PCBs are now free.

I was there a few months before the wall came down- crossed on the S-bahn (subway) with some smuggled ostmarks (~1/10 of the official exchange rate) in my sock. Good times. They made you pay for most stuff up front at the official rate, so the East German marks were just play money. For example, the good restaurants seemed to be fully booked so it was actually hard to spend the money.

--sp

Yes, I remember that in ~1973. 1:1 official exchange rate, more like 4:1 on the black market. You weren't allowed to change the money back, so effectively it was a way of gaining hard currency.

It was very difficult to find anything worth spending the changed money on, even in the best department store on Alexanderplatz. ISRT postcards were the least bad option.

I, too, smuggled out a few of their /aluminum/ coins in a sock, hoping that they wouldn't lock up a 16yo kid :) Still got them; daughter looked blankly when I showed them to her :(

No, I learned what life in the eastern bloc was like early on.

Last time I was in former east Germany a few years ago (visiting some suppliers in Jena) I picked up an East German army jacket for the spawn and one of those bolt-on country oval things for DDR.

Eastern Europe, pre iron curtain fall, was not really the way my propagandized young mind had pegged it- really more civilized in a way but not nearly as affluent. Of course I didn't have to live with the surveillance etc. back then, now we all do.

--sp

I wasn't lecturing you about anything. RFE was a very good thing in general, I think. Certainly the Poles valued it a lot.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

OK; accepted. I was probably not making a sufficient mental distinction between you and some of the more, er, rabid trolls that infest this group.

Over here it had the reputation of being propaganda. Not like the Orwellian propaganda from the Russians, but definitely less introspective/critical than standard western media.

I'll ask some Poles at when I next get a chance, but most of those over here are too young to remember the 70s and early 80s.

"Was" being the operative word.

For example, would-be despot Hillary railed against the Citizens United dec ision at the last debate. That was nothing more than two guys whom the Fed eral Election Commission tried to prevent from selling their anti-Hillary v ideo on the internet in 2008. The FEC wanted to regulate them out of exist ence. The Supreme Court ruled it was free speech.

Can't have that. Hillary wants to stack the Court to reverse CU. Dissent isn't permitted.

There's lots more room to fall.

James Arthur

My wife and I toured Romania a few years ago, and got a look at what living for decades under an authoritarian dictatorship (nominally communist in this case) had done to the country and the society.

Quite horrifying. The "everybody is pressured into informing on everyone else" police state had pretty much wiped out any "social contract" of mutual support and trust. Everyone was afraid of everyone else during those years; nobody trusted (or could trust) anyone, even their family. You could figure that anyone you knew, if confronted by the State security apparatus, would be quite willing to throw you under the bus to save themselves or to curry favor.

Although the secret police are (mostly) gone, the damage remains. We were walking in Budapest, and saw an ambulance trying to get through traffic, siren blaring and lights flashing. People were casually walking right in front of it, and drivers turning into its path. I commented about this to our guide, and she sighed and said "They figure 'It's not coming for me, so why should I care?'."

I figure it's going to take them _generations_ to recover.

It left me with an acute distaste for strong-man rule (of any political flavor). Our democracy is an awfully messy and imperfect system, but IMO it's much preferable to any sort of authoritarian rule (even one we might start out agreeing with).

The phrase is usually attributed to Voltaire, but seems to have been invented in the UK in 1906.

It's a bit older than that, and derives from a branch of the Vatican set up on 1622 ( Congregatio de Propaganda Fide - Congregation for Propagating t he Faith) that propagated the Roman Catholic point of view with the explici t sub-text that all other points of view were wrong.

You are denying the revelations of the beatified Joe McCarthy?

In fact there aren't any commies left, anywhere. There are still plenty of democratic socialists around, but none of them believe in a one party state , and it was the "leading role" of the - single - communist party that dist inguished communists from real democratic socialists. Even Chomsky is an an archo-syndicalist, who believes in running everything through local committ ees.

The Chinese Communist Party still exists, but it's just one more exploiting oligarchy with a few tame theologians retained to represent practical poli tics as if were being motivated by Marxism.

ecision at the last debate. That was nothing more than two guys whom the F ederal Election Commission tried to prevent from selling their anti-Hillary video on the internet in 2008. The FEC wanted to regulate them out of exi stence. The Supreme Court ruled it was free speech.

Actually very expensive speech. What the Supreme Court ruled that it was fi ne for the rich to spend squillions on right-wing political propaganda.

In most advanced industrial countries, spending on election propaganda is l imited, and has to be documented, and authorised by somebody actually stand ing, so that if the electoral propaganda is malicious libel, the guy that a uthorised the libel gets labelled as a nasty piece of work.

Karl Rove got away with the "Swift Boat People" libel, and the right hopes to be able to do it again. Calling Hillary Clinton a "war-monger" is defini tely in the same class.

The US Supreme Court seems happy to play along with the rabid right.

t isn't permitted.

Anonymous libel factories aren't the kind of dissent Thomas Paine would hav e admired.

A lot less than James Arthur thinks. And the way that James Arthur thinks - or has been brain-washed into not thinking - is why there's not a long way left to fall.