Posted on 08/22/2018 12:53:12 PM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
As his country commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Soviet invasion that crushed an effort to ease the totalitarian grip of Communism known as the Prague Spring, the Czech Republics president is staying silent.
Milos Zeman, an ardent supporter of Russian President Vladimir Putin, refused to mark Tuesdays anniversary of the 1968 invasion of then Czechoslovakia.
"Im calling on you not to neglect your constitutional obligations, Jiri Pospisil, head of the opposition party TOP 09 and a former justice minister, wrote in an open letter to Zeman. "Despite your pro-Russian sympathies, both you and I are citizens of one country that in 1968 dreamed its dream about a just social order. The occupation put an end to this dream."
His office rejected criticism as "an orgy of hate" and pointed to Zemans opposition to the post-invasion regime, for which he was thrown out of the Communist Party and his university teaching job in 1970.
"The president was courageous at a time when courage didnt come cheap, and thats worth much more than a thousand speeches delivered 50 years later," Zemans spokesman, Jiri Ovcacek, said on Twitter last week. "The occupation was a crime. The presidents view hasnt changed since 1968.".
(Excerpt) Read more at themoscowtimes.com ...
Even still, the Czech Republic has emerged from communism quite beautifully while being in the E.U. fold and it's why thousands of Russians move there and not the other way around.
No reason to poke the bear.
This was the Unofficial Theme Song of Prague Spring
Marta Kubisova - Modlitba pro Martu (Prayer for Martha)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8_a7zoKv-0
Let peace remain with this country.
Malice, envy, hate, fear and contention,
Let these pass away, quickly pass away.
Now, when lost governance over your own
Affairs returns to you, people, returns.
The clouds are slowly rolling away
And everyone harvests what he has sown.
Let my prayer speak to the hearts,
Which times of malice have not burned,
Like frost burns the flowers, like frost.
Let peace remain with this country.
Malice, envy, hate, fear and contention,
Let these pass away, quickly pass away.
Now, when lost governance over your own
Affairs returns to you, people, returns.
I rode through East Germany on a British military train to West Berlin as the invasion was building up in July of 1968. I remember at each grade crossing you could see columns of tanks, APC’s, trucks etc as far as you could see. Very tense times in that part of the world.
And Abe should be in trouble for not mentioning Tokyo being fire bombed every time there's a celebration of an anniversary of Tokyo just like he should mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki every year on the anniversary of the end of WWII with special comments about how evil Americans were for killing civilians without a second though, right?
After all, what's good for the goose is good for the gander but people stupid enough to cook their own goose in precedent sauce are just too dimwitted to realize what precedent they're cooking up.
Ironically, 1968 was also the year of the “Soixante-Huitards” or as I call them, the “Soixante-Retards” in France with the Student protests.
Those students actually came out in support of the Soviet Union and their overthrow of the “Reactionary” Dubcek.
In Chicago there were riots on Michigan Avenue which forced the mobilization of the National Guard protecting the Democrat Convention. One might think these events separated by 10,000 miles were connected.
I don’t recall Czechoslovakia having declared war on the Soviet Union.
Rock-n-roll pushed freedom but always for good.
Rock-n-roll pushed freedom but not always for good.
Frank Zappa was good pals with Vaclav Havel.
“Red” Rudi Dutschke and Red Army Faction. Antifa type German communists of the time...same as the street scum vying with the nazis in the 20’s-30’s. Europe was full of this crap in the 60’s as was of course the US.
Nor do I recall the US declaring war on North Vietnam but hey, you just play the selective memory game and keep simmering that sauce instead of letting sleeping dogs lie.
I learned from Havel, a lot. Read all the translations when they got published.
The USSR had a tendency to every few years beat up on one of it’s buffer satellite nations. Hungary, Czechoslovokia, Poland...It kept the others in line.
So what’s with this Zeman? Russia is two countries away from the Czech Republic. The Poles have a border with Russia and they taunt the bear all the time.
The Poles suffered for it plenty of times. 2 partitions, the 1920 vistula campaign, 1939 soviet occupation, the iron curtain..
And it stayed exactly that way until I took the same train line through East Germany into West Berlin in 1989 on an good-will mission with the Army to *East* Berlin just before the wall fell. They would stack their t54s and t55s by the thousands near rail lines, for obvious reasons.
I think the main difference when I went compared to your visit was how badly the ravages of communism set in. It was horrible to see.
Good on ya soldier...we share some history there. I was USAF at the time.West Berlin was a glittering oasis in that cesspool of democratic socialism. Very bleak in the east zone.
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