In the bipolar world emerged during the 1950s, the weaponless Cold War, obtaining information (also by the means of spying) and state propaganda gained extraordinary significance. While the US and the USSR had similar objectives (i.e., overcoming the other), their methods were more different.
Was Islamic fundamentalism’s seclusion as the only governing force left in Afghanistan preventable? When was the last ray of hope of a steady Afghanistan joining the international community lost? Presumably, in the last chapter of the Cold War, when the superpowers turned the country into a site of their rivalry.
“The celebration took place in the courtyard of the San Sabba refugee camp, on August 20, at 11 a.m., near the monument commemorating the Italian and Jewish hostages the Nazis had executed here,” says a 1956 Information Item of Radio Free Europe (RFE).
It has been twenty years since journalist and politician Miklós Vásárhelyi’s passing. Between 1984 and 1990, Vásárhelyi was the personal representative of George Soros on the Hungarian Academy of Sciences – Soros Foundation Committee. From 1991 to 1994, he served as Vice President of the Soros Foundation, then Chair of the Board between 1994 and 2001.
Is it true that in the digital age there are no workers and no working class, that everyone is a white-collar worker or self-employed? Or does exploitation prevail in the era of Platform Capitalism, with social inequalities still on the rise? What is the role of labor research today, and what are its tools?
It is a cliché that famous people always have a faithful and industrious partner beside (or behind) them, serving their masters by abandoning personal ambitions and occasionally even themselves, so that the other can accomplish what destiny had in store for them.
The coming addition to the Curated Collections was compiled by Balázs Leposa, archivist at the Blinken OSA, and will be available soon. Typical header of an item in the collection.
The Chernobyl nuclear accident happened thirty-five years ago, on April 26, 1986. The Blinken OSA commemorates the anniversary by revisiting how the disaster was reported by the Hungarian state radio, and how the public reacted.
Sixty years ago, on April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin completed one orbit of Earth, and accomplished the first manned spaceflight in history. The event was a milestone in the Space Race, a Cold War front line between the US and the Soviet Union. A Radio Free Europe Background Report from December, 1961, preserved at the Blinken OSA, reveals the American stand on the developments of that year.
The Eichmann trial began sixty years ago today, on April 11, 1961, in Jerusalem, Israel. The German-Austrian Adolf Eichmann was the SS-Obersturbannführer overseeing the department at the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) responsible for “Jewish affairs.” He designed, organized, and lead the deportation of European Jews in occupied and satellite countries. The impact the Eichmann trial had on the public afterlife and the historical processing of the Holocaust can hardly be overrated.