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Disney made a movie about this called Night Crossing in the early 1980s. More recently, there's a 2018 German movie about it called Balloon. [0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082810/ [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7125774
The photo of the balloon here really helps put the story into perspective. https://web.archive.org/web/20190408181736/https://www.museu...
Gotta love the way German sounds to English ears. Always good for a chuckle.
This guy is a hacker hero - do the engineering needed, get the proof of concept built, move fast, break things, start over and go big, then scores a victory over the commies and saves his family.
The photo of the balloon here really helps put the story into perspective. https://web.archive.org/web/20190408181736/https://www.museu...
Wait... People want to escape from communist countries?
Odd how nobody ever builds a balloon to fly towards the communist utopias.
One good metric of quality of life (which includes various freedoms) is how many people emigrate or immigrate. Anybody who defends authoritarians has to explain why so many people want to leave and why the regime wants to keep them in. (With some exceptions such as China which weaponizes emigrants by threatening their families.)
Pretty much all the highest % immigration countries are monarchy that I can think of, since in those country another tax payer is an easy win and immigrants that cause problem can be instantly booted so there is very little downside to taking anybody with $1 or a job who cares to come.
Top Countries by Percentage of Immigrants (approximate recent figures):
Qatar: Around 77% (or 76.7%).
United Arab Emirates (UAE): Around 74-88% (some sources show higher figures for earlier years).
Kuwait: Around 69-73%.
Bahrain: Around 55%.
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> East Germany immediately increased border security, closed all small airports close to the border, and ordered the planes kept farther inland.[6] Propane gas tanks became registered products, and large quantities of fabric suitable for balloon construction could no longer be purchased. Mail from East Germany to the two escaped families was prohibited.[12] > Erich Strelzyk learned of his brother's escape on the ZDF…
> People - here in Germany as well as abroad - forget too easily what a sinister but also ridiculous state the GDR was Wait till you hear how sinister its precursor state was
My elementary school showed the Disney movie about this at least once a year.
And much of the public library books were a couple generations old, plus there was the Cold War, which meant lots of exposure to anti-fascism messages, and to anti-Soviet-like messages.
So, today, people of a certain age, who paid attention in school, have been programmed that the secret police saying, "Your papers, please" and sending people off to concentration camps, are obviously the very bad guys, and America is the good guys who don't do that. People with that upbringing would see certain textbook political maneuvers and tactics coming from a mile away, and be concerned.
To counteract that IMHO great programming, you'd need something extreme, like Rupert Murdoch and others pounding large swaths of the electorate with propaganda for decades -- to get them to support some politicians that are stereotypes we were told for decades before are outright evil.