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The end of Liberty

ipsiphi | 24.03.2006 16:29 | Technology

at 165 metres in height the antennas of Radio Liberty on the coast of Catalonia were one of the most visibile signs of the "cold war" outside of Mannheim Germany.
Erected to broadcast propaganda into the Warsaw Pact states and the Soviet Union as a result of entente between the USA and Franco's dictatorship in 1959.
Of course technology has moved on now. Your mobile is just as powerful.
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the visible sign of "Liberty" of course "the disappeared" are more important.
the visible sign of "Liberty" of course "the disappeared" are more important.



It was a dark time.
For all of Europe.
And most of the World
When the word and concept .:. Liberty .:.
really got abused.
As Benjamin Franklin said "those who would sacrifice security for liberty deserve neither", & as I'd put it, you may not choose which of the trio .:. Liberty Equality Fraternity .:. you want more, you fight for them all or you fight for none.

Europe today stretches from "the Atlantic to the Urinal" and the only thing I see is the pursuit of "Equity".

["In 1949, the National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE), was set up in the United States with the backing of U.S. foreign policy experts and, as later reported, the financial support of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Radio Free Europe, one of the divisions of NCFE, was conceived as a substitute for the free media that no longer existed in Soviet-controlled lands. Another part of the NCFE, the Exile Relations Division, sponsored research and publications, often by prominent refugees from Soviet-occupied or controlled countries.

By early 1950, the Committee was ready to expand its work to include radio broadcasts to Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. The governing board of directors decided to use American production skills and technology, but refugee talent for the development of the content of programs. This broke new ground and set this "surrogate" broadcasting apart from the programs offered by the BBC or Voice of America, where scripting was done by central staff who were typically less familiar with the local conditions in the countries to which they were broadcasting.

On 4 July 1950 the new international broadcast station, Radio Free Europe, transmitted its first program -- 30 minutes in length, to Czechoslovakia -- from a 7.5-kilowatt transmitter, located at Lampertheim, just north of the city of Mannheim in West Germany. Broadcasts to Romania were launched on 14 July, to Poland and Hungary on 4 August, and to Bulgaria on 11 August. Initially, the broadcasts were prepared in New York, but very soon the entire broadcast operation was shifted to Munich, where a building for the broadcast operations was completed in 1952.

The mission of RFE then and now was simply to tell the truth. The broadcasts were to bring listeners objective news, discussion and commentary in order to give them the information they needed to form sound judgments about their situation and their aspirations for freedom and independence.

Radio Free Europe was directed to the so-called European communist satellite countries, but it soon became obvious that such broadcasts could and should be extended to the Soviet Union itself. To that end, a separate organization, Radio Liberation (later Radio Liberty), was created and the first Russian-language program aired on 1 March 1953 from Lampertheim. Within ten minutes, the program was jammed by the Soviet Union. Soon, the station began broadcasting in Ukrainian, Belarus, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Turkmen, Uzbek, Tatar-Bashkir, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Georgian, and other languages of the Caucasus and Central Asia.

In 1951 and 1952 stronger transmitters for RFE broadcasts were built in Gloria, Portugal. In 1959, the broadcasting capacity of the station was further increased by additional transmitters installed in Playa de Pals, Spain -- an ideal distance for projecting shortwave signals to RL listeners."]
cut and past from :-  http://www.rferl.org/specials/50Years/history/rferl-history.html


Of course you may still listen to "radio liberty" or "radio free europe" here:-
 http://www.rferl.org/listen/
And you may consider that the father of one of the founders of "copyleft" and "creative commons" was a CIA agent charged with designing the propaganda aimed at the Soviet Block broadcast from the Girona coast in Catalonia.
more info:-
 http://www.answers.com/topic/radio-free-europe
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Together we must move to the light-

So it does no harm to remember today the coup d'etat which brought the junta to Argentina "in the name of Liberty" and also note the demolition of these towers.

So - you may here watch a video of how the towers were demolished yesterday by the prodigious use of 16kg of explosive (plastic type B).
 http://documents.vilaweb.cat/video/200603/antenes/index.html

one of the previous employees has set up this site with museum images of what they did and how-
 http://www.radioliberty.org/

.... i wonder did tin-foil hats come into it?

ipsiphi