The Tragic Failure of the Prague Spring »
Posted By berkeley 3 months, 1 week ago in NewsBut Czechoslovakia's experiment became its tragedy on the night of August 21, 1968, when the armies of fellow Warsaw Pact countries invaded. Students in Prague graffitied on a building wall, "Lenin, wake up, they've gone mad."
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berkeley
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. Of all the enemies to public ...
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gamahuche3 months, 1 week ago
This is an excellent, excellent account.
Nothing is unfamiliar to me, nor do I disagree with much and I commend, especially,the very interesting analysis of how the failure of the Prague Spring in 1968 in fact also undermined the results of the Velvet Revolution of 1989.
The morale - and the morals - of people here would have been completely different and the benefit to Europe would have been much greater.
How the politics have unfolded since then has been a huge disappointment to most people and the result has been a hideous eruption of greed and corruption and a loss of the humanist values which were so embedded in the national psyche.
Havel was a fine figurehead of a President, perhaps overly loved and respected, but his political power was insufficient to counterbalance the greed of the nouveau riche who found ways to steal almost everything that wasn't nailed down.
*******
I hope to return to this story later but have a big work schedule
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gamahuche3 months, 1 week ago
A very important secondary result was also the separation of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia as independent states which took place on 1st January 1983 and had NOTHING to do with the wishes of the people in either country and everything to do with the overarching ambition and ego of the dominant politicians of the day, Czech Vaclav Klaus and Slovak Vladimir Meciar and their unwillingness to share the limelight.
The people absolutely did NOT want this. I was on Slovakia at the time the Slovak parliament voted for it and watched on TV the glummest collection of browbeaten hacks who were forced to stand up individually and say yes or no.
Yuk yuk yuk.
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CHAM3 months, 1 week ago
Intresting. A good post. And yes the consequences may be "unintended", but the lesson is that people suffer when powerful financial and political interests conflict.
I remember the rolling of tanks into the Czech Republic and remember thinking that if the world wasn't careful, world war was sure to break out. It certainly looked like it might.
Emile Zatopek was the sports hero of that time and must have been one of the best Czechoslovakian icons of all time. I used to marvel at his ability. No one in the world could touch him.
But that area of the world became the punch/counterpunch battleground of Communism vs Capitalism and as they say the rest is history. The hardships imposed on people in this game are not important, just the aims of the agenda groups, and the people suffer, but not the agenda groups who finish second best at worst. Sometimes we can just be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
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gamahuche3 months, 1 week ago
Emil Zatopek was amazing!!!
In the Helsinki Olympics he walked away wuth the 5,000 and 10,000m AND right after that in his very first marathon run EVER, won that too.
I saw him live once at White City in London and he walked away from his field again. I believe that included Gordon Pirie and Vladimir Kuts.
His wife was also an Olympic athlete and she is still alive. I've been trying to pluck up the courage to ring her doorbell.
I'm looking for an amazing picture..
Still looking..
But here he is winning the 52 Olympic Marathon:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=oFl829WefFQ
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gamahuche3 months, 1 week ago
Finally!!
This is the one..
http://www.bbc.co.uk/czech/ceskarepublika/02102...
Is this juicy or what?!
Now you know why I want to meet her..
Zatopek was also a hero because he spoke out against the Russian invasion of 68, thereby becoming a virtual non-persom in practical terms.
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Candida3 months, 1 week ago
A woman I know, who was a young girl then, was woken by her boyfriend on August 21, 1068 with the words: "We have invaded Czechoslovakia." Still sleepy, she said: "What do you mean? I haven't invaded them, and neither have you." "No," he said impatiently, "the Warsaw Pact countries." "Why?" came her next question. "There is a revolution there," he answered. So they listened to the news, and there was not a single word about it. It had been announced at 6:00 a.m., and then it wasn't mentioned again until noon or so. By then it was pretty well over.
I've often wondered why the Soviets needed the Warsaw Pact countries. They could deal with the Hungarian revolution in 1956 quite easily by themselves. I guess they didn't have occupying forces in Czechoslovakia before 1968, and the other countries gave some legitimacy to their invasion. The big powers play, and the people of the small countries pay.
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gamahuche3 months, 1 week ago
[Your turn for the typo.. 1066 was the Battle of Hastings; in 1068 we were still a pretty Celtic entity..]
Why were they there - it was about spheres of influence, a game that is still being played out worldwide.
The US has spent half a century being paranoid about tiny Cuba and its quite surprising that they never invaded.
However they've played games all over Central and South America, supported some diabolical dictators, with Pinochet as a prime example.
Now of course their moral and physical influence on the whole continent has shrunk considerably.
Re the news from Cz in 1968 - the Soviets pretty much managed to shut down all communication modes as a high priority.
In the 80's in NYC by extraordinary happenstance, and because I visited daily an exhibition of pictures by I met two
photographers who were virtually the ONLY foreign media people left in Prague when the Russians [technically with the other members of the Warsaw pact] invaded.
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Radiofreeeuropa3 months, 1 week ago
Berkeley, thanks for submitting this, it's real analysis, a relative rarity. My two bits on the subject:
In terms of a system of government it appears the Spanish Anarchists had the closest thing to an arrangement that actually worked. The flaw of capitalism that no one seems to acknowledge is that unrestrained, all the capital ends up in very few hands. This is clearly demonstrated in numerous societies. The Czech's have hit so many high notes in their struggle, and I feel will prevail, as they have in the face of remarkable challenges through history, in this new era where an equilibrium of sorts needs to be found. In many senses, Prague Spring was not really a failure, but a bridge, a work of architectural beauty that threatened powerful concerns. The bridge was destroyed by those concerns. But it was rebuilt stronger and larger in the Velvet Revolution.
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Radiofreeeuropa3 months, 1 week ago
Personal freedom is not exclusive of community, and even a system devised by the best and brightest is gamed by the corrupt and deplorable. It is undermined by the incompetent and the exceedingly greedy.
This can be easily observed in the United States as well, the U.S. Constitution was devised by the best and brightest of that time. They had the foresight to design a system that
built upon the best efforts of the past and relied on checks and balances regarding power distribution.
Yet we suffer the same ills as all machinations of governments, the greed of the few outweighs the needs of the many. There are those who are constantly misrepresenting and manipulating for personal gain. These things seem to come in peaks and trows, waves of favor and disfavor. The bigger the wave, the higher the peak, but unfortunately the lower the trow as well.
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Radiofreeeuropa3 months, 1 week ago
This of course, is merely the view of an outsider who admires and respects, but has not lived the experience of the Czechs or witnessed any of this first hand. I remain optimistic even within the constraints of healthy skepticism.
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gamahuche3 months, 1 week ago
We'll need to get you over here some time soon RFE and sort out a few things - painlessly over a few beers of course..
For now lets just deal with the books...
Klima - yes, worth reading. Wrote "Love and Garbage"..
"The Unbearable Lightness of Being" was Milan Kundera and was a pretty great book. Unfortunately he now lives in exile and only writes in French.
MUCH juicier is anything by Bohumil Hrabal, e.g. Closely Watched [sometimes Observed] Trains - also a great film; Too Loud a Solitude; Cutting it Short - also a fabulous film; I Served the King of England [not one of my favourites].
Czech films of Milos Forman include The Fireman's Ball,Loves of a Blonde. Jiri Menzel's films: Larks on a String, Closely Watched Trains, My Sweet Little Village..
Then to understand Czech humour Jaroslav Hasek's "The Good Soldier Schwejk" is crucial.
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gamahuche3 months, 1 week ago
Then you can spend several years puzzling over the word "litost" and its meaning - 107,000 google hits to get you started - and Milan Kundera's effort in "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" to give you a helping hand..
Its deep, RFE!
A few Czech beers of the right kinds will facilitate learning and understanding considera
bly, of course.
Then its time of course to enter the esoteric realms - the Alchemy, the Golem, Rudolf II and Rabbi Low and the surrealist realm of Jan Svankmajer, the defenestrations, the 5-sided Star Palace, Vysehrad Fort where Queen Libuse ruled and where she envisioned a mighty city whose name shall be Prah, or threshold; the fantastic evocative towns outside the capital like Kutna Hora, mining hill, one of the richest silver-mines in Europe, Cesky Krumlov, another haunt of alchemists serving Vilem Rozmberk..
Well I've only just started but have also been summoned..
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Candida3 months, 1 week ago
gamahuche: "Czech films of Milos Forman include The Fireman's Ball,Loves of a Blonde."
Don't forget his newest film: Goya's Ghosts. Although it's not about Czechoslovakia, it is about freedom and human decency.
http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2007/07/go...
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miklkit3 months, 1 week ago
They were courageous people demanding their rights as human beings. I hope to be as strong in the years ahead.
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