On wisps of rumor, thousands of East German “vacationers” packed Hungarian campgrounds, awaiting an opportunity, fearing prison, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The Pan-European Picnic set the stage for the greatest border breach in Cold War history: hundreds crossed from the Communist East to the longed-for freedom of the West. Drawing on dozens of original interviews―including Hungarian activists and border guards, East German refugees, Stasi secret police, and the last Communist prime minister of Hungary―Matthew Longo tells a gripping and revelatory tale of the unraveling of the Iron Curtain and the birth of a new world order. Just a few months after the Picnic, the Berlin Wall fell, and the freedom for which the activists and refugees had abandoned their homes, risked imprisonment, sacrificed jobs, family, and friends, was suddenly available to everyone. But were they really free? And why, three decades since the Iron Curtain was torn down, have so many sought once again to build walls? Cinematically told, The Picnic recovers a time when it seemed possible for the world to change. With insight and panache, Longo explores the opportunities taken―and the opportunities we failed to take―in that pivotal moment 1215-1230 2/4 The Picnic: A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain Hardcover by Matthew Longo (Author) 1230-1245 3/4 The Picnic: A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain Hardcover by Matthew Longo (Author) 1245-100 am 4/4 The Picnic: A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain Hardcover by Matthew Longo (Author)
1/4 The Picnic: A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain Hardcover by Matthew Longo (Author) https://www.amazon.com/Picnic-Dream-Freedom-Collapse-Curtain/dp/0393540774/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists organized a picnic on the border of Hungary and Austria. But this was not an ordinary picnic―it was located on the dangerous militarized frontier known as the Iron Curtain. Tacit permission from the highest state authorities could be revoked at any moment. On wisps of rumor, thousands of East German “vacationers” packed Hungarian campgrounds, awaiting an opportunity, fearing prison, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The Pan-European Picnic set the stage for the greatest border breach in Cold War history: hundreds crossed from the Communist East to the longed-for freedom of the West. Drawing on dozens of original interviews―including Hungarian activists and border guards, East German refugees, Stasi secret police, and the last Communist prime minister of Hungary―Matthew Longo tells a gripping and revelatory tale of the unraveling of the Iron Curtain and the birth of a new world order. Just a few months after the Picnic, the Berlin Wall fell, and the freedom for which the activists and refugees had abandoned their homes, risked imprisonment, sacrificed jobs, family, and friends, was suddenly available to everyone. But were they really free? And why, three decades since the Iron Curtain was torn down, have so many sought once again to build walls? Cinematically told, The Picnic recovers a time when it seemed possible for the world to change. With insight and panache, Longo explores the opportunities taken―and the opportunities we failed to take―in that pivotal moment 1957 Hungarian-Austrian Border
2/4 The Picnic: A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain Hardcover by Matthew Longo (Author) https://www.amazon.com/Picnic-Dream-Freedom-Collapse-Curtain/dp/0393540774/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists organized a picnic on the border of Hungary and Austria. But this was not an ordinary picnic―it was located on the dangerous militarized frontier known as the Iron Curtain. Tacit permission from the highest state authorities could be revoked at any moment. On wisps of rumor, thousands of East German “vacationers” packed Hungarian campgrounds, awaiting an opportunity, fearing prison, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The Pan-European Picnic set the stage for the greatest border breach in Cold War history: hundreds crossed from the Communist East to the longed-for freedom of the West. Drawing on dozens of original interviews―including Hungarian activists and border guards, East German refugees, Stasi secret police, and the last Communist prime minister of Hungary―Matthew Longo tells a gripping and revelatory tale of the unraveling of the Iron Curtain and the birth of a new world order. Just a few months after the Picnic, the Berlin Wall fell, and the freedom for which the activists and refugees had abandoned their homes, risked imprisonment, sacrificed jobs, family, and friends, was suddenly available to everyone. But were they really free? And why, three decades since the Iron Curtain was torn down, have so many sought once again to build walls? Cinematically told, The Picnic recovers a time when it seemed possible for the world to change. With insight and panache, Longo explores the opportunities taken―and the opportunities we failed to take―in that pivotal moment 1956 Budapest
3/4 The Picnic: A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain Hardcover by Matthew Longo (Author) https://www.amazon.com/Picnic-Dream-Freedom-Collapse-Curtain/dp/0393540774/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists organized a picnic on the border of Hungary and Austria. But this was not an ordinary picnic―it was located on the dangerous militarized frontier known as the Iron Curtain. Tacit permission from the highest state authorities could be revoked at any moment. On wisps of rumor, thousands of East German “vacationers” packed Hungarian campgrounds, awaiting an opportunity, fearing prison, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The Pan-European Picnic set the stage for the greatest border breach in Cold War history: hundreds crossed from the Communist East to the longed-for freedom of the West. Drawing on dozens of original interviews―including Hungarian activists and border guards, East German refugees, Stasi secret police, and the last Communist prime minister of Hungary―Matthew Longo tells a gripping and revelatory tale of the unraveling of the Iron Curtain and the birth of a new world order. Just a few months after the Picnic, the Berlin Wall fell, and the freedom for which the activists and refugees had abandoned their homes, risked imprisonment, sacrificed jobs, family, and friends, was suddenly available to everyone. But were they really free? And why, three decades since the Iron Curtain was torn down, have so many sought once again to build walls? Cinematically told, The Picnic recovers a time when it seemed possible for the world to change. With insight and panache, Longo explores the opportunities taken―and the opportunities we failed to take―in that pivotal moment 1956 Budapest
4/4 The Picnic: A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain Hardcover by Matthew Longo (Author) https://www.amazon.com/Picnic-Dream-Freedom-Collapse-Curtain/dp/0393540774/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists organized a picnic on the border of Hungary and Austria. But this was not an ordinary picnic―it was located on the dangerous militarized frontier known as the Iron Curtain. Tacit permission from the highest state authorities could be revoked at any moment. On wisps of rumor, thousands of East German “vacationers” packed Hungarian campgrounds, awaiting an opportunity, fearing prison, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The Pan-European Picnic set the stage for the greatest border breach in Cold War history: hundreds crossed from the Communist East to the longed-for freedom of the West. Drawing on dozens of original interviews―including Hungarian activists and border guards, East German refugees, Stasi secret police, and the last Communist prime minister of Hungary―Matthew Longo tells a gripping and revelatory tale of the unraveling of the Iron Curtain and the birth of a new world order. Just a few months after the Picnic, the Berlin Wall fell, and the freedom for which the activists and refugees had abandoned their homes, risked imprisonment, sacrificed jobs, family, and friends, was suddenly available to everyone. But were they really free? And why, three decades since the Iron Curtain was torn down, have so many sought once again to build walls? Cinematically told, The Picnic recovers a time when it seemed possible for the world to change. With insight and panache, Longo explores the opportunities taken―and the opportunities we failed to take―in that pivotal moment 1956 Budapest
Yugoslavian planners considered themselves to be architects of a third way “between the blocs,” aligned neither with the capitalist West nor the Communist East, but rather masters of their own socio-economic destiny. This ramified in the economy and on the streets of Yugoslav cities in the form of supermarkets and their larger kin department stores. Ivana Zimbrek, PhD candidate in history at Central European University, investigates the history of Yugoslav department stores as the product of professional imagination in a markedly international context. While the department store as a retail technology had its origins in the explicitly capitalist United States, Yugoislav planners admired its efficiency and “cultural level,” and believed that they could turn it toward state-socialist purposes. As a result, indigenized department stores populated the new neighborhoods of growing capital cities, and later gained a place in the historic centers of smaller towns throughout Yugoslavia. Zimbrek studied a diverse archive of retail and department store materials housed in the Hagley Library collections to better understand American precedents and to compare and contrast them with the Yugoslav experience. In support of her work Zimbrek received a research grant from the Center for the History of Business, Technology, & Society at the Hagley Museum & Library. For more Hagley History Hangouts and more information, please visit us online at hagley.org.
Running 12500km from the Arctic Circle to the borders of Greece, the European Greenbelt is one of the most ambitious conservation schemes ever devised. The idea was to use the no man's land of the Iron Curtain that divided Communist East from Capitalist West as a wildlife corridor to allow rare and endangered species to travel unimpeded across the continent. On the 20th anniversary of the Greenbelt, the writer and anthropologist, Mary-Ann Ochota takes to the road, from the industrialised peat bogs of Finland through the Baltic states and Germany's dying forests to the peasant farms of the southern Balkans. The wildlife of these borderlands is rich and varied but the conservationists feel that they're battling forces bigger than those that created the Iron Curtain in the first place. Producer: Alasdair Cross
In May 1952 East Germany sealed its entire border with the capitalist west. Over the next 37 years 75,000 people would be arrested trying to flee the Communist East and hundreds would die in the attempt. Today the barbed wire and machine guns are gone and the old border has been transformed into a protected wildlife zone. It's a home to lynx, wolf and wildcat and a vital corridor for migrating birds and mammals. Mary-Ann Ochota begins her journey along the old border, meeting the people doing their bit to turn a birdwatcher's fantasy into the world's longest nature reserve. (Photo: Mary-Ann Ochota walks the route of the Iron Curtain through central Germany)
Mike: Common-ism [Theme song] Nazi SS UFOsLizards wearing human clothesHinduism's secret codesThese are nazi lies Race and IQ are in genesWarfare keeps the nation cleanWhiteness is an AIDS vaccineThese are nazi lies Hollow earth, white genocideMuslim's rampant femicideShooting suspects named Sam HydeHiter lived and no Jews died Army, navy, and the copsSecret service, special opsThey protect us, not sweatshopsThese are nazi lies Mike: Welcome to another episode of the Nazi Lies podcast. I'm happy to be joined by Rutgers History Professor, Paul Hanebrink, author of the really easy to read book, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism. The book charts the development of the belief that communism or certain forms of it are instruments of Jewish power and control, from its pre-history and medieval antisemitism and Red Scare propaganda, through his development among proto-fascist and ultimately a Nazi Party, and the legacy of fascist campaigns against Judeo-Bolshevism in former fascist states. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Hanebrink. Paul Hanebrink: Thanks very much for having me, it's a pleasure to be here. Mike: So before I opened your book, I was expecting to hear a story of the fascist myth of Judeo-Bolshevism as told primarily by fascists through to the present day, but that's not the story you tell. Instead, you tell more of a people's history of believing that Judaism and communism in whole or in part are linked and tied to bad things generally. Besides the fact that this is your area of expertise, why did you decide to tell this history? Paul: I'm glad that you picked up on that. I am very much interested in how this myth or this conspiracy theory connects to a whole host of other issues. And I came to it actually when I was in Hungary in the 1990s. I'm a historian of Hungary by training, and I was doing my research for my dissertation, and my dissertation was on Hungarian nationalism and its relationship to Christianity in the 1920s and '30s and '40s. I was really struck by how so many of the different phrases and ideas and, sort of, thinking about Jews and communism which I was reading in my archival sources during the day, were reflected in journalism and in sort of public discussion about the recently vanished communist regime and what that had meant for Hungary and for the Hungarian national society. And I knew also that this was not just a particularly Hungarian issue, that this same kind of conversation, the same kind of debates about the relationship of Jews to communism was going on in other countries across the former Soviet bloc, especially in Poland, especially in Romania. And I knew that it had also been a major factor in Nazi ideology and an issue that kept coming back in strange ways even in German society. So I wanted to try to think about why this idea had such legs, as it were, why it seemed to endure across so many different kinds of regimes, and also try to figure out why it was so ubiquitous if you will, why it could be appearing in so many different places and so many different societies simultaneously. And so the book is an attempt to try to paint a broad canvas in which I could explore the different things that it meant to different people at different times. Mike: Okay. One thing I brought up in book club was that the book almost feels like a military history in the way you tell it, very event- and people-heavy and diachronic across the chapters, but told geographically within the chapters. So talk a little bit about your choice of historiography, because it definitely feels like a careful choice you made in how consistent your style remains throughout. Paul: Yeah. Well, I mean, as I said, one of the things I wanted to do was I wanted to capture the sense that this was a conspiracy theory that was powerful in a lot of places at the same time, and that it didn't radiate out from one place to another, but that it sort of sprang up like mushrooms in a lot of different places in different periods throughout the 20th century. I wanted a broad geographical canvas, and I didn't want to just simply focus on one country or do a kind of comparison between two countries or something like that. So I wanted to sort of figure out a way to tell this as a European story, and to be able to track the different ways in which this conspiracy theory circulated across borders and from one political formation or political group to another and also over time. The other thing that I wanted to focus on with this book in addition to the broad geographical canvas was also the notion that I didn't want a book that was just going to be a lot of different antisemitic texts one after the other, and so I just kind of piled them up in a big heap and kind of read them closely and pulled out all the different symbolisms. I wanted instead, to try to show using carefully chosen examples of people or groups or political parties or moments in history or events to really show how this ideological substance, this conspiracy myth, became something that had meaning and had power for people that shaped the way in which they saw and interpreted what they were doing and what others were doing. And so for that reason, I think, very carefully throughout each chapter, I try to find actors in a way that I could hang the narrative on and that I could sort of develop the analysis by leading with specific kind of concrete, more vivid examples. And that may be perhaps what you picked up on when you were reading it. Mike: Okay, so let's get into it. A lot of people know kind of the rudiments of old-school antisemitism and anti-communism, but not how they co-evolved into the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism. So, how did antisemitism and anti-communism become modern? Paul: Yeah, it's an interesting question. What I wanted to try to think about in the book–and I explore this I think most carefully in the first chapter–is the way in which very old ideas about Jews, specifically about the ways in which Jews, have been used to symbolize in a sense a world turned upside down or illegitimate power or some kind of dystopia. And you can see this particular set of ideas throughout a number of centuries going back into the Middle Ages. So I begin with this, this idea that Jewish power is somehow illegitimate power. And then I look very carefully at the accusations that were circulating in Europe during World War I about Jews in a sense gathering power on the homefront while the true members of the nation were away on the front fighting. And so there was a real concern across Europe about Jewish loyalty and about Jews as being potential subversives or traitors or spies. And that feeds very easily into Jews as revolutionaries. So you have these two things that come together in that sort of end of World War I moment where also the Bolshevik revolution breaks out, and that there's this very old language that is familiar and comfortable to so many people thinking about Jews as eager to sort of accumulate illegitimate power, that's the very old story that reaches back to the Middle Ages, but tied to this very particular moment in European history in which there's concern about Jewish responsibility for the collapse, for example, of empires from Russia to the Austro-Hungarian empire, and the role that they're playing in revolutionary movements and revolutionary politics in so many different places across the European continent at that time. And I think it's the crucible of those two in that moment that really creates the Judeo-Bolshevik myth as a particular form of Jewish conspiracy theory. I'm not saying it's different. I'm saying that there are many different faces and iterations of the myth of a Jewish conspiracy, but that this is a particular one or particular version. And that it does particular ideological things, particular political things for people during the 20th century. Mike: Okay, so if modern anti-Semites and modern anti-communists largely belong to the right, their ideas coalesced into this conspiracy theory of Judeo-Bolshevism. Now you honestly don't spend a large amount of space in the book describing the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism, and there's two things going on in your book. On the one hand, you have the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism which is this theory that there is a secret cabal of Jews who control the world through joint efforts of banking finance and world communist movements that operate to destabilize Western civilization through financial panics and revolutions, so there's that. Then on the other hand there's what you spend more time on, which is the perception that communism or at least its excesses in actual existing communism, is Jewish in origin and operation. Like, it's not necessarily a belief in a conspiracy necessarily so much as a dislike of Jews and the belief that they're inordinately involved in communism. So when antisemitism and anti-communism became modern and intertwined, the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism, this totalizing conspiracy theory started to form. Who were the major players in that and what kinds of influence do they have? Paul: Yeah. I guess there are two things I want to pick up on in your question. The first is that I think you're right that I'm more interested in approaching the question in a particular way. And that is that, you know, a lot of the kind of antisemitic rhetoric and antisemitic ideology from the 20th century, there was this real insistence that you could somehow count the number of Jews who were in communist parties, and you could determine that this was a high number and that therefore Jews were somehow responsible for communism. And so much of the politics around trying to resist that was around kind of factually disproving that. I find it much more interesting to sort of not get drawn into the trap of saying, "Well, it's partly right or partly wrong," but to look instead at the way in which this conspiracy gained momentum, and that it came to seem so self-evidently right and sort of self-evidently commonsensical to so many different groups of people. And that brings me to the second part of your question. It's very interesting especially if you look at this moment right after World War I in the early 1920s across Europe, you find all kinds of different political groups across a wide selection of the political spectrum raising this conspiracy theory and using it to try to make sense of the fact that this massive revolutionary movement had broken out. So you certainly find fascists or perhaps proto-fascists, if you like, in the early 1920s really making this central to their ideology. Certainly you see that in the early Nazi Party but also in a number of the other far-right paramilitary groups that you can see active in different parts of Europe at this time. But also, you know, people who might call more mainstream conservatives, people who are definitely interested in a kind of national consolidation but very distrustful of the tactics of fascists or of national socialists, making use of this also, for example, to talk about threats to national sovereignty or threats to borders or, you know, the fear that Jewish refugees from war-torn parts of Eastern Europe are going to flood across the borders, and when they do, they're going to bring with them a revolutionary infection which is going to cause radicalism to break out at home. You can find it also among religious conservatives who are concerned primarily with the breakdown of moral and social order and who are interested in combating what they see as being the evils or the ills of secular modernism. They also blame Jewish communists for in a sense driving it, but also being a kind of reflection of these deeper secular trends which they strongly oppose. So you can find this language in a lot of different places, and there's, in a sense, kind of different coalitions in different countries that form among groups who disagree about a number of policy issues, but have a certain kind of common shared understanding that Jews and political activism, or left political activism and certainly revolutionary politics are somehow all related. And that somehow particular tension has to be paid to that constellation of threats in order to forestall or to ward off some kind of greater danger or challenge to the national body. Mike: So fascist parties rode the wave of the relative popularity of the Judeo-Bolshevism myth, and it became kind of a guiding philosophy in a way for fascist public policy. So talk about Judeo-Bolshevism in the hands of fascist states. Paul: Here I would fast forward to the late 1930s when you really see Nazi Germany making a pitch for being the most resolute enemy of communism on the European continent. I think one of the things that you can see as the Nazi vision of a new order of Europe comes into focus is that people–and far-right movements and far-right nationalist movements across the continent that see their own place in that and see a kind of shared goals and shared vision–find Judeo-Bolshevism almost a kind of shared language in which they can create common ground for working with or collaborating, if you like, with Nazi power. You can see this in France especially on the far right, just before and after the creation of Vichy and the military defeat of France in 1940. You see the far-right really seeing the Judeo-Bolshevik threat as a kind of glue which will allow them to work together with German power to regenerate France. You can also see this on the Eastern Front after the German army invades the Soviet Union in 1941 in Operation Barbarossa. You can find far-right Ukrainian nationalists, Lithuanian nationalists, Latvian nationalists who see the fight against Jewish communists as being a way to make common cause with Nazi power in the hopes that when the war is over, and as they believe, the Germans win, they will be able to reap the rewards by getting, for example, statehood or some other kind of political power. You see this also amongst some of Nazi Germany's East European allies in the war against the Soviet Union, both Hungary and Romania, although those two states are in bitter opposition over so many things, especially territorial claims. Both of them go to war on the side of Nazi Germany precisely because they believe that after the war is over and after Germany has won, they will get some special dispensation in the peace that follows. They go to war against the Soviet Union in the same belief that it's a crusade against Judeo-Bolshevik threat in the East, and that the war against the Soviet Union has to be fought in this way. And so fascist movements, fascist states, or fascists who would like to have a state in the future, see in the Judeo-Bolshevik threat not only a threat to their own national interest, but also a space of common ground or a space of cooperation which will allow them to work with Nazi power even if they disagree with Nazi ideology on other points, and even if the Nazi vision for Europe doesn't actually pan out for them in the way that they hope. Mike: Okay, so with the collapse of the fascist states came an almost immediate transformation of the public's perception of the Judeo-Bolshevism myth. So the new states that emerged were expected to denounce such prejudices as fascist and hence bad, and publics to varying degrees were expected to comply. So talk about the, shall we call it, 'withdrawal effects' of the collapse of fascist states on their publics? Paul: Yeah, you can see this most vividly in Eastern Europe where the collapse of fascism and the defeat of Nazi Germany is accompanied by the arrival of the Soviet Army and the immediate ambitions to political power of communist parties and communist movements across the region. You can see that communist parties have to struggle to seek legitimacy among people in societies where so many people are very well accustomed to thinking of communism as something alien, and also something Jewish. And so from the very beginning, you see communist parties and communist movements wrestling with the fact that in certain segments of society, there's a kind of association of them with Jewish power. And so they try to navigate this. You can also see it, for example, in the efforts by post-war regimes in transition that are either communist-controlled or on the way to being communist-controlled, who are having trials of war criminals. There are many people, you can see this in Hungary and in Romania, who look at these trials and you can say, "Well, these are not trials of fascists. This is in fact a kind of Jewish justice or a kind of Jewish revenge." And so they associate the search for or the desire for justice after the war and the desire to punish real criminals with illegitimate Jewish power that has only come into being because of the fact that the Soviet power has placed it there. And so the fact that there's a complete regime change doesn't change the fact that people across the region still have the memory of the legacy of this language that had been baked into all aspects of political life for the preceding two or three decades. And this very much shapes the way in which people see Soviet power, see Soviet takeover, see communist parties, see especially the crimes that Red Army soldiers commit–you know, rapes and seizures of property–are immediately associated in many people's minds as being somehow Jewish crimes. All of this seems plausible because fascist movements and fascist regimes had conspired with the Germans to eliminate Jewish presence from life across Eastern Europe. And now after 1945, survivors of the Holocaust are in public again trying to put together their lives. And so a group of people who had been absent from public space are back in it. And so that only kind of heightens the attention around Jews and around how suddenly the tables seem to have been turned and how the new political regimes that are coming into being are somehow antithetical to the true national interest or the true national identity. Mike: All right. There was also a certain evolution in the West in response to the experience of World War Two and its aftermath regarding Judaism and communism. What did that look like? Paul: Yeah, one of the things I found really interesting, and I did devote a chapter to it because I did find it so curious, is that at the same time that this story that I'm telling you in Eastern Europe was going on, there is this really interesting transformation of the relationship in political discourse of Jews and communism in Western Europe as a result of the Cold War. You can see this most clearly in the kind of ubiquity of the notion of Judeo-Christian civilization as the thing that Cold War liberals are going to protect against Communist aggression. And this very interesting migration of the adjective Judeo from, you know, Judeo-Bolshevism to Judeo-Christian civilization. And you can see this in all aspects of American popular culture and political culture in the '40s and '50s, a willingness to compare using theories of totalitarianism to compare Nazi crimes to Soviet crimes and to present Jews as being victims of both. But also to, you know, really kind of focusing on Jewish communists–there was a lot of focus for example on Ana Pauker in Romania who served as a really important Communist official–as being, you know, Jews who had lost their way and who had lost their sense of religious tradition and religious identity and become completely transformed morally into this almost monster. There are lots of articles about figures like this presenting her as being just something that's called a Stalin in a skirt or something like this. And these figures were then presented as being empowered by communism to attack the moral and religious values on which Western civilization was founded and which the US-led West was going to defend against Soviet expansion and the expansion especially of Communism and communist ideas into the West. I guess a way to bring it back is to say that there's a very interesting way in which this relationship of Jews and communism is completely recoded and reshuffled by Cold War liberals in the 1940s and 1950s to create this kind of very stout, multi-confessional anti-communism that was so prevalent in the US at that time. Mike: All right, so back to the East. So the death of Stalin and subsequent public inquests into his regime revealed excesses that shaped public perception and public policy across the former fascist world. How did the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism play in the post-Stalin world? Paul: You know what's really interesting is that once Stalin dies, there is a rush by Communist Party leaders across Eastern Europe to blame the excesses of Stalinism on somebody or some group in order to present themselves as charting a new way forward that is going to make communism more compatible with the national character, the true sort of national interests, or to create a kind of truly national path to communism. You can see this happening in Poland and Hungary and Romania and other places as well. And one of the ways in which that sort of political strategy works is by demonizing or accusing the most hardline Stalinist leaders who are now discredited for being anti-national or unnational, and for being Jews. And there were a number of figures who were sort of held up as being examples of this. You can see this in Hungary most clearly where the leading figures of the Communist Party in the early 1950s in the Stalinist period were all men of Jewish background. And so the Hungarian Communist regime, without really launching a major antisemitic campaign, let it be known in all sorts of different ways that this new way forward after the death of Stalin, after especially the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, was going to be built around creating a much more truly Hungarian form of communism that will *wink, wink, nod, nod* have many more ethnic Hungarians at the forefront. You can see something very similar going on in a number of different countries, coming most particularly to a head in 1968 in Poland when there is a major campaign against Jews, accusing them of being cosmopolitan, accusing them of being Zionist, as a way of saying that in fact, the Communist regime in Poland is the truly national regime and it truly represents the interests of the Polish nation. And so Jews become the enemy of this true national communism, and the fervor around that leads the vast majority of what remains of the Polish-Jewish community to emigrate in 1968, leaving what is today a very, very tiny community. Mike: Okay. So, eventually the communist states collapse and their economies are restructured along neoliberal lines. How does Judeo-Bolshevism rear its head? Paul: It rears its head, I think, in two ways. The first is in this, again, as a kind of an antithesis or a kind of opposition, you see right-wing nationalists coming to the fore in 1989 very ambitiously trying to create a new right-wing political party, new right-wing political movement in societies where that had been banned for decades. And they set themselves up as being the true spokespeople for the nation in opposition to the Communist regime that went before which they say was an imposition from abroad by forces that were anti-national, completely forgetting the ways in which the communist regimes across Eastern Europe had worked so hard to try to present themselves as national and to try to build up national legitimacy. And in that process, you find right-wing nationalists really very easily slipping into describing the regimes that had gone as being Jewish or inspired by Jews or recalling the role that Jews had played at various moments in it. So you see it coming back in this politics of memory. The other way in which you see it coming back, and it also has to do with historical memory, is the debates about how to understand World War II and the Holocaust. The stakes around that are very high because in the 1990s, as some of your listeners will undoubtedly remember, there was this new focus that continues to this day on Holocaust memory as being a kind of token or sign of a society that had embraced liberal values of human rights and democracy, the idea that you know, if we commemorate the Holocaust or remember the Holocaust, that's a sign that a society is developing towards becoming a mature democracy. And so for that reason there was a lot of intense interest in how the Holocaust should be represented, how it should be remembered, how it should be written about, how it should be talked about. And in a number of different societies across the former Communist East, you have nationalists who are very wary of this European liberal project, who express their wariness as a dissatisfaction with a memory of the war which they say is one-sided and which they say only prefaces the memories of what they would call "others' Jewish memory", and which doesn't pay sufficient attention to the crimes of communists that had been committed against “us,” “us” being the national community without Jews. And in those debates, there's a lot of focus on what role did Jews play in Communist coming to power right after World War II? What role did Jews play in those parts of Eastern Europe where the Soviet Army had turned up in 1939 in Eastern Poland, parts of Romania, for example? And, you know, did they welcome the Soviet Army and did they, at that time, betray the nation? And how should we remember that? So there was a lot of focus in the 1990s, and into today, about how Jews, communism, fascism, and the Holocaust should all be remembered. Some of your listeners might remember or know about the big controversy in Poland around the historian Jan Gross' book, Jedwabne, which had to do with a big, a truly terrible pogrom in which the Jews of this one particular town were killed by their neighbors. At the core of that event was the accusation that they had collaborated with the Soviets when the Soviets were in power between 1939 and 1941. And that that issue became a live one in Poland in the 2000s because it was tied up with these debates about how to remember the past, but also how to imagine the Polish future in Europe going forward. Mike: Okay, and now you take the book to the present day. So how does the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism live with us today? Paul: I think it lives in a number of different ways. The first place that you see it is in what you might call the ideological arsenal of the far-right in a lot of different countries. If you listened to, for example, what the marchers were saying in Charlottesville in 2017, many of them were talking about how Jews will not replace “us,” “us” being White nationalists. They also in a kind of knee-jerk way were going on about how they were opposed to communism, even though I don't think there were any communists anywhere in the area. But nonetheless, they saw communists as being somehow related. You can see this in the number of really horrific shootings of Jews by shooters in this country and elsewhere, where Jews are associated with immigration. There's this accusation that Jewish cosmopolitans are somehow ringleaders or are organizing the migration of other sorts of racial inferiors into the country. And that's a kind of real play and adaptation of something that was central to Nazi ideology. When, you know, Nazi Germany went to war against the Soviet Union, one of their main arguments was that the Soviet Union was controlled by Jews and that Jewish commissars were going to lead armies of racial subhumans or racial inferiors into the heart of Europe. And that the head of this Jewish-led army were going to be millions and millions of different kinds of migrants who were going to swamp Europe. You can see that kind of language being repurposed and repositioned by the far right to fit into immigration debates today. So that's one place: on the far right. The other place where you really see it is the, kind of, reshuffling of the Jewish conspiracy, and I think this is where I would say the book that I've written really tries to focus on how this particular version of the Jewish conspiracy theory or the Jewish conspiracy myth or the myths of Jewish power took a particular form at a particular historical moment in the 20th century. And that with the end of communism, there has been a reshuffling, and so now the face of the Jewish enemy or the great threat is not a Jewish communist like, let's say, Leon Trotsky who figures so prominently in anti-communist ideology throughout the 20th century, but is now someone like George Soros who is anything but a communist, obviously. He is a very wealthy financier, someone who's not only made a lot of money in the financial markets but also is using it to try to promote things like the open society through his nongovernmental organizations. And so you see this idea of an international Jewish plot or an international Jewish conspiracy linked to things like cosmopolitanism, which are anti-national. These themes have been reshuffled, refolded, and repurposed into a now what is the post-communist age. And so in some sense, if the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism is becoming a kind of substance of historical memory, you can see the conspiracy theory that was at the heart of it lives on because it has acquired, in a sense, new clothes. There's new language to talk about it because it's being fit into new scenarios and put to new purposes. Mike: All right. Well, Dr. Hanebrink, thank you so much for coming on the Nazi Lies Podcast to talk about the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism. The book, again, is A Spectre Haunting Europe, out from the Belknap Press which is an imprint of Harvard. Dr. Hanebrink, thank you once again. Paul: Thank you very much for having me, it was a pleasure talking with you. Mike: The Nazi Lies book club meets every week to discuss the books of upcoming guests on the podcast. Come join us on Discord. A subscription to Patreon gets you access starting as low as $2. Thanks for listening. [Theme song]
Today we chat with the author of Interflug - East Germany's airline, Sebastian Schmitz. This is the first book published in English about Interflug. Don't worry though, you do not need to be an aviation nerd to enjoy this one! In this episode, we ask Sebastian your questions as we learn more about Interflug, her history, her planes, her employees and her passengers on the East Germany Podcast. And Much More Communist East Germany's Interflug was an airline like no other. Their route map was flown by exotic Soviet-built airliners and shaped by political alliances, with trips into war zones in some of the most obscure corners of the planet, all under the constant surveillance of an ever-present police state.
In 2014, Saudi Arabian blogger Raif Badawi was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for insulting Islam by promoting secular values on his blog Free Saudi Liberals. Raif Badawi’s fate would have been familiar to Soviet refusenik and human rights activist Natan Sharansky, and many other dissidents in the Soviet Bloc, who also faced long prison sentences and inhuman treatment during the Cold War. Both theocratic and communist states proclaim to be in possession of the “truth.” Consequently, they punish those who engage in religious or ideological heresy, leaving little room for the idea of human rights. So, it is no surprise that in 1948, Saudi Arabia and six European Communist states were among the eight countries that did not vote in favor of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Both communist and Islamic states developed cautious strategies to engage with the growing human rights system in order to seek legitimacy without undermining their grip on power. One key strategy was to pull the teeth from the protection of free expression by including simultaneous obligations to prohibit the broadly defined concept of “incitement to hatred.” But ultimately the very human rights language which the communist states had sought to contain ended up eroding the communist stranglehold on power. But the repressive legacy of Communism had a long half-life, even after the ideology itself was dumped on the ash heap of history at the end of the Cold War. The countries in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation — the OIC — sought to exploit the very loopholes that the communist states had introduced for their own purposes. Instead of protecting an atheistic and materialistic ideology, they advanced an interpretation of human rights where restrictions on free speech protected theistic and metaphysical Islamic doctrines from criticism and satire. And while a concerted global effort by democracies successfully beat back the OIC offensive at the UN, this conflict is still ongoing. In fact, the democracies and human rights system of Western Europe have internalized and expanded limitations on free speech, which they once deemed dangerous. This raises the question of just how robust the future of free speech — and the culture on which it depends — really is. In this episode we will explore: How the Communist East and the Capitalist West clashed over the limits of free speech when drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights at the UN; How Eleanor Roosevelt became a dogged and eloquent defender of principled free speech protections and warned against Soviet attempts to abuse hate speech restrictions to punish all dissent; How the American position at the UN clashed with domestic laws targeting communists under the Second Red Scare and McCarthyism; How the Soviet Bloc used laws against “incitement” to punish hundreds of dissidents and human rights activists behind the Iron Curtain; How the Helsinki Final Act provided dissidents with a tool to hold their governments morally accountable for human rights violations; How Western states and human rights NGOs gave dissidents like Vaclav Havel and Andrei Sakharov a voice and increased the pressure on the Soviet Bloc; How the Helsinki Final Act contributed to the fall of Communism; How, after the end of the Cold War, the OIC launched a campaign to prohibit “defamation of religions” at the UN; How the OIC campaign managed to secure majorities at the UN and conflate blasphemy and hate speech; How the OIC campaign was defeated by the Obama administration and the application of the Supreme Court decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio; and How case law from the European Court of Human Rights undermines efforts to prevent future abuse of human rights to limit freedom of expression. Why have kings, emperors, and governments killed and imprisoned people to shut them up? And why have countless people risked death and imprisonment to express their beliefs? Jacob Mchangama guides you through the history of free speech from the trial of Socrates to the Great Firewall. You can subscribe and listen to Clear and Present Danger on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, YouTube, TuneIn, and Stitcher, or download episodes directly from SoundCloud. Stay up to date with Clear and Present Danger on the show’s Facebook and Twitter pages. Email us feedback at freespeechhistory@gmail.com.
Jay Dyer returns to Our Interesting Times to discuss his third lecture on Carroll Quigley's Tragedy and Hope. We talk about the banker-financed Bolshevik Revolution, Stalinism, the rise of the Third Reich, power blocs, why Russia and Germany were problems for the Atlanticists, and why both continental powers needed to by destroyed. We also talk about the philosophical corruption that has taken over Western thought since the Enlightenment and how the hardcore Marxist model of the Communist East and Fabian model of the Capitalist West were designed by the Bankers to take humanity to the same dismal destination.
There are certain dates that every European historian knows. Among them are 1348 (The Black Death), 1517 (The Reformation), 1648 (The Peace of Westphalia), 1789 (The French Revolution), 1848 (The Revolutions of 1848), 1914 (The beginning of World War I), 1933 (Hitler comes to power), and 1945 (The end of World War II). Two decades ago we added another date to the roster of “historical” years–1989. In ’89 the world really did change: the hallmark of an entire historical epoch–the struggle between the Capitalist West and the Communist East–came to a sudden end. The Berlin Wall came down, the Soviets withdrew from Eastern Europe, the Communist Parties of Eastern Europe relinquished power, new democratic states emerged, and people danced in the streets. At least for a while. To say that nobody saw ’89 coming would be a bit of an exaggeration: people had been predicting the decline of Soviet power in Eastern Europe for decades. Like all regularly made predictions (“Prices will fall…”), this one eventually came true. Still, the events of ’89 were unexpected. What the heck happened? If anyone knows, it’s Padraic Kenney. Not only has he spent his entire (prodigious) scholarly career studying modern Eastern European history, but he was there when it all happened. He published the classic account of ’89 in ’93 (A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989 (Princeton UP, 2003)) and since then two other books about it as well (The Burdens of Freedom. Eastern Europe Since 1989 (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2006); 1989: Democratic Revolutions at the Cold War’s End (Bedford-St. Martin’s, 2009). In this interview, he tells us how it all went down (or up, depending on your perspective). Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
There are certain dates that every European historian knows. Among them are 1348 (The Black Death), 1517 (The Reformation), 1648 (The Peace of Westphalia), 1789 (The French Revolution), 1848 (The Revolutions of 1848), 1914 (The beginning of World War I), 1933 (Hitler comes to power), and 1945 (The end of World War II). Two decades ago we added another date to the roster of “historical” years–1989. In ’89 the world really did change: the hallmark of an entire historical epoch–the struggle between the Capitalist West and the Communist East–came to a sudden end. The Berlin Wall came down, the Soviets withdrew from Eastern Europe, the Communist Parties of Eastern Europe relinquished power, new democratic states emerged, and people danced in the streets. At least for a while. To say that nobody saw ’89 coming would be a bit of an exaggeration: people had been predicting the decline of Soviet power in Eastern Europe for decades. Like all regularly made predictions (“Prices will fall…”), this one eventually came true. Still, the events of ’89 were unexpected. What the heck happened? If anyone knows, it’s Padraic Kenney. Not only has he spent his entire (prodigious) scholarly career studying modern Eastern European history, but he was there when it all happened. He published the classic account of ’89 in ’93 (A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989 (Princeton UP, 2003)) and since then two other books about it as well (The Burdens of Freedom. Eastern Europe Since 1989 (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2006); 1989: Democratic Revolutions at the Cold War’s End (Bedford-St. Martin’s, 2009). In this interview, he tells us how it all went down (or up, depending on your perspective). Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
There are certain dates that every European historian knows. Among them are 1348 (The Black Death), 1517 (The Reformation), 1648 (The Peace of Westphalia), 1789 (The French Revolution), 1848 (The Revolutions of 1848), 1914 (The beginning of World War I), 1933 (Hitler comes to power), and 1945 (The end of World War II). Two decades ago we added another date to the roster of “historical” years–1989. In ’89 the world really did change: the hallmark of an entire historical epoch–the struggle between the Capitalist West and the Communist East–came to a sudden end. The Berlin Wall came down, the Soviets withdrew from Eastern Europe, the Communist Parties of Eastern Europe relinquished power, new democratic states emerged, and people danced in the streets. At least for a while. To say that nobody saw ’89 coming would be a bit of an exaggeration: people had been predicting the decline of Soviet power in Eastern Europe for decades. Like all regularly made predictions (“Prices will fall…”), this one eventually came true. Still, the events of ’89 were unexpected. What the heck happened? If anyone knows, it’s Padraic Kenney. Not only has he spent his entire (prodigious) scholarly career studying modern Eastern European history, but he was there when it all happened. He published the classic account of ’89 in ’93 (A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989 (Princeton UP, 2003)) and since then two other books about it as well (The Burdens of Freedom. Eastern Europe Since 1989 (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2006); 1989: Democratic Revolutions at the Cold War’s End (Bedford-St. Martin’s, 2009). In this interview, he tells us how it all went down (or up, depending on your perspective). Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
There are certain dates that every European historian knows. Among them are 1348 (The Black Death), 1517 (The Reformation), 1648 (The Peace of Westphalia), 1789 (The French Revolution), 1848 (The Revolutions of 1848), 1914 (The beginning of World War I), 1933 (Hitler comes to power), and 1945 (The end of World War II). Two decades ago we added another date to the roster of “historical” years–1989. In ’89 the world really did change: the hallmark of an entire historical epoch–the struggle between the Capitalist West and the Communist East–came to a sudden end. The Berlin Wall came down, the Soviets withdrew from Eastern Europe, the Communist Parties of Eastern Europe relinquished power, new democratic states emerged, and people danced in the streets. At least for a while. To say that nobody saw ’89 coming would be a bit of an exaggeration: people had been predicting the decline of Soviet power in Eastern Europe for decades. Like all regularly made predictions (“Prices will fall…”), this one eventually came true. Still, the events of ’89 were unexpected. What the heck happened? If anyone knows, it’s Padraic Kenney. Not only has he spent his entire (prodigious) scholarly career studying modern Eastern European history, but he was there when it all happened. He published the classic account of ’89 in ’93 (A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989 (Princeton UP, 2003)) and since then two other books about it as well (The Burdens of Freedom. Eastern Europe Since 1989 (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2006); 1989: Democratic Revolutions at the Cold War’s End (Bedford-St. Martin’s, 2009). In this interview, he tells us how it all went down (or up, depending on your perspective). Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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