Richard Fidler

speaker

218 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 26 Jul

Richard Fidler’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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No One Saw It Coming · Richard Fidler: The lie that toppled a regime · 26 Jul 2026 podcast

And again, there was this ongoing process of saying black is white, up is down, everything's getting better for everyone all the time, when it clearly wasn't.

Those who could see what was going on in West Germany, for example, could see they were having a much...

a greater degree of political freedom.

For all its faults, yes, Germany, yes, we know, for all its faults, had a much greater degree of political freedom and much higher standard of living.

So there was a feeling like communism was like, it was both undefeatable, inevitable, and yet impossible to sustain.

So there was a feeling of an irresistible force meeting an immovable object by the time you get into the very late 80s.

People are getting poorer and poorer.

The city's falling apart.

The environment has been ravaged beyond belief.

This iron need by the government to control what reality is.

Up is down, black is white.

Despite the dire state of things, the complete absence of freedom, the lack of things in the shops, the government's got its own people saying things have never been better.

Every year the president gives a speech saying, we're so happy at the moment, everything's going so incredibly well.

Indeed, under communism, people are loving each other better than they did under capitalism.

So there's this strange Alice in Wonderland effect that's going on in the country.

Everyone knows it's crap.

Berlin Wall's come down.

East Germany is now going to become part of West Germany.

All these countries are liberalizing and introducing democratic systems.

In hindsight, we can say that it was really obvious that Czechoslovakia was going to become democratic, but it wasn't obvious at the time.

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