Posted by:
Lot's Wife
(
)
Date: May 21, 2023 05:19AM
blindguy Wrote:
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>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Europe/Ra> dio_Liberty
>
> While RFE and RL were not AM-based (they wer/are
> shortwave; I remember picking up the former a
> couple of times during the 1980s and 1990s on my
> own SW rig), both were effective at getting the
> U.S. message and supplying actual news to
> Communist-block countries and the Soviet Union.
> And I wouldn't be surprised if, particularly in
> eastern European countries that bordered NATO
> countries, especially East Germany and West
> Berlin, if local AM radio from some of the
> non-Communist countries was helpful in informing
> these countries' citizens about what was going on
> in the West and eastern European countries and the
> Soviet Union that those countries weren't airing
> on their own stations.
Agreed. But it is easy to overestimate the effect such broadcasts had. Consider RFE broadcasts encouraging Hungarians and Czechoslovakians to rise against the USSR in 1956 and 1968, respectively. In both cases the US lived to regret having instigated rebellions that produced nothing but the death of naive young democrats when the tanks rolled in.
The fall of the Iron Curtain did not stem measurably from RFE and similar networks. The Eastern Bloc collapsed from within as decades of mismanagement ruined the Soviet economy, the Afghan War sapped public support, Solidarity in Poland weakened the bonds between erstwhile allies, and Gorbachev embarked upon reforms that were incompatible with the state. Western broadcasts were a marginal factor at best.
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> With regard to Nazism, I suspect that the BBC
> (British Broadcasting Company) did provide some SW
> services to the citizens of those countries,
> though at the time (this was some 15 years before
> the founding of RFE and RL), they were probably
> not as sophisticated as they've since become.
I would go farther. The greatest value of Western broadcasts lay in their transmission of hidden messages to spies in various parts of Eastern Europe. But even there the effect was minimal--or even negative--given that the British establishment was riddled with spies who fed all the codes to the Eastern Bloc governments, meaning that when the expatriate forces were dropped at night into Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, they were almost without exception rounded up and killed.
Propaganda machines were better by the 1970s and 1980s, to be sure, but they never approached the importance of developments within the Soviet empire itself.