... in the know ... Ross Hedvicek

Stop the discrimination against foreigners

2008-04-26T12:50:00.000-07:00

Article by The Prague Post:

April 16th, 2008 issue

We were at the Foreigners’ Police in Prague early one morning recently, crushed in an anxious mob of people in the first-floor hallway. The hallway leads to a ticket dispenser that, at least in theory, guarantees you a meeting with a bureaucrat in the office, the busiest of its kind in the Czech Republic.

A colleague of ours set her child down for about 30 seconds to get her cell phone out of her purse. Tired of waiting for hours, the crowd chose that moment to surge forward, almost knocking down the little girl, who started crying loudly.

A police officer berated our colleague in front of the crowd. He said if she ever brought a child to the Foreigners’ Police again he would report her to social services, which might take her child away, since she wasn’t being a good mother.

All this came after a long, nightmarish wait in a mob outside trying get in the building. Later in the morning, the numbered tickets proved to be useless, as people spontaneously formed lines at the bureaucrats’ desks, and were taken care of with no regard for numerical order. By that time, the police had left.

If you’re a foreigner trying to do the right thing in the Czech Republic, you know this story already, or some variation of it. It’s part of a larger pattern that makes it hard to believe this country isn’t pursuing a deliberate strategy of making foreigners feel as unwelcome as possible.
Giving the government money is never a problem. We didn’t have to wait even one minute to file a tax return, or register to pay social security fees. Buying private health insurance (foreigners are often seen as a potential burden on social services) took about five minutes.

But God forbid that foreigners should try to do something as simple as, say, own a car. Under the city’s onerous new parking regulations, any permanent resident of the district can get an annual parking permit for 700 Kč ($43.80). But, if you’re not a permanent resident, even with a proper visa and a flat lease in hand, that same permit will cost you 36,000 Kč.

In addition to insulting, degrading and unnecessary, this strikes us as incredibly short-sighted. As the Czech population ages and more educated young people leave the country for better opportunities elsewhere, foreign workers offer a valuable addition to the labor pool. The Labor and Social Affairs Ministry has implicitly acknowledged this with a program encouraging foreigners to apply to be permanent residents.

But there’s already discussion about ending that program.

This country has a well-deserved reputation for xenophobia. It would be smarter for the people running the government to court outsiders instead of driving them away, so they can pay taxes and social security and health insurance fees.

And dare we raise the question of basic fairness? No law-abiding resident should have to endure the mob scene at the Foreigners’ Police, or negotiate to get his car out of an impound lot for a simple parking infraction.

The man who knows too much...

2008-03-21T06:51:00.000-07:00

By Markéta Hulpachová Staff Writer, The Prague PostMarch 19th, 2008 issue (reprint authorized)

The Hučín file

Name: Vladimír Hučín

Age: 55

Residence: Přerov, north Moravia

Family: Married, one daughter

Career: BIS counterintelligence service, 1991-2001

Years imprisoned: 1976-77, 1983-86, 2001-02

Hours before his arrest, Vladimír Hučín, a seasoned officer in the counterintelligence service, knew that he was being followed.

The authorities’ noose had been tightening around him for months, and a suspect vehicle full of undercover cops now stood just down the street from his home.

Unfazed by their presence, Hučín embarked on his errand, but didn’t get very far. As he rounded the corner of the cemetery beside his house, men in black masks jumped out of the police car and shoved him into the vehicle.

He was handcuffed and hauled off for interrogation. For the following year, he was confined to jail cells and psychiatric wards, prevented from talking to outsiders and primed for a nonpublic trial.

The year was 2001.

Although Hučín’s case involves government practices reminiscent of the totalitarian regime, the suspicious circumstances of his arrest and subsequent prosecution are chillingly contemporary, and involve some of the country’s highest-ranking politicians. While his adversaries in the police, Parliament and the judiciary call him a rogue criminal and a terrorist, Hučín’s testimony paints a different portrait — one of a man who simply knows too much.

In local media, Hučín, a candidate in this fall’s Senate election, is best known for his controversial trial and his decade-long work in BIS, the national counterintelligence agency. His story, however, starts much earlier.

In 1971, Hučín, who was then 17 years old, stepped into a restaurant in his hometown of Přerov, north Moravia, to buy a soda. Jaded by the repressive atmosphere that followed the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops, he was the picture of rebellion against the communist establishment — long hair, defiant scowl, Led Zeppelin T-shirt.

Unfortunately for him, the restaurant at which he planned to purchase a Kofola happened to be the same venue at which a score of venerated, high-ranking communists were downing vodka in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (KSČ).
Subversive activities

What followed would end up shaping Hučín’s lifelong anti-communist resolve. The mob of decorated party members allegedly dragged him by his hair to the nearby toilets, ripped out most of his hair, and beat him until he lost consciousness.

“To have something like this happen to you at the hands of people who are being presented as the cream of communist society … something inside you breaks,” he says. After that moment, Hučín was a sworn enemy of the regime. At first, his acts of resistance were relatively innocuous: For example, he flooded Přerov with thousands of “Down with the Soviet dictatorship” fliers using meteorological balloons.

Between 1973 and ’76, Hučín’s subversive activity escalated. Using small time bombs, he destroyed various displays of communist propaganda, sabotaged a Soviet freight train and released teargas at an event commemorating the communist revolution.

“I was always extremely careful to do these things so that no citizen was ever harmed,” he stresses. “I couldn’t afford risking that.”

But, even as he and his small group of accomplices expanded their activities, the tentacles of the StB — the secret police in communist Czechoslovakia — closed in.

In the summer of 1976, left-leaning American singer Dean Read was scheduled to give a concert at a stadium in Přerov — an event Hučín wanted to disrupt by releasing teargas. Instead, he was arrested by the StB, based on information given to them by Hučín’s own associates.

“They told the StB that I was preparing an armed offensive against the regime, that I was gathering arms,” he says. “They sandwiched the truth between false accusations to get a result that sounded believable.”

Convinced that Hučín posed a serious terrorist threat, the StB employed beat him, interrogated him and injected him with drugs to try to obtain a confession. But, he says, they never got one. After eight months of confinement, Hučín was released on parole due to lack of evidence.
Although he was now under heavy surveillance, he continued to carry out subversive antics. Through his own network of collaborators, Hučín staged an attack against Antonín Mikeš, a particularly zealous StB agent.

Because the StB was watching him constantly, Hučín trained one of his disciples, Ladislav Brázda, to detonate a small bomb outside Mikeš’s cottage.

“He extended a 20-meter wire, hid behind the corner and ignited the fuse,” says Hučín. “The door burst into pieces. Mikeš’s car was also damaged.”

The StB arrested Hučín and his associate immediately after the attack.

“Unfortunately, Brázda buckled after the first night of intensive interrogation,” he says. “He told them everything.”

This time, Hučín was sentenced to two and a half years, and transported to the notorious Minkovice correctional facility in north Bohemia, which he says was at times “reminiscent of hell.”

The other side of the barricade

In 1986, after his release from Minkovice, Hučín signed Charter 77, a dissident document criticizing the communist regime. But joining the ranks of dignitary signatories including Václav Havel and Petr Uhl only led to further disillusionment.

“The StB installed its own agents in the [Charter 77 movement] ... they knew that these dissidents did not have it in their power to harm them,” he says. “Out of every 30 people that attended [Charter 77] meetings at my house, I can say without a qualm that at least three of them were StB agents.”

As communist governments throughout the Soviet bloc crumbled, the StB began sketching out a nonviolent, “velvet” revolution, he says.

“If there was a real revolution, it could have turned bloody. That is why the StB scripted things the way it did, and Charter 77 was something they could use to their advantage. The chartists’ motto ‘We’re not like them’ was their savior — through their indecisiveness, the chartists created a chaotic environment, which allowed the pragmatic communists to destroy evidence and save their careers.” At the end of 1989, the all-powerful StB was officially dissolved. And as the citizenry celebrated the Velvet Revolution, the StB scrambled to destroy a plethora of incriminating documents, some of which Hučín says he salvaged.

“I managed to retrieve a good amount of files. They’re a bit burnt on the sides, but they contain information about judges, state attorneys, StB agents and other members of the criminal regime’s administration.”

In 1991, the Confederation of Political Prisoners (KPV) recommended Hučín for a post at the Olomouc bureau of FBIS (now BIS), the democratic nation’s fledgling intelligence agency. Although the government required BIS employees to have negative lustration certificates proving they never collaborated with the communist regime, many of them had apparently slipped through the crevices, he says.

“When I first started at FBIS, I was surprised to learn that it was full of StB agents. At the time, I was too low-ranking to do anything about it, although I did what I could.”

Despite frequent confrontations with the leadership, which he says was controlled by former StB agents, Hučín says he soon became one of BIS’s most productive operatives. Focusing on left-wing extremism, he monitored a zealous circle of Moravian communists with ties to members of the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSČM) and international extremist groups.
“In a city like Prague, left-wing extremism may seem like a marginal problem, but, in north Moravia, where there is high unemployment and a strained social situation, it is still a real threat,” Hučín says.

Process of elimination

As Hučín focused on left-wing extremism, tensions in BIS mounted. “Much of my activity pointed to the fact that lustration certificates were being manipulated. They were given to people who didn’t have clean records, and the people who administered them were in no way trustworthy,” he says. “Suddenly, I began to have all sorts of complications.”

The major blow, he says, came in 1998, when the Civic Democrat (ODS)-led government was replaced by the more left-leaning Social Democrats (ČSSD). Around the same time, a series of mysterious bombs began exploding in Olomouc and Přerov. According to Hučín, these bombings were the beginning of the government conspiracy against him.

“With the blessing of the ČSSD, the KSČM began orchestrating a plan for my elimination,” he says. “In order for the public to buy it, they needed to make me look like a terrorist.”
As the government built the case against him, Hučín says he was systematically prevented from engaging in any real intelligence gathering.

Meanwhile, the bombing attacks raged on. Between 1997 and 2001, a total of six bombs exploded in the Přerov and Olomouc area. As a member of the BIS team “Explosion,” which was responsible for investigating the bombings, Hučín began to suspect that the attacks were the work of left-wing extremists. However, in 2000, Shadow Interior Minister František Bublan (who was then the director of BIS) suddenly removed him from the case.

“It was immediately after I filed a report stating that the left-wing organizations behind the bombings had links to the KSČM,” Hučín says.

Meanwhile, information that Hučín himself was behind the attacks began appearing in local media. According to Hučín, it was a telltale sign that the conspirators were closing in on him.

In February 2001, police arrested Hučín and searched his house, allegedly looking for evidence linking him to the bombing attacks. “They were actually looking for the old StB files I had in my possession,” Hučín says.

Although his alleged involvement in the bombings was the initial premise for his arrest, Hučín was never charged with any crime related to the terrorist attacks. Instead, he was gradually charged with seven crimes, including insubordination, unauthorized handling of private documents, and abusing public office.

In the clear

After one year of imprisonment — part of which he spent at a psychiatric ward — the Constitutional Court deemed the confinement illegal, and Hučín was released.
What followed was a controversial trial that lasted five years.

Alleging that the Hučín case involved classified information regarding national security, the regional court in Přerov insisted that the court proceedings not be public.

“The state authorities had a vested interest in keeping my trial secret,” Hučín says. “Trust me, the only people that were threatened by a public trial were the people responsible for my prosecution.” Powerful lobbies like the U.S. Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor called for a fair trial, and Hučín’s case was finally made public in 2005. In the following two years, he was acquitted of all charges by both the Přerov District Court and the Olomouc Regional Court.

With the help of high-ranking politicians like Senator Jaromír Štětina, Hučín continues to wage war against his adversaries, who he says remain in top government and judicial posts.
Last November, Štětina presented the Parliament committee monitoring BIS activity with a series of documents proving BIS manipulated the police investigation in the Hučín case for political reasons — an act that has since met with resistance from both the committee membership and BIS, which continues to deny the allegations.

“BIS did not commit any errors in [Hučín’s] case,” says Michal Zachystal, the state attorney who handled Štětina’s allegations. “If its members were involved in the case, it was in accordance with the law.”

Meanwhile, Hučín plans to run in the Senate elections this fall.

“If I’m elected, I don’t think I would remain in office for the full term, as I would inevitably end up in conflicts, but it would give me the chance to rid the state administration of these relics of the old communist apparatus,” he says. “Right now, we are preparing for a counterattack, and it’s going to make certain people hot under the collar. Watch and see what happens.”

Markéta Hulpachová can be reached at mhulpachova@praguepost.com

What will happen when Castro falls?

2007-06-03T18:36:00.000-07:00

Let me start by establishing some basic facts. My fellow Floridian Randy Wayne White explains things as follows:

"It is discussion that all Cubans enjoy, but most of them know it will not go as smoothly as some would like to pretend. By air and boat and inner tube, more than two million Cubans have immigrated to the United States and, when Castro falls, the return migration will not be as peaceful, nor as massive, as some believe. The Cubans are one of the great American success stories. They are brilliant people: smart, industrious, family-oriented, goal-oriented. In the space of less than two generation, they have accumulated extraordinary wealth and power in the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth. Were they really going to abandon that?

A few years ago, the Miami Herald ran the results of the poll which indicated that, even with
Castro gone, only one in five Cuban-Americans would return to their native island. Although the poll did not supply demographics, it is not unreasonable to assume that, of that number, most would go expecting to recover their old properties and resume their old lives. It's a pipe dream. It will never happen. The life they knew, in homes and on the island they loved, is gone forever...
Another fallacy is that, after the fall, Cuban_Americans will receive a warm welcome from their long-suffering countrymen. Despite the lengthy political separation, weren't they still brothers? Nope. They are not brothers ... and never were.

It is a ticklish problem; one seldom discussed, but the fact is that ninety-five percent of the Cubans who fled the island were white. With their exodus, blacks became a racial majority in Cuba... and it was Cuba's black population - historically used as little more than a slave labor - who rushed to take over the homes and properties abandoned by the exiles. On the day that Castro came to power, Havana's Miramar and Vedado neighborhoods were made up of tasteful mansions and estates. Now most of those mansions are black tenements and slums.

On the day that Castro took control, Catholicism was the national religion. Today the most widely practiced religion is Santeria, and Afro-Cuban belief very similar to Haiti's voodoo. Santeria plays prominently in Castro's political decisions. The predictions of Santeria priests are even reported in state newspapers.

Is this new Cuban majority eager for the return of teh Miami exiles? Absolutely not. Indeed, they are terrified at the prospect. In Castro's essentially all-white puppet government, blacks have very little input. But they had absolutely no influence at all when the people who fled Cuba were in control. That's why they don't want change. And that's why they will probably fight it when change comes knocking on their door.

The what-will-happen-when-Castro-falls is an enjoyable conversational game, but the reality is much darker. It will be a difficult and painful transition... and it also may be very bloody indeed..."

The above seven paragraphs were quoted directly from Randy Wayne White's book "North of Havana." He is perfectly right on target. How do I know? There is a precedent for it. It has happened before. Let me introduce you to a sample of comparable geopolitical analytical analogy.

It has happened in Czechoslovakia - after the so-called Velvet Revolution. Czechoslovakia was under the communist boot for 42 years, Cuba for 48 years (and still counting). During that time over a million people left Czechoslovakia and settled all over the world. Their properties were distributed by the communists to the lowest scum imaginable in their nation - and this scum is supporting those communists to this very day. Just look at the May Day celebration in Prague this year and the photographs of who was celebrating!

There was no black population in Czechoslovakia, but ethnic cleansing happened there on a big scale. It started after WWII with the forceful removal of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia - to the tune of 3 million people (and 270 thousand murdered during the process). By that time several thousand ethnic Jews had been removed from Czechoslovakia (with about a hundred thousand murdered during the German occupation - Czechs happily blame it on the Germans, even if Czechs are anti-semites par excellence themselves) and now came a wave of one million (over the years, of course) ethnic Czechs fleeing the country to escape communism and their jails. Add the numbers and get a very decent number of houses, apartments and other properties available for re-distribution among lower rabble and communist-supporting cretins. I even have a very un-scientific (but tested) theory that as the malnutrition in North Korea caused a decrease in average male height by almost 2 inches (5 cm) (and that is scientifically proven!), that in the same way this massive 42 year long brain drain caused an average decrease of 10 points on the Raven IQ test of the average Czechoslovak citizen.

When the infamous Velvet Revolution in November 1989 happened, Czechoslovak exiles rushed back to their perceived "homeland" and were slapped hard in the face with a "Cuban surprise" - they were not about to get their properties back. The above-described cretins now living in their houses and properties were not about to return what they considered "theirs" and had the full support of local Czech laws and the Czech government, who was populated - thanks to celebrated fake-humanist Vaclav Havel - almost exclusively by communists! Communists and communism took extremely deep roots in Czechoslovakia and even if it may sound a bit harsh (as our well-meaning Dubya is finding out about Iraq) - some nations are not sufficiently civilized to accept freedom and democracy. They do not like freedom and democracy in Iraq, they do not like freedom and democracy in Czechoslovakia, they do not like freedom and democracy in Cuba. And you can not force freedom and democracy on anybody.

So the Czech exiles had to leave their properties in the hands of commies and commie-supportive rabble again and leave the country for the second time with a tails between the legs, all the while Vaclav Havel was collecting honorary degrees and awards worldwide. Liberal universites did not care that Havel's humanitarian credits were comparable to those of Idi Amin Dada. Why should they? Leftwing Vaclav Havel is historically responsible for not punishing communist crimes in Czechoslovakia and for keeping former communists in positions of power. The Czech Republic's army's officer's cadre was exclusively communist - yet they were accepted as regular members of NATO and have rendered that once great alliance virtually incompetent. Czech allegiances are split in the best case - and favor Russia's direction every time Putin starts threatening with new missiles (which was last week as of last count). The world would probably be better off if the Czechs were still behind the barbed wire of the Iron curtain.

Tomorrow, June 3, 2007, our well-meaning (and perhaps a bit naive) president George W. Bush will be in Prague, Czech Republic. Over ninety percent of the Czech dignitaries he will meet there, from current Czech president Klaus down, are either former communists or people extremely soiled by collaboration with the communist regime. By the way - historians generally agree that while the Nazis are responsible for at least 20 million deaths, the communists are responsible for at least 100 million deaths. I wonder if Dubya would be so gladhanding in Germany if he knew that 90 percent of the German dignitaries were former Nazis? Yes, freedom and democracy is still a very foreign concept to many nations - including the post-communist Czechs.

There is no reason to expect that the situation in Cuba after Castro's departure will be much different than it is today in the completely screwed up, allegedly "post-communist" Czech Republic.

Do we need another Czech Republic ninety miles south of Key West?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_exile

Imagine Hitler's children...

2007-05-23T05:48:00.000-07:00

I was recently able to sneak in and out of the Czech Republic and here is my report: It is worse than anybody could have ever predicted.

Imagine Hitler's children running post-war Germany. Sure, Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and all other big-name Nazis would be dead and gone, but low-level Nazis would be promoted to top positions in government and society and running every aspect thereof. No escape. That is roughly the equivalent of today's Czech Republic. The old commie honchos are gone, having never been punished for their crimes, and are enjoying their retirements. Younger ex-communists, now pretending to be freedom-loving democrats are behind the wheel and firmly in control.

Rabid anti-Americanism oozes from every pore of that country. The Czech media, with their expected Judas-like bias are doing their fifth column job with the same fervent devotion as CNN (the Communist News Network) or PMSNBC here in America and spews hatred against America and anything which can be viewed as pro-American. Anti-American leftists like Michael Moore, Oliver Stone and similar nutcases are celebrated as big American heroes in the same way as Hugo Chavez. The older generation is trying to justify their idiotic positions by comparing the U.S. to the Russians: "First we were under forced Soviet dominance, now we are being forced everything American." Americans are generally considered fat, lazy, uneducated, burger-eating idiots with Bush, who is "like Hitler" holding a special place in their hatred. Prague is a favorite place of many American expatriates, especially those of left-of-Karl-Marx persuasion. Let's hope that Babs Streisand, Jane Fonda and Alec Baldwin will move there soon. The ex-pats recently had a big event there, something called "Americans against Bush". No kidding.

Communism sank such a deep roots in the Czech Republic that it is now firmly embedded in the fabric of society and is virtually not removable. Over 75% of current teachers were at some point in their careers members of Communist party - the rest, the younger ones who were too young to join the party, are still the products of communist schools and their communist teachers. A telling example of the state of Czech society is the Czech version of the "free Internet" encyclopedia Wikipedia. True to its form, it is officially headed by a former StaSi and StB (Czech secret police) informer, but the majority of its "contributors" are very young kids, sometimes as young as 15 years old. I intentionally wrote "contributors" because the Czech Wikipedia is not about contributing, it is about governing - who is in charge and who is to decide what is allowed to be written in this web-accessible encyclopedia. What you get is eerily similar to what happened to the children in William Golding's book "The Lord of the Flies" when they attempt to govern themselves and fail with disastrous results. These "children of the Czech Wikipedia", which are additionally heavily infected with the "Czech vision of the world" (almost identical with Marxism), are not contributing to Wikipedia, but are endlessly terrorizing each other and fighting for imaginary "power." When unsuspecting new contributors wanders in, their texts are immediately scanned and edited by overzealous, pre-pubescent cretins so they do not contain anything even remotely critical of past and current communist regimes in the Czech Republic, with no regard to historic facts whatsoever.

Czechs as a nation have an inferiority complex of humungous proportions. It is easily noticeable in situations where they apply the achievements of anybody even remotely of Czech origin as the achievement of the whole "Czech nation." Czechs were always sporting this weird trait, but in the last 17 years it has reached simply unbearable proportions. When Czech sport teams (i.e. hockey - a sport that Czechs are traditionally good at) win any competition, hundreds of thousands of people gather in town squares and while frenetically screaming "We are the champions!" (Jsme mistri!) drink themselves into oblivion with their low-quality Czech beer. Every civilized western nation has their achieving sport teams and their sport fans (The Bears!), but none of those happy fans ever tried to apply the achievement of their teams on themselves or their nation! The drunken Czech mob then usually unanimously nominates the leading sport figure to be President and leader of the whole country ("Hasek na Hrad!"). I am living near a golf course, but I do not recall, even after his many very famous victories, hearing an ear-piercing roar of "Tiger Woods for President!" I guess we are too far to the West and the Czechs are to far to the East.

According to recent newspaper reports the Czech military, which employs over fifty thousand "officers", most of them sitting in Prague's Department of Defense can currently offer ONLY THREE THOUSAND BATTLE-READY SOLDIERS. That is top heavy management brought to the extreme. And the "battle-readiness" of Czech soldiers is still a matter of opinion and rightfully questioned by many. When a very small contingent of Czech soldiers (numbering less than 100) was with great brouhaha of Czech Bush-hating press sent to Kuwait (Czech chest-beating patriots claimed that it was Iraq) they distinguished themselves by stealing sweaters in U.S. Army supply stores and stealing personal laptop computers from U.S. servicemen. They were sent packing back to the Czech Republic without coming anywhere close to military action. At home they were feted and toasted, received promotions and a chest-full of medals. The most incompetent of them were given posts at Brussels' NATO Headquarters - since the Czech Republic is a member of NATO (yep, Clinton did it) too. After all, they were "Iraq war veterans."

Last weekend, while we were watching sunset over the Gulf of Mexico, I vented my aforementioned observations to a friend, who used to "work for the U.S. government", as they like to say and was stationed for years in West Berlin and elsewhere in western Europe. "You got it right on, bro," said the man with a mild sneer. "With allies like the Czechs - who needs enemies?"

Ich bin ein American...

2007-05-08T11:32:00.000-07:00

Construction of the Berlin Wall began on August 13, 1961. On June 26, 1963 , when President Kennedy famously proclaimed that he was a doughnut (yes, folks, a Berliner is a doughnut), I was not too far from there. Unfortunately, I was on the other side - the wrong side - of the Berlin wall and Iron Curtain. In my defence I would say that it was not my choice - I was born there.

I remember nazism, fascism, anti-semitism, Marxism, Stalinism, communism and even "socialism with a human face". Despite being old enough to remember Unter den Linden still in ruins, before it was rebuilt, I was born after World War Two ended and as such I did not experience nazism and fascism myself, but the first hand experiences of my parents and family left an impression on me. All the other -isms I experienced on my own and I have scars to prove it. In that sad part of the world you could not travel a hundred miles without seeing some depressing memento of those times. Auschwitz was less then a hundred miles from where I was born and the place where Oscar Schindler (Schindler's list) had his factory was less then fifty miles away.

So I was born in a far away place, but in my soul I was always an American. I always knew that when I grew up I had to go where I was sure I belonged - to America. I came to America completely legally, I did not sneak across any borders, did not break any laws, did not protest and act like America owed me something simply because I was here. I took care of the legalities and I became an American citizen.

I have seen another -ism: anti-Americanism. Anti-Americanism is based on the same principles as nazism, fascism, anti-semitism and communism. It is based on envy and hate. Nazis and anti-semites started with hating Jews (because they were more industrious and wealthy than Nazis), communists hated just about everybody else (especially "capitalists" because - again - they had more money and brains than the commies could ever hope for). The violence of Kristallnacht and the holocaust (complete with the stealing of property and ripping out of gold teeth) was soon to follow. Not to be outdone by the Nazis, the Communists created one huge concentration camp called the "Eastern Bloc." They stole absolutely everything, killed millions and created a police states that made the Nazi effort look like amateur hour.

Today's "anti-Americanism" is nothing less than the same old hateful ideology: the ideology of under-achievers against over-achievers. It always starts with simple envy, develops into dislike and hate and culminates in violence, regardless if it is propagated by local leftists and liberal no-goodniks or some middle-eastern hateful ideology, pretending to be a religion. Yes, folks, political correctness is just another name for communist censorship. Sticks and stones can break my bones - but words leave permanent damage. The ideology of anti-Americanism has already progressed from envy to hate and has now entered the stage of violence. Have you already forgotten 9/11?

President Kennedy said on that day that "All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin. And, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words 'Ich bin ein Berliner.'" and all applauded and nobody cared that he said "ein" (that "ein" is the difference between somebody being from Berlin and a doughnut) because everybody knew what he meant and that he meant well.

My own paraphrase is that all free men, wherever they may live, are Americans. And, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words "Ich bin ein American!"

Czech Republic: Fair trial concerns in the case of Yekta Uzunoglu

2007-03-30T09:30:00.000-07:00

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL
Public StatementAI Index: EUR 71/001/2007 (Public)News Service No: 061
28 March 2007
Czech Republic: Fair trial concerns in the case of Yekta Uzunoglu

Amnesty International has received reports that Yekta Uzunoglu, a German citizen of Kurdish origin originally arrested in 1994, has been denied his right to a fair trial. Yekta Uzunoglu has also alleged that he was subjected to torture and other ill-treatment by law enforcement officials.

According to information received by Amnesty International Yekta Uzunoglu was arrested outside his flat on 13 September 1994. The arrest was based on testimony received from another Turkish citizen, Göksel Otan, who had been living in the Czech Republic under the alias of Gurkan Gönen and reportedly working as a police agent. Göksel Otan accused Yekta Uzunoglu of abducting and torturing him. However, in statements given to his lawyer at the time, several witnesses -- representatives of the pharmaceutical company Boots and of a Turkish cosmetic company, as well as several Czech individuals -- said that Yekta Uzunoglu had been with them at the time the act of torture was alleged to have taken place. Yekta Uzunoglu was charged with a range of offences, including torture, limitation of personal freedom, conspiracy to murder, robbery, fraud, and possessing arms without a licence.

Yekta Uzunoglu alleges that shortly after his arrest and while being held in custody he was subjected to “physical torture, torment and psychological terror.” In 1996 the then Interior Minister, Jan Ruml, is said to have admitted that Yekta Uzunoglu had been abused by the police.

The charge of a threefold conspiracy to murder or preparation for a murder was withdrawn on 10 April 1995, and that of economic fraud on 5 June 1998. Regarding the alleged illegal possession of arms, according to a statement in the Chamber of Deputies by the Czech Minister of Justice at the time, Jan Kalvoda, Yekta Uzunoglu had been prosecuted on this charge “by mistake” and the Minister apologized for this during his response to parliamentary queries.

Although granted German citizenship while imprisoned, after his release on 12 March 1997 (after 31 months in custody) Yekta Uzunoglu chose to stay in the Czech Republic in order to pursue his case because the charges of torture and limitation of personal freedom were not withdrawn. Yekta Uzunoglu appealed a judgment decision from September 2003 to close down his case, on the grounds that he wished to assert his right to have a court acquit him of the charges of torture and limitation of personal freedom.

The main court hearing on this appeal began on 25 June 2004. However, the hearing was considerably delayed because Göksel Otan, the alleged victim as well as a witness, had not appeared in court on numerous occasions and the police had failed to secure his presence in court. The court had also failed to summon for testimony the witnesses who were providing an alibi for Yekta Uzunoglu. Göksel Otan appeared for the first time on 24 August 2006; he was later also questioned and heard in court on 25 August 2006, and on 5 and 6 October 2006. Göksel Otan retracted his original testimony, repeatedly declaring that Yekta Uzunoglu “did not torture him, nor was he able to torture him, because he was not present during the act of torture”. The last main hearing took place on 6 October 2006, when Göksel Otan once again reiterated that Yekta Uzunoglu was not present. After hearing the testimonies and declarations, the last court hearings restarted on 27 March.

During all this time, the case of Yekta Uzunoglu has been supported by the Czech Helsinki Committee (CHC), which was involved in this case from the very beginning in 1994. Over the years, the CHC has publicly and repeatedly raised concern about the police handling of the case. The Charta 77 Foundation, through its president František Janouch, has also expressed its solidarity and support to Yekta Uzunoglu and concern about the unlawfulness of the proceedings.

International standards require that a person charged with a criminal offence be tried within a reasonable time. This right is enshrined in Article 14(3)(c) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which requires that trials on criminal charges take place without undue delay, and in Article 6(1) of the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, which requires that all trials (criminal or other) are conducted within a reasonable time. The authorities have the duty to expedite proceedings. If they fail to advance the proceeding at any stage due to neglect, allow the investigation and proceedings to stagnate or if they take an unreasonable time to complete specific measures, the time will be deemed unreasonable. Similarly, if the criminal justice system itself inhibits the speedy conclusion of trials, the right to trial within a reasonable time may be violated.

In the light of the account of these proceedings as outlined above, Amnesty International urges the Czech authorities to investigate procedural violations of Yekta Uzunoglu’s fair trial rights including the rights to be tried without undue delay, to ensure Yekta Uzunoglu’s right to call and to question witnesses under the principle of equality of arms, and to an effective defence. Amnesty International also urges the authorities to review the handling of this case in order to identify the flaws in the criminal justice system which led to Yekta Uzunoglu’s denial of a fair trial, with a view to preventing any repetition in the future. Finally Amnesty International would welcome details of any investigations which took place into Yekta Uzunoglu’s allegations of torture and ill-treatment in custody, and what their outcome was.

An Imperfect Fit

2006-11-28T15:36:00.000-08:00

There is a pattern: the United States is having problems imposing democracy on religious zealots in Iraq, the Netherlands is being legally and democratically overrun by Muslims and their undemocratic laws and customs, the European Community is failing and falling apart because of the unwise decision to include undeveloped East European countries. Now Turkey wants in as well? Who will be next claimant to "Europeanism"? Kazakhstan with Borat? It is truly an imperfect fit. The book "An Imperfect Fit" by Vit Klemes is the most important book since Francis Fukuyama published his "The End of History and the Last Man" and along with Mark Steyn's "America Alone" is required reading for any thinking man today.

The deeply philosophic book ponders principles of democracy and its future and the future isn’t so bright, so put away your shades. Dr. Klemes writes: "The defining characteristic of modern liberal democrats has been their belief that man is 'fundamentally good' and that the goodness of his nature will come to the surface once he is freed from oppression and want and his actions are guided by 'free choice". This belief can now be put to the test in the advanced democracies of the West which have essentially satisfied these conditions thus providing man with an unprecented opportunity to demonstrate the fundamental goodness of human nature in practice."

This writer believes that the level of civilization is determined by the level of respect towards human life - not by the length of the existence of that particular brand of "civilization". Therefore is quite irrelevant if the Chinese or Indian civilization are 6000 or 4000 years old - their killing of unborn female fetuses or throwing of widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands puts them into an awkward position. They are not fully compatible with the great democracy of the West. They are truly an imperfect fit.

Author Vit Klemes writes at length about all three dimensions of democracy - liberty, equality, and fraternity and worries about the greatest danger facing democracy today - 'outdemocratizing' itself into self-destruction. It is quite ironic that we can use a former countryman of Vit Klemes (who was born in Czechoslovakia) the president of the Czech Republic Vaclav Klaus, as a shining example of this dilemma about outdemocratizing democracies into self-destruction and about the incompatibility of seemingly democratic countries of the East - here comes the pun about "wicked" countries of the East ("wicked" being a term used throughout the book).

The president of the Czech republic, Vaclav Klaus is a quite despicable character, "Ahmadinejad of Eastern Europe with Papa Doc Duvalier attitude", the man who put "r" into arrogant, a person of questionable loyalties, a man with a shady past, a statesman with better relations to Mongolia and Russia than to any country in the West, "persona non grata" in Washington, D.C. and yet he is loved, admired and democratically elected by his own people! Yet leaders of other "wicked countries of the East" are sometimes even worse than poor Klaus - look at Belarus' Lukashenko or Russia's Putin. The chasm in their respective societies is widening and their countries are well on course towards Balkanization. What then? Total incompatibility! An imperfect fit! The collapse of democracy!

Some (like me) believe that with the rise of islamo-fascism and the death of communism being more wishful thinking than fact that we would be much better off with the Iron Curtain still standing. Vit Klemes believes that there is something better coming. Allow me to quote again from his book: "Herein lie the seeds of democracy's self-destruction. However, such a prospect need not necessarily be viewed with alarm and apprehension since it would be a consequence of the system's departure from the realities of life and its unviability. And there would be no reason to mourn the collapse of an unviable system - even if it bears the cherished noble name of democracy - for there is always a possibility that a more viable one may rise from its ashes: after all, it is the substance that counts, not the name."

After reading Vit Klemes' book An Imperfect Fit and watching the daily news, I concluded that his summary of the state of things in not-so-civilized countries is still sort of an understatement. It should not be An Imperfect Fit. It should be Unfit.
---
Vit Klemes - An Imperfect Fit - Advanced democracy and human nature - ISBN 1-4120-1789-0

The Greatest Cold War Story Ever Told

2006-10-03T12:34:00.000-07:00

The Naval Institute Press in Annapolis, Maryland published a dazzling, accomplished book by Barbara Masin called Gauntlet. I was surprised by the title, as I had previously read the older, differently named, version of the manuscript supplied to me by the author. When I hear the word Gauntlet, the Clint Eastwood movie of the same name always pops into my mind specifically the final scene of an old and rugged Clint running the gauntlet (or driving in his case) through the streets of Phoenix, being shot at from all sides, with high hopes and sense of duty, only to arrive on the steps of city hall to find a conclusion that he did not really like. Then it struck me - the finely crafted story told to us by Barbara Masin is in many facets and angles very similar, but very real and with an added epic weight.

It is a story of five young men, brothers Ctirad and Josef Masin (who is to become Barbara Masin's own father), Milan Paumer, Vaclav Sveda and Zbynek Janata, who in October 1953 fled communist Czechoslovakia on foot and shot their way through equally communist East Germany to West Berlin. It was the culmination and grand finale of their anti-Communist resistance activities, going in the footsteps of their legendary father and their families - and that it where the "gauntlet" comes into play. East German StaSi and VoPo mobilized over twenty thousand soldiers and policemen to capture the five young men.

They eventually captured two out of the five and promptly gave them to Czech commies to be executed, with many other relatives - but the Masin brothers and Milan Paumer (with a gunshot wound in the stomach) finished their run of the gauntlet to West Berlin. The book is a gripping thriller that would make Robert Ludlum proud - with one big distinction: this was not fantasy, this was a real life story and even those unfamiliar with the harsh realities of Eastern Europe in the dark ages of the Cold war will be sucked into the action. The realism of the story is chilling and makes it next to impossible to put the book down.

The Masin family was far from ordinary and the book follows the story of several generations in the family. Josef Masin, the father (1896-1942), was a soldier, hero of both world wars, member of Czechoslovak Legions in WWI, which fought their way across Russia and Siberia to the Pacific Ocean and was a member of the underground resistance against the Nazis. His sons, Ctirad (b. 1930), Josef (b. 1932) and daughter Zdena (b. 1933) were the next generation. Their mother, Zdena Masinova, although she did not know about her sons activites and escape plans, was sentenced to 25 years of prison and died in prison soon afterwards in horrific conditions. Their uncle Ctibor Novak was executed together with Vaclav Sveda and Zbynek Janata. Multiple friends and relatives were also executed or imprisoned - even if they knew nothing about the Masin brothers’ group’s anti-Communist activities.

The Masin brothers still have not set foot back in their native land. Today the Czech Republic is still only marginally free and allegedly democratic, but the majority of its population, after more than fifty years of constant brainwashing, has quite a ridiculous attitude about their own history and the role they themselves played in it. The Masin brothers and Milan Paumer are repeatedly nominated for the highest of Czech awards, only to be rejected by the communist-dominated Czech government. Yet other Czech politicians are afraid to take a clear stance in this case. Poorly educated, brainwashed for multiple generations and generally fearful, the population of today’s Czech Republic seems to lack the guts needed to push the issue through.

Nevertheless, the Masins and Paumer are held in high regard by the community of Czechs and former-Czechs living abroad, who in contrast to the inhabitants of the Czech and Slovak Republics, are familiar with the experience of fleeing to the West at the risk of one's life, and seem to be Masin's admirers: in 2005, the Czech and Slovak Association of Canada gave the Thomas Masaryk Award to the Masin brothers and Milan Paumer.
The Masin brothers and Milan Paumer were heroes. In this context heroes are individuals, who by example of their own bravery are able to inspire the masses. And inspire they did. Close to 1 million former Czechs and Slovaks now happily live abroad.

Czechoslovakia is from the historic point of view quite an unfortunate country - it was a truly free country for only twenty years (1918-1938) of their 1500 or so year history. By becoming Americans, the Masins and Paumer found - not that they planned it that way - the end of their rainbow. Czechoslovakia probably was not destined to be free, then or now - so those of us - inspired by the Masins - those of us who had freedom embedded in our DNA just had to go and become Americans. Which isn’t bad at all, considering where we came from and what most of us have been through.

The Czech translation of the original manuscript was published in the Czech Republic about a year ago under the name "Odkaz". Since then, an additional seven months of research was added to the book for its English edition. It is a fast read and sure to delight anybody from history buffs and thriller aficionados right down to elderly cancelled Czechs who want their English-speaking children and grandchildren to read about their ancestors old country which never came to be free. It serves as a fine introduction for those unfamiliar with the history of that sad part of the world. A must for every library. This intense and amazing story is, without doubt, the greatest Cold war story ever told.

Thank you, Joe, Ray and Milan. And thank you all, who died on the way here. You all were and are our heroes and inspiration.

---------------
Gauntlet. (Five Friends, 20,000 Enemy Troops, and the Secret That Could Have Changed the Course of the Cold War) - by Barbara Masin, Published by Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, Maryland 21402, ISBN 1-59114-515-5 384 pages, Printed in the U.S.A.

http://www.gauntletinfo.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masin
http://www.praguepost.com/P03/2006/Art/0810/tempo1.php
http://www.radio.cz/en/article/52502/limit
http://www.praguepost.com/P03/2005/Art/1027/news1.php

How the West Was Lost...

2006-08-09T07:38:00.000-07:00

You know what NATO is otherwise you would not be reading this article. What is intriguing is its membership. The founding members (as of April 4, 1949) were Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, United Kingdom and the United States. It made perfect logical sense. More countries were later added to the roster: Greece and Turkey on February 18, 1952 and Germany on May 9, 1955. Germany expanded to include the territory of Saarland, when it was returned in 1957 and then again to include the former East Germany after the German re-unification of October 3, 1990. Eventually Spain joined on May 30, 1982. So far so good.

On March 12, 1999 logic and common sense were unceremoniously thrown out the window when the allegedly democratic and former Warsaw Pact countries of Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic joined NATO. A few years later on March 29, 2004 seven additional more-or-less communist countries joined NATO: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. Liberals and communists of the world rejoiced everyone else went slack jawed with shock. It made almost as much sense as the Ku Klux Klan joining the NAACP or Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. NATO was an international organization for collective security - meant for the west’s defense against the Soviet Union and its vassals - and now it’s being joined by the very countries against which it was supposed to fight?

All those new East European members of NATO have made only marginal steps towards democratization of their countries. Their membership in NATO renders this once powerful organization factually powerless and useless which was probably the intention of the authors of the idea of admitting them into NATO in the first place.

Only very superficial changes were made in governmental make up of all former countries of the Warsaw Pact. I will use the Czech Republic as an example to illustrate.

Czechoslovakia switched from being communist into being "democratic" under very suspicious and never fully explained circumstances on November 17, 1989, when the StB (the Czech secret police) organized "student demonstrations" in Prague. One youthful-looking StB officer, Ludvik Zifcak, even pretended to be "dead student Ruzicka" so the news flashes about the "tragedy" could be sent out to the world by Marxist journalist (no accident here) Petr Uhl to drum up sympathy and get things moving. Today Ludvik Zifcak is the chairman of one of the many Communist parties in the Czech Republic and no longer hides his true colors.

Next came the moment for the future darling of western leftist media and western Marxist university professors, writer Vaclav Havel. It was not so obvious then, but with twenty-plus years of hindsight, it is obvious that Vaclav Havel, a protégé from a prominent family, was groomed by the communist government for a big position in the future. That future started later with the so-called Velvet Revolution. The prominence of Vaclav Havel under the communist regime was obvious not only from his uninhibited traveling to the West at a time when ordinary Czechs had to stay put for decades (does nobody remember the Iron Curtain anymore?), but also from his driving around in expensive western cars when his compatriots could hardly afford a bicycle to pedal. This was a little too well known and therefore the communist planners decided to manufacture a plausibly deniable cover story for the future - for when the need would arise to present Havel as a martyr and opponent of the communist regime. So they imprisoned Vaclav Havel (well, it was more like a spa) to create an aura of a "prisoner of conscience". The world and the Czechs themselves took the bait. Vaclav Havel later put a big dent into his manufactured “poor tortured prisoner” cover story when his "Letters to Olga" were published. Letters to Olga were letters to his wife from prison and in which he describes his prison life. For example "smoking cigars" (page 5), "eating caviar" (page 16), "ordering cartons of different brand of cigarettes, the old one is not good enough" (page 61), "watching movies and TV" (page 85), "eating chocolates" (page 98), and "getting shipments of foreign vitamins" (page 107). He led the life of comfortable vacationer in every sense of the word. On a page 7 he writes about "getting massages". Poor prisoner Vaclav Havel how could he have endured the suffering of that hellish prison existence for so long?

On Dec. 29, 1989 the exclusively communist Czechoslovak parliament unanimously "elected" Vaclav Havel, an alleged enemy of the state until the day before, to the presidency of Czechoslovakia. Who says pigs can’t fly?

Then the events took a faster pace and started making even less sense. President Havel immediately pronounced a new policy of "Peace and Love" and ordered that there will be no prosecution or persecution of communists. Some of them, like the hard-line commie and then Prime Minister Marian Calfa, became "close friends" with Havel. During Havel’s 14 year presidency (which ended in February 2003) he never failed to protect his communist buddies, while at the same moment preaching to the West about human rights. Vaclav Havel gave lifetime tenure to old-time communist judges and presided over establishing "legal continuity" with the former communist regime and thus forever protected all communist criminals in justice, army, police and all branches of the government from ever being punished for their past crimes.

After the Czech Republic became a member of NATO on March 12, 1999, Havel sent former Warsaw Pact “ex-communist” officers as emissaries to Brussels - no other "senior officers" were apparently available! My guess is that all NATO military secrets reached KGB headquarters in Lubyanka Square about 15 minutes after they were entrusted to "NATO-Czech" officers. The same is true for all other "senior officers" from former Warsaw Pact countries that were sent to Brussels in similar fashion. By allowing those snakes into the house, NATO rendered itself ineffective and useless and can no longer be taken seriously as a military protective force and alliance. Whoever in NATO had the "bright idea" to allow Czechs, Poles and Hungarians into NATO to create a "buffer zone" between Western Europe did not realize that the Czechs, Poles and Hungarians are the proverbial Trojan horse. The enemy is no longer at the gates - with this stupid decision the enemy is now inside the gates.

And this is how the United States lost NATO without even knowing it.

What’s the current situation? Vaclav Havel, a key player in the elimination of NATO, has since "retired" and has become the world’s most successful collector of Honoris Causa doctoral titles from universities world-wide. If your school will plop another ridiculous title on him, yes, he is always willing to come and soliloquize a little. The power of communists and the influence of the Soviet Union (now Russia, whatever) on the countries of Eastern Europe never waned and the KGB’s grip on events remained firm. Communists switched the official names of their parties into something more acceptable to gullible Westerners and continue to rule.
Their formerly political power was smoothly transferred into economic power in one amazing trick - company bosses, which had always been a political appointment, simply became company owners in a very smooth transition to capitalism. In the most recent Czech and Slovak elections, the renamed political parties of ex-communists won the elections. They promised the moon and stars and the populace believed them.

And you thought that Islamofascism was a problem? Have you forgotten about the Evil Empire? They knocked NATO out cold without a single shot being fired. Just wait and see what they come up with next...

Slovakia. Tide is turning...

2006-07-05T11:14:00.000-07:00

The political tide is turning in Slovakia - for the worse. During the recent elections the communists (under whatever new name they are hiding now) won. Slovak president Ivan Gasparovic named Robert Fico to be the new Slovak Prime Minister.

Sharing power in Fico's new government will be former Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar and the darling of Slovak nationalists Jan Slota. Vladimir Meciar (an ex-communist), the Prime Minister of Slovakia in the nineties, was and still is a nightmare of Slovak politics. In ruthlessness he could compete with Noriega (with whom he shares more than just some facial features) or any dictator up to Idi Amin Dada. During Meciar's rule, luxury cars turned car bombs were exploding in the streets on an almost daily basis (he blamed that on local mafiosi), his political opponents were persecuted or murdered (he blamed that on local mafiosi), the lucky ones hid abroad (he blamed that on local mafiosi I guess), some the not-so-lucky ones were blown up in their cars (he blamed that on local mafiosi), the son of the then-president was kidnapped (he blamed that on local mafiosi), and his mistress hanged herself (I do not recall, but I think he blamed that on local mafiosi too). During Meciar's government, Slovakia was on the brink of becoming a pariah of the civilized world. Now he is back in a position of power. Why? Has something changed?

Jan Slota is a national level politician, whose every third or fourth word in any given sentence in an earthy Slovak expletive, which can be translated as "whore." People just love it. He is a heavy-duty drinker. In his circles it is considered "standard." In the past, he has issued a call for everybody to get into tanks and to attack Budapest, which happens to be the capital city of neighboring Hungary.

And Robert Fico himself? A young spineless lawyer, populist and an ex-communist, a ladder-climber even during the communist regime, a member of the communist nomenklatura, who after the so-called Velvet Revolution founded a political party so extremely left of center that he was disliked even in the Socialist International organization - and they love any communist nut. It is not known if he has drawn any likable pictures of the streets of old Vienna.

And the above-mentioned three nuts were just put back into a position of power in Slovakia. By democratic elections no less.

They say that some birds are not meant to be caged, because their feathers are too bright. In the same fashion we can state, that some countries were not meant to be democratic, because ... well, whatdayathink? Maybe the Iron curtain came down far too soon. And do not tell me that Eastern Europeans have the right to democratically elect commies if they want to. They don't. There are a lot of historical precedents. If you will go to the library and look it up (or Google it!) you will find that even Adolf Hitler did not get to power in a violent way. Hitler, meine Liebsten, was democratically elected.

Czechs in EU - was it a mistake?

2006-07-03T14:42:00.000-07:00

I remember about thirty years ago I read Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Vonnegut, with his well-known fondness for Germans, was explaining with the aid of his child-like drawings how it was with Germans and WWII. There was a doodle of the German flag with a swastika in the middle and a caption that dryly noted: "This was the German flag, when the Germans were sick." A few lines beneath that was a similar drawing, but without the swastika and a caption saying: "This was the German flag, after the Germans got well." A genius in simplicity.

I wish somebody would figure out a similarly simple explanation of what was the reasoning to accept the Czech Republic (or any other East European countries for that matter) into NATO and subsequently into the EU as well. At the time it sounded like a good idea to have them in NATO and the EU and have them act as a buffer between Western Europe and Russia, because for sure they did not qualify militarily, economically or as a sufficiently civilized society.

If it was a suspicion then, time proved the correctness of that suspicion now. The Germans went through "denazification" and to a large extent they cleansed their society of an element of evil - the Nazis. Look it up in any encyclopedia and you will find that communism has killed about ten times as many people as nazism did. All those Hitlers, Eichmanns and Heydrichs were just bumbling amateurs compared to their communist counterparts. In spite of all that, communism and communists were never punished for their crimes against humanity. Exactly the opposite - former communists are back in power in most countries of Eastern Europe and they are being freely elected to plush offices representing their countries at EU headquarters in Brussels. They say they are not communists anymore. Well, would you elect Heinrich Himmler to EU office just because he wore a different kind of uniform?

The same countries are also members of NATO - formerly a defense alliance against the Empire of Evil. When countries of the Empire of Evil joined NATO without bothering to change to true democracy the purpose of NATO became very unclear. New NATO members are represented in Brussels by their "experienced" and "senior" military officers: essentially the same people who swore allegiance to the Soviet Union as members of the Warsaw Pact a few years back. I doubt that NATO has or can have any military secrets that the Russians do not know within 15 minutes.

Countries of Eastern Europe did not fulfill the expectations we had of them 16 years ago. They choose not to pursue Dostoyevsky's advice on Crime and Punishment. They choose unwisely - they choose not to punish the worst ever crimes in human history. I believe that history will treat those responsible for non-punishment as equally guilty as those who committed the crimes. Vaclav Havel, Vaclav Klaus, Alexander Lukashenko and Slobodan Milosevic will get their places in the halls of infamy right next to Hitler and Goring. No lecturing or doctoral titles honoris causa there.

What I was trying to say is that if Vonnegut were to comment on the Czech Republic or other countries of Eastern Europe today, almost 17 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, there would be no need for his doodles. It would suffice to say that their colors never changed.

Czech Republic and the new Europe...

2006-07-03T14:41:00.000-07:00

We all know what pathological liars do: they embellish their stories in ways that they believe will impress people or make the liars look better than they actually are. But what about entities larger than a single individual? In a debate I participated in recently, I suggested that we have historical data to prove a pattern of pathological lying at the level of tens of millions of people at once: the case of the Czech Republic, formerly known as the left side (no pun intended) of Czechoslovakia.

Lying as part of the Czech national culture started with the communist takeover right after WWII and established its roots so deeply that it reached a state of confabulation. Confabulation is "the confusion of imagination with memory, and/or the confusion of true memories with false memories." Basically it is when you start believing your own lies. The Czech Republic is in a state of confabulation.

A few examples to ponder: the decrees of President Benes in 1945, which caused irreparable harm to millions were lies - and millions knew they were lies, but the Czechs believed it then and believe it now. They even honored those lies recently by passing the new "Lex Benes" law. Then there were the political trials in Czechoslovakia in the early fifties everyone knew they were lies, but they believed it then and they believe it now. Can you imagine that the Czech Republic adheres to "legal continuity" with laws from the early fifties? Laws of the brutal terror of communism?

They lied (and knew about it) about the non-existent successes of socialism in the sixties, they lied about the Prague Spring in 1968 and their own confabulation made them believe that "reformed" communists like Dubcek, who tyrannized them a few months earlier, were now to make their lives better. Is it possible that 15 million people simultaneously suffer from Korsakoff's syndrome and (to quote Wikipedia) "confabulate by guessing an answer or imagining an event and then mistaking their guess or imagination as an actual memory?" It happened!

Russian tanks ended that psyched-out happening with the Prague Spring, but mass lying, confabulating and brainwashing continued. They lied on (and believed it) about their love for the Soviet Union and their inhumane system; they lied (and believed it) about "normalization" in the seventies and eighties.
Everybody with half a brain knew that the Velvet Revolution was just a KGB/StB prepared "changing of the guards" but nobody thought about stopping the lies. So they continued. Vaclav Havel, the darling of western liberals, made the whole Velvet revolution a lie by ensuring that not a single communist murderer or tyrant was punished. Nobody said a word. Vaclav Klaus, Havel’s successor, is lying about his imaginary successes in the West as an "economic lecturer" and ten millions of Czechs eat it up.

Senior officers of the Czech Army who just a few years ago were hard-line communist officers of the Czechoslovak Army (a Warsaw Pact member) now reside in NATO offices in Brussels - which rendered NATO effectively useless. Very large portions of Czech Republic representatives in EU posts are ex-communists. It is no secret that Czech representatives at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg busy themselves by lying about the number of complaints coming from the Czech Republic and hiding them from non-Czech speaking judges. A cartoon I saw recently, deriding the European Union as a "new socialist super state," was probably depicting things the way ex-commies from Eastern Europe would love to have them.

So, do we have historical data to prove a pattern of pathological lying at a national level or not?

Stop financially supporting Wikipedia!

2006-04-27T10:19:00.000-07:00

I have certainly found it ironic that the English Wikipedia includes an article about the expression "useful idiots" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_Idiots) because it is essentially the status which the founders and management of Wikipedia (located mostly in Tampa, Florida) now have in the eyes of users of most East European language versions of their very own website. Please note that this is not name-calling, but merely a technically accurate description. After all, I am a polite guy.

The Wikipedia, in its English form, was founded under the naive impression that other language versions will be managed under the same civilized rules as the original one. Wrong assumption...

According to my research and various sources (who prefer to remain anonymous) only the English version of the Wikipedia can be described as relatively civilized and unbiased. Unfortunately this is not the case in most local language versions in countries with little or no history of democracy or western civilization. I am unable to read Chinese to verify it, but I am getting second-hand reports that Chinese Wikipedia does not include any historical information about atrocities commited by communists and that all articles must be from the official "Beijing point of view" - thus not NPOV (Neutral Point of View). I can't stop wondering why such a travesty of human decency is being tolerated by and supported with American resources. Seems to me that Google with its "Marxist version of the Google search engine" is not alone in its kissing up to Chinese communists. Well well well...

The situation is very similar in all East European language versions - where I do not need any translators and I can personally confirm it. It is bad on Slovak, Polish and Russian Wikipedias but the situation on the Czech Wikipedia is far and away the worst. In case you are not aware of it, the Czech Republic (a democracy in name only) is ruled by neo-communists - though they offically call themselves "socialists". Czech students, who are the main fodder-contributors to the Czech Wikipedia are saturated to their eyeballs with Marxism. They could not be any redder.

Thus it is only logical that the contents and daily life of the Czech Wikipedia looks and behaves accordingly. The sysops and admins of the Czech Wiki rule with an iron fist and they've created the very first Wiki-tyranny. Dissent or any democratic expression of a different (while still NEUTRAL) opinion is impossible and is immediately punished by extreme blocking (ranging from a few days to nine months) to prevent editing of said or any article. This is only for Wikipedians who do not goose step with the official party line - everybody agrees that vandalism is not to be tolerated anywhere and should be punished accordingly. Wiki-stalking of suspected wiki-dissidents is the rule not the exception and is a part of a Czech Wikipedia sysops basic duties. The Czech Wikipedia has been virtually hijacked by marxist Wiki-terrorists. Best of all, they have nothing to worry about because nobody in Tampa speaks Czech and they can always lie their way out - they have many willing accomplices among Czech students studying in the United States that will cover their backs.

As a result, thousands of articles on Czech history and society are severely biased and twisted to comply with the current political propaganda and prevailing sentiments in society. For example Czechs generally dislike Czech expatriates of the Cold-war era, and so articles about them reflect only one point of view. There are hundreds of examples like this. Discussion of these issues is not allowed and those who object are immediately accused by sysops of "disrupting" and repeatedly blocked until they leave the Wikipedia altogether. Basically, unless the article is about stones or flowers or other scientific things, only the communist and marxist point of view is allowed and only it is considered to be "neutral". All opposing viewpoints are thus banned.

The admins are also using technical means to further their goals: automatically blocking thousands of IP addresses, which are allegedly "proxies" (and they are not) and refusing to install software which would allow transparent reading of Czech words with or without Czech diacritics. That last trick effectively blocks thousands of potential Wiki visitors from abroad, who do not have diacritics on their keyboards - aka those hated Czech expatriates.

If somebody from the Czech Wikipedia attempts to seek remedy or justice at the English Wikipedia or META Wikipedia (there is such a guy, a Czech lawyer named Vit Zvanovec), he is quickly located and a "death squad" of Czech (but English-speaking) sysops from the Czech Wikipedia moves to discredit, dismiss him as a crackpot and neutralize him. In that effort they are getting very effective help from local American "useful idiots" (again, no name-calling, just a technical description) who would patronize, discourage and generally put down the "complainer" - like for example a Wikipedian named Dan, who wrote to Zvanovec as follows at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_permissions#Desysopping_of_cs:Wikipedista:Egg

"To request the removal of sysop access from another user, please gain consensus on this on your own wiki first. All discussion must be kept on your local wiki." This is not the place to propose a user's desysopping. Please make a request here only after you have obtained consensus among the cs.wikipedia community. Dan"

Seems that "Dan" can not wrap his mind around the fact that any such action on the Czech Wikipedia is not possible, because such person would be immediately blocked (and Zvanovec in fact was) and a Czech "death squad" would quickly show up (as they did) and proclaim Zvanovec a known troublemaker with a history of "disrupting", who should not be taken seriously. Case closed.

It seems that there is no way to get a message through up the chain of command. Tampa is turning a deaf ear. Any such attempt ends up either being ignored or with the really illogical recommendation of placing a complaint with the very people against who you are complaining. Not even Joe Stalin could set up a smarter system.

But maybe there is a way and one which always gets attention and results. Wikipedia depends on donations. Simply stop sending any money to the Wikipedia Foundation, stop your contributions, stop your PayPal accounts - it will get noticed sooner or later. It will also force all the distinguished thinkers at Wikipedia Offices in Tampa, Florida to climb down out of their ivory towers and start dealing with real problems. I have no doubts that the absolute majority of donations to Wikipedia Foundation comes from the U.S., I do not think that contributions from the People's Republic of China or the Czech Republic matter too much. Therefore I believe that American money should not support intellectual brainwashing anywhere (be it in China or Eastern Europe) and that the founders and managers of this great idea - a free Internet encyclopedia - should decisively step in and use all means at their disposal to stop abuse of their own project by some marxist intellectual vermin of world. Situation is bad. And nothing short of immediate, resolute action to make it better is acceptable.

Judgment by numbers – Czech this out.

2006-03-07T13:05:00.000-08:00

I resent being unjustifiably, erroneously not to mention libelously called a spammer by my Czech communist enemies. Oh, they claim to not be full-fledged raging Stalinist communists? Well isn’t that special! I guess they take umbrage to their own actions and tactics when they’re used against them. Tough luck – they continue to do it to me so I will make a concerted effort to do it to them.

Let’s look at it from a statistics point of view. According to the Lenin-saluting communist Czech vendetta squad on this board, I am a spammer because several (3-6) people from the Czech Republic think so and called me that. Never mind the fact that they are no longer on my list! Based on the size of my mailing list (which numbers in the thousands) they are just a tiny fraction of a fraction of one percent. However, to some brainwashed Marx-idolizing Czechs it does justify this accusation and they insist on including this derogatory label in my articles.

I claim, here and now, that I and a number of other people hold with utmost conviction that Wikimol, Miraceti and Radouch (together with several of their friends on the Czech Wikipedia) are full-fledged communist Marxists and I respectfully request the right to call them as a such. If such permission is not given, I will call them that anyway – just like they have done to me. I reserve the right (and will exercise it) to include a note about their communist and Marxist allegiances in any articles written about them – even though I doubt any will be written about such impotent and completely irrelevant figures.

Justice for all. After all – we are not living behind the Iron Curtain. They may wish the Iron Curtain still remained and that the glorious Union of Soviet Social Republics was still a formidable power, however, they live a life of delusion. I, as an American citizen, have certain unalienable rights, one of them being the right to freedom of expression and freedom of speech. However, they live in the People’s Republic of China, err, sorry, the Czech Republic, and not in the United States and as such know nothing of personal freedoms, but that does not give them the right to publicly defame me with their libelous tripe.

Czech Wikipedia in disarray

2006-02-25T16:00:00.000-08:00

I was wandering around the Internet recently and happened upon the Czech version of Wikipedia. What I found puzzled me. I was fully aware of the basic principles of Wikipedia, that Wikipedia is not a democracy and that you can’t demand the right to freedom of speech as we understand it in America, but still - it was a shock.

The Czech version of the Wikipedia (at http://cs.wikipedia.org/ ) is mostly populated by citizens of the Czech Republic - a country which only recently emerged from behind the Iron Curtain. More than 60 years (officially only 42) of living under the Stalinist boot certainly made an impression on all of them: they are still brainwashed beyond recognition.

The Czech Wikipedia is an encyclopedia about flowers, animals and many other non-controversial items. However, there are virtually no articles about their recent history of communist rule because they are considered not only "controversial” but “taboo” as well. If anybody is bold enough to submit such an article (not opinionated or harshly critical pieces, just historically and factually accurate ones), administrators immediately delete it and the submitting user is permanently banned. The reason for this self-censorship is simple: fear. In 1989, communists in the Czech Republic changed their coats - they are not "communist" anymore, but they remain in positions of power. This has the administrators of the Czech Wikipedia quaking in their boots. Until recently the main "sysop" nicknamed "-jkb-" quite innocently admitted on his personal Wiki-page that he was essentially a collaborator with the StB (the Czech version of the KGB) 25 years ago. He did not think much about it because he considered it commonplace. He has since resigned. At least he had the decency to do that.

The situation with the rest of the Czech Wikipedia administrators is not much better. All of them are fervent nationalists (at par with Muslim fanatics offended by a simple cartoon) and simply will not allow any articles related to their country’s recent history to be on their site. It is as if the German version of Wikipedia made no mention of the Holocaust and was allowed to deny the existence of that part of German history. At the same time the Czech encyclopedia sports pathetically subservient, overblown and exaggerated biographies of their current leaders and politicians (Havel, Klaus, Svoboda, etc) that would be comparable only to the official biography of Kim Il-sung in the North Korean Wikipedia (if there was one). When you consider that the Czech (then Czechoslovak) government voted for "legal continuity with a previous communist regime" in 1990 then it’s no real surprise.

To use an old Yogi Berra maxim "You can observe a lot by watching." I am watching them a lot. The most amazing (and deeply disturbing) thing in the Czech Wikipedia is the currently running trial (they call it arbitrage) of their former colleague and fellow-administrator Vit Zvanovec, who had a falling-out of favor in a fashion not dissimilar to the 1950’s political trials in Czechoslovakia (Slansky et al.). That sentiment is still running in their veins - trying somebody, bombastic talk about imaginary crimes and real punishment. The only thing missing there are the bewildered crowds of proletariat demanding death for the accused in the "Psovi psi smrt!" (Dogs deserve to die like dogs!) manner of late Czech writer Marie Pujmanova. Everything else is eerily similar - judges, accused, non-existing crimes, and the oh-so-Czech mannerisms. The judges in the proceedings insist on using and being addressed by their infantile nicknames, but accused is using his real name - Vit Zvanovec. Every time the accused uses the real names of the judges, he is "called to order", immediately reprimanded and also immediately punished by being temporarily banned from posting - it is a Kafkaesque absurdity bordering on sheer ridiculousness. All of the involved are, at least according to Czech standards, educated people: Accused Zvanovec is a 31-year old lawyer and his tyrants are all university-trained people, one of them is even a Catholic priest (no idea if he was ever a member of Pacem in Terris).

I myself had a few skirmishes with that bunch of dictatorial stooges as well - but comparatively miniscule ones, especially compared to Zvanovec. The Czech Wikipedia had no information whatsoever on anything related to the recent history of the country while under communist rule - I have no doubt that this "omission" was quite intentional. So I showed up and started making a fuss about the lack of articles about heroes of the communist resistance - namely Radek and Josef Masin, recent political prisoner Vladimir Hucin, dissident Petr Cibulka, and a number of exiled writers and artists. Such an ‘oversight’ was in my view unimaginable and simply unforgivable. So I did the right thing and started articles about each of them. Yes, I was the first.

As expected, the leftist clique of administrators did not like it one bit. They screamed in ways that would make a horror movie director proud. I was threatened, harassed and eventually repeatedly blocked – an action that would probably instill fear in any ordinary Wikipedista with a permanent residence in the Czech Republic. Well, not my case - so I pressed the matter and after some time the articles about the Masin brothers, Hucin, Cibulka and others were included in the Czech Wikipedia. However, they are not in my original wording: they are mangled and distorted by Czech newspeak, but at least they are there.

My latest exercise in futility on the Czech Wikipedia was my attempt to insert new articles with definitions of the terms Neo-communism and Anti-Americanism. Everything on the internet is very fast as you may know: I inserted the original article at 21:31 on 9.2.2006 with about 500 words explaining the terms in relation to the current Czech Republic. By 23:19 on 9.2.2006 the article had been completely reworded by the Marxist goon squad of administrators, reduced to few sentences (none of the mine) with completely opposite meanings than originally explained and twisted into the position that the term is not valid anymore and is applicable only to some commie relics far to the east - not in the Czech Republic.

The elimination of my article on anti-Americanism was even faster - it took a mere 4 minutes and was completely deleted by an administrator with the telling pseudonym “CHE”. Is it possible to pick more Marxist nickname, with the exception of calling yourself "Stalin?" A note was attached explaining that there is an existing article about anti-Americanism, explaining that it was something about a protest during the Vietnam War. Surely there is nothing even resembling anti-Americanism anywhere in today’s world!

For my sins (and perseverance) against this Marxist bunch of sandbox dictators that run the Czech Wikipedia I was of course due for some kind of sophisticated punishment (as sophisticated as the feebly pre-pubescent leftist Czech mind can understand it): they created an article about me and filled that with all manner of lies, false accusations, libel and outright hateful information and prevented me from deleting any of it. I guess they never heard that something like this had happened before – the case of John Seigenthaler Sr. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Seigenthaler_Sr._Wikipedia_biography_controversy) where patently false statements were also inserted into an article about him by some irresponsible punk. Legal action followed, libelous statements were corrected and some arrogant behinds were subjected to a well-deserved kicking.

Unfortunately the current administrators of the Czech Wikipedia cannot clean up this mess because they are the creators and producers of it. They will not resign voluntarily (being the communists that they are, they will attempt to sit there forever just like Brezhnev-era apparatchiks) and Wikipedia's central command in Florida is about as willing to act as Kofi Annan's United Nations. As we know from Russia, "perestroika" never worked - because it was expected that the communists would make themselves into honest and productive people - instead of liars and thieves. I am predicting that the decline of the Czech Wikipedia (on which many critics surprisingly agree) will continue until the point, where current administrators will have to be forcibly removed and replaced. There is no other way in the post-communist Czech Republic. They will accept it well - after all they are used to it. That’s how the things work over there.

Since the ultimate solution to this problem in nowhere to be seen, the only temporary band-aid for the time being is simply to ignore the Czech version of Wikipedia, because at its current level it is nothing more and nothing less than another mouthpiece of communist and leftist propaganda from Eastern Europe.

--------
Ross Hedvicek, author of several books and hundreds of articles, lives in the U.S., and can be reached at ross@scanlon.im1.net

Snakes. Why'd it have to be snakes?

2006-02-21T06:32:00.000-08:00

In case you are wondering what a quote from an Indiana Jones movie has to do with my article about the former Czechoslovakia - it is a parallel! Indy's puzzlement over snakes is obvious - I on the other hand am wondering why 15 years after the alleged switch to democracy and subsequent split into two countries, neither the Czech Republic or Slovakia can produce decent, uncorrupted people with a clean record to represent their respective countries in top government jobs or abroad in diplomatic positions.

To put it into perspective - imagine the governments of Francois 'Papa Doc' Duvalier, Saddam Hussein or the memorable Idi Amin Dada Oumee. All these governments are clean as a whistle compared to the current governments of the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Over 90% of government officials in the aforementioned two countries are in one way or another stained by their membership in the communist party, its clones and variations or by collaboration with the oppressive communist regime. And the most ridiculously corrupt and incompetent characters are always at the top.

Take, for example, the Prime Minister of the Czech Republic: Stanislav Gross, a 34 year old former government railroad employee with the nickname "Kolotuk" (the railman who checks the integrity of wheels on railroad cars and engines by gently knocking on them with a long-handled hammer). He made the meteoric rise from zero to hero when he went from a nobody to the Prime Minister in less than 10 years. During that time he managed to get a doctorate in law by copying 25 pages of a government report he had access to. When nosy reporters found out, his "doctoral thesis" miraculously disappeared in Prague's flood two years ago and was never found. The reporters should consider themselves lucky to not have vanished along with Kolotuk's thesis since the honorable Prime Minister has a passion for surrounding himself with the most unsavory characters from the country's past - former communist prison guards, former communist secret policemen and so on.

Kolotuk's wife, thus wife of the Prime Minister, is an even more amusing specimen. The young lady started her career in a Prague bordello owned by her girlfriend. But don't get any ideas! She was allegedly employed only as a cleaning lady! Nothing more! Mmmhmm. Then she mysteriously received a security clearance to work in the food service lounge of the Czech parliament, where she met Kolotuk, fell in love and got married. A truly heartwarming and Cinderella-esque story.

After they married, the newlyweds acquired a luxurious home in an exclusive apartment development in Prague's Barrandov area. Minor hiccup - the luxurious apartment was worth several millions of Czech crowns and inquiring reporters calculated that neither of the pair had the means or ever made a sufficient amount of money to cover the purchase. The Prime Minister issued numerous excuses - all of them lame - about how he came to be in possession of such a gross (no pun intended) amount of money. The funniest one was that he borrowed it from his uncle, a retired (and penniless) Army officer living for the last 25 years on a government pension. The uncle confirmed the story, but he could not explain where he acquired the money. Eventually the uncle claimed that he himself borrowed it from a local businessman, to whom he wrote an IOU. This IOU was promptly "purchased" by the leader of local "conservative" party, who then allegedly burned it. His "purchase" was supposed to be financed by a government grant, which his miniscule party would get if they were ever elected to parliament - so it was in fact, never paid for. Are you still with me?

The leader of the main opposition party, Miroslav Kalousek, did not say too much, because his own living quarters (which he could not afford on his own as well) were allegedly paid for by his brother in law, who was subsequently murdered by his partner. Not even the scheming Lucretia Borgia could come up with a more masterful plan!

Remember the wife of the Czech Prime Minister? I'm not finished with her yet. She is a very enterprising lady and recently came up with the idea of rebuilding and remodelling a whole block of older buildings in Prague to make them into luxurious apartments and offices. All this remodelling would cost an obscene amount in any currency and would be paid for by money provided by her girlfriend from the past - the owner of Prague's bordello. Where the Prime Minister's wife used to work. As a cleaning lady. The Czech Republic has no laws or regulation against money laundering ("that would be too uncivilized!") so no investigation commenced - but the Prime Minister's wife is allegedly backing off the idea due to pressure from the media. I want to cry! Oh the injustice! Call Johnny Cochran! Why is she is not on Oprah yet???

And the Prime Minister did not resign, nor did he even apologize - because situations like this are not the exception in today's Czech Republic - they are the rule.

So it goes in the Czech Republic...

Ross Hedvicek
March 11, 2005

Bamboozling the Americans...

2006-02-21T06:27:00.000-08:00

I love America and Americans - I have no reason not to - I am one of them. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) I have a history, knowledge and experience far beyond the shores of this continent. And that is why it always irritates me, when I see well-meaning, kind-hearted Americans being taken advantage of by wily, deceitful, greasy and underhanded so-called "Europeans". Let me tell you about two examples - one local and one really high-level.

There is no secret about the fact that the Czech Republic and Slovakia are unable, 15 years after the alleged switch to democracy, to put into leading positions of their country people without a disreputable and dark past, without a communist resume, or with clean character. This goes for their diplomats and ambassadors as well. Let's just recall ambassador Rudolf Schuster, formerly a communist aparatchik of the highest calibre, first named by the infamous president Vaclav Havel as Ambassador to Canada, and after division of Czechoslovakia becoming the president of Slovakia. Seems like a pre-requisite to become an ambassador or diplomat was to have a communist past - names like Rita Klimova, Anton Hykisch, Jan Kavan and Eduard Kukan come to mind immediately.

They have an American Czech-Slovak Cultural Club here in Miami. I happen to know a number of people from there. They are nice, kind people, treasuring their Czech-Slovak heritage - even if it is often several generations removed. Now I am being told that they are preparing a Czech-Slovak festival - or officially "the First Czech-Slovak Heritage Days in Florida - 2005" - you can see the details at http://www.acscc.org/festival_121404.html

When I was browsing through the list of speakers I found the following "dignitaries":
Doc. PhDr. Boris Banary, CSc., Rector, Catholic University in Ruzomberok, Ruzomberok, Slovakia
Dr. Jiri Barta, Executive Director, VIA Foundation, Prague, Czech Republic
Prof. PhDr. Ivo Bartecek, CSc., Dean, Philosophical Faculty, Palacky University, Olomouc, Czech Republic
Doc. PaedDr. Michal Bauer, Ph.D., University of South Bohemia, Ceske Budejovice, Czech Republic
Prof. PhDr. Vaclav Buzek, CSc., Rector of the University of South Bohemia, Ceske Budejovice
Margita Fuchsova, Consul General of the Czech Republic, Los Angeles, CA
H.E. Rastislav Kácer, Ambassador of the Slovak Republic to the United States, Washington, DC
PhDr. Karel Konecny, CSc., Dept. of History, Palacky University, Olomouc, Czech Republic
Jaromir Marek, M.A., Correspondent & Chief of Czech Broadcasting, Radio Prague, Prague, Czech Republic
PhDr. Slavomir Michalek, CSc., Historian, Historical Institute, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, Slovakia
PhDr. Dalibor Mikulas, CSc., Vice Rector for Foreign Relations, Catholic University in Ruzomberok, Ruzomberok, Slovakia
The Honorable Senator Doc. MUDr. Jaroslava Moserova, DrSc., President, Czech Commission for UNESCO, Prague, Czech Republic
H.E. RNDr. Martin Palous, Ambassador of the Czech Republic to the United States, Washington, DC
Prof. PaedDr. Vladimir Papousek, CSc, Vice-Rector, University of South Bohemia, Ceske Budejovice, Czech Republic
Ales Pospisil, M.A., Consul General of the Czech Republic, New York, NY
Doc. Ing. Josef Prusa, CSc., Rector, University of West Bohemia, Pilsen, Czech Republic
Prof. PhDr. Milos Trapl, CSc., Dept. of History, Palacky University, Olomouc, Czech Republic
Prof. PhDr. Jan Vicar, CSc., Dept. Of Musicology, Palacky University, Olomouc, Czech Republic
Linda Vlasak, B.A., former Program Director, Maryland State Arts Council, Baltimore, MD
Prof. Ing. Zdenek Vostracky, DrSc., Past Rector, University of West Bohemia, Pilsen, Czech Republic
Prof. RNDr. Zdenek Weiss, DrSc., Director, Materials Chemistry Center, Technical University of Ostrava, Ostrava, Czech Republic
Mgr. Miroslav Wlachovsky, Deputy Chief of Mission, Embassy of the Slovak Republic, Washington, DC

(A short note for those readers not well-versed in the Czech reality - if any of those people above are over the age of 40, they simply HAD to be a communists in order to receive all those titles in then-Czechoslovakia)

I, of course, do not know what the above mentioned well-titled speakers will be talking about, but I am sure it will not be about their lifetime collaborations with communists in then-Czechoslovakia, about their past membership in the communist party or about how much they had to bend over to achieve all those titles and positions. I am sure that all of them will welcome the free trip and free meal in Florida, no doubt about it.
I have nothing but love and respect for the well-meaning third and fourth generation Czech-Americans and Slovak-Americans in the Miami club, but their naivete got the better of them this time. It is a shame to invite this roster of characters to their American heritage festival. It would be a shame at any heritage festival or celebration - Czech, Slovak or otherwise. It is akin to a Jewish community from Miami inviting Adolf Eichmann's children plus a few former SS concentration camp guards to Miami to celebrate Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur with them. That's simply not right.

The second example of Americans being bamboozled by East Europeans is really high-level. It about how Czech president Vaclav Klaus crashed a party and got himself invited to the White House.

Czech president Vaclav Klaus is a really despicable character. While he allegedly never was a member of the communist party, he mysteriously always enjoyed privileges reserved only for communists in totalitarian Czechoslovakia. Nobody can explain why - not even Vaclav Klaus himself. He was privileged enough to be allowed to study economy at university at a time when innocent people were jailed for decades in uranium mines, and he was allowed to travel to the West and even to study in the U.S. at a time when normal Czechs were dreaming (often futilely) about going on a vacation to communist Hungary's Balaton Lake.

Klaus had put the "rrrr" into arrogance and in spite of his anti-Americanism he would love to get some face time with an American president. Dubya never met him and after Klaus' derogatory comments about the war in Iraq his prospective visit to Washington was indefinitely put on the back burner and he was coldly ignored by everyone from the former U.S. Ambassador in Prague Craig Stapleton to the lowest level staffer that addresses the janitor at Foggy Bottom as 'sir'. It is no secret that Klaus was so verbally abusive towards the U.S. and it's ex-ambassador in Prague during their meeting before the start of the Iraq war that Stapleton simply up and left the meeting with the Czech president and slammed the door on him. Not a good omen, I would say...

This was no problem for a political snake the likes of Klaus. You can always count on American naivete. During the last meeting of EU heads of state Klaus could not get close to Bush, but in the closing moments of the photo session he simply forced his way onto the podium and stood next to a completely shocked and puzzled Bush. My sources tell me that Dubya had not the slightest idea who Klaus was and being a sociable and polite gentleman he shook Klaus' proffered hand. Klaus wasted no time and started talking to him in his famously broken English, about that he will be in Washington next week and that he would like to stop at the White House. At that time, Bush was under the impression that he was talking to Ivan Gasparovic, another ex-communist, but the president of Slovakia - to where Bush was leaving immediately for a summit with Putin. Therefore Klaus got a jovial Texas answer in line with "anytime you are in D.C. - just stop in to see me". He was not alone in his mistake. This is confirmed by the official White House web page, which identified Klaus talking to Bush as "Slovak president Ivan Gasparovic". Bush learned the true identity of this sneaky rat only after everything was over. Klaus on other hand let everybody know that U.S. president George W. Bush had just invited him to come on an official visit to Washington.

The week after that Klaus went on a "private visit" of the U.S. still unsure of if he will be able to pull the stunt off or not. Eventually, he was successful. He just crashed a party at the White House and got a 30-minutes visit with Dubya with pictures of them shaking hands and all that jazz... The media in the Czech Republic presented this shameful trick visit as a great feat of Czech diplomacy (oh, by the way, the Czech Ambassador is speaking in Miami next week as well) and ordinary Czechs were made to believe that Klaus was in America to give that yokel Bush some sound advice on how to properly run things...

So that's how not only ordinary Americans from Miami, but our president as well were bamboozled. What should have happened is that those annoying arrogant bastards from Prague should have gotten sorry asses kicked down Pennsylvania Avenue by the Secret Service and U.S. Marines - and not been allowed entry into the White House. That would happened if there was justice in the world.

But there is not - and we, as Americans, are just far too nice of a people to even imagine to what length some of those Easterners would go to take advantage of us...

So it goes...

Ross Hedvicek
March 11, 2005

Related:
http://www.praguepost.com/P03/2005/Art/0303/news6.php

Vaclav Havel : He Could Be A Hero!

2006-02-21T06:24:00.000-08:00

While I was listening to the radio in my car this morning, I could not avoid catching the remake of "We Could Be Heroes" from that Godzilla movie. But the association it brought to me was not of any pre-historic dinosaur, but another historical anomaly in the Czech Republic - president and playwright Vaclav Havel - a dear dear darling of Western media and university professors.

Contrary to the opinion of left-leaning media and even more leftist university professors at American universities, Havel proved to be a huge disappointment while undoubtedly, he could be a hero.
Havel was "elected" to his presidential chair quite a few times - maybe not as often as Suharto was, but almost.

When he was elected for the first time, he was "elected" by proclamation by the very same communist government he was supposedly about to overthrow. Well, he did not! He actually guaranteed that none of the communist tyrants of Stalinist era in Czechoslovakia were ever punished. Over the years Havel grew more "experienced" (among other things he presided over the fall-out of the country into two separate states), and even after such a failure he ran for president again in the Czech republic - and won! All of the people can be fooled all of time - that's the Czech way. And during the last presidential "re-election" there was a great danger that he could lose by ONE VOTE! His cronies did not waste any time and had one parliamentarian (expected to vote against Havel) promptly arrested a few hours before election. What do you think happened? The media kept quiet and Havel won the re-election BY ONE VOTE! Isn't that amazing? Gee, what a democratic process! And when one of the colleagues of the arrested parliamentarian protested, Havel's wife - the First Lady loudly whistled on her fingers in the parliament. Well, Hillary is in a class of her own, but have you heard her whistling and disrupting Congress during some official proceedings?

Yes, Havel could be a hero - but he is not.

A few years after the Velvet revolution transcripts of tapes were published in Prague. Transcripts of talks Havel held with representatives of the communist government in November 1989, talks about transfer of power. Incredible scenes of primitivism and unheard of bluntness and horse haggling as to who will get what position in the next government in exchange for communists going unpunished. And Havel kept his word to the people responsible for tens of thousands of deaths, communist concentration camps, and hundreds of thousands lives destroyed. Not only did they all go unpunished, but also they were all involved in "privatization" of the state-owned properties and eventually they all became rich. They went from nomeklatura communists directly to hard-core capitalists in a few short steps. All in the name of Havel's Velvet Revolution. Unreal!

He could be a hero - but he is not.

Another of Havel's memorable things is his "use" of presidential clemency. Not only did he not hesitate to interfere with valid judgements and give clemency to true hardened criminals, he gave clemency to someone who beat his own father to death (the victim was Jozef Odlozil, silver medalist in the long distance running, from the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City) just because the mother of the criminal (former Odlozil's wife, also multiple gold Olympic winner from 1968 Mexico, Vera Caslavska) was one of the Havel's close friends, but he brings his misuse of clemency to new level these days, when he pardoned two gypsies (long criminal records for thefts and robberies) who physically attacked a parliamentarian during his pre-election speech. Havel pardoned them so fast that the local police did not have time to officially charge the two culprits with the attack! Can you believe that? And another interesting bit is that the parliamentary who was attacked is the same guy, who was locked up in prison, so he could not attend and vote in last Havel's re-election. Funny, isn't it? Life is not so complicated, afterall...

Well, yes, Havel could be a hero - if he were not just another neo-communist criminal.

Ross Hedvicek

(June 1998)

Czech Republic: Friend or foe?

2006-02-21T06:21:00.000-08:00

A Presidential commission, the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, informed president Bush on Thursday March 31, 2005 that the United States still knows "disturbingly little" about the intentions of many of its "most dangerous adversaries." Isn't that interesting?

Certainly, the commission was talking mainly about Iraq, Iran, North Korea and so on - the obvious enemies. The less obvious (but no less dangerous) enemies were not acknowledged - at least not publicly, for CNN to report about.

I of course do not know what Bill Clinton was thinking (well, take a wild guess...), when he pushed for including the former Czechoslovakia into the western world and accepting them into NATO and so on.

Take a look at the Czechoslovak/Czech Prime Ministers of the past 15 years - when the country was allegedly "democratic": Milan Cic, Marian Calfa, Petr Pithart, Josef Tosovsky, Vaclav Klaus, Milos Zeman, Vladimir Spidla, and Stanislav Gross. Out of those eight people, five were communists and the remaining three were politically so far left, that they would qualify for the communist label without any difficulty. And now, with the latest leftie Prime Minister Stanislav Gross having to resign because of corruption, we already know that the next Czech Prime Minister will be another ex-communist, Jan Kohout. It never ends..

The two main Czech political parties, CSSD and ODS, are heavily populated by ex-communists, who (after the fake Velvet Revolution) simply left their original Stalinist Communist Party and joined these two. The KSCM (non-apologetic Stalinist communists) is the third strongest party in the country. And that in spite of the fact that the country has a currently standing law (198/93 Sb), proclaiming communist ideology, parties and regimes ILLEGAL!

In the current armed forces of the Czech republic (army and air force) all senior officers (I am not talking about some junior lieutenants) are ex-communists and as senior officers they represent their country at NATO headquarters in Brussels. I doubt it would be too big of a stretch of the imagination to assume that they forward all NATO military secrets to their old buddies and schoolmates (since they all have Soviet schooling) in Moscow as soon as any such secrets reach their desks.

Very similar is the situation with the Czech justice system. Alleged humanist and former president Vaclav Havel gave lifetime tenure to communist judges from pre-revolution Czechoslovakia (to be a communist was a pre-requisite for the job), so they feel quite secure. Before they were judging according to the Stalinist rule book, now the same people are supposed to uphold democratic laws and justice. Havel's successor, current Czech president Vaclav Klaus recently refused to name approximately 36 new judges. Why? Because they were too young and lacked a communist past! The abuse of power in the Czech justice system is rampant - a perfect example would be the judicial persecution of Vladimir Hucin (www.hucin.com) who was imprisoned without charge or trial during Havel's presidency and is still being dragged through the courts just for his opposition to communism.

The situation is no better with Czech representation at the European Court of Human Rights, Council of Europe at Strasbourg, France. Czech citizens who can not get any justice in their home country turn in droves to the authorities in Strassbourg. There are literally thousands of complaints about injustices caused by currently sitting ex-communist judges mostly in the areas of human and property rights. The most frequent complaint is that the Czech government is via the Czech justice system refusing to return property confiscated by previous Czech regimes. So what is the Czech governmental solution to these complaints? They sent their own people to the European Court to act as their representatives. These 'representatives' would be more aptly called obstructors of justice - they intercept their fellow countrymen's complaints and send them back with fake documentation that their complaint was denied - while in fact it never reached the court. Neat, isn't it?
When it comes to representation at the European Parliament in Brussels, it always seems that only ex-communists are either most qualified or are elected to be representatives of their nations. Czech embassies and consulates abroad are almost exclusively populated by cronies of the last two presidents - with no regard to their diplomatic capabilities or their ability to stay sober.

It is a mystery to me why, 15 years after the country's alleged switch to democracy, the Czech Republic cannot - or does not want to - produce quality people with a clean past to represent them abroad and fill the top positions of their government. Why are only ex-communists available? Is it accidental? A freak of nature? Or worse - intentional?

I opened a Czech newspaper recently and was only mildly surprised to find what is happening this weekend in the Czech Republic. There will be a world gathering of Stalinist communist parties (including Cuba, China, Belarus, etc. - a total of 35 communist parties) in Prague's hotel Olympik starting on April 23, 2005. Communists from all over the world know very well that in the Czech Republic they are among friends and that they will be warmly welcomed. So - not in Beijing, Pyongyang or Havana - but in Prague, Czech Republic. Seems that the civilized West would be much better off if Czechs were still behind the barbed wire on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

As I see things right now, the Czech Republic is not just an enemy at the gates, it is more like a Trojan horse already inside the gates. If you paid attention during your history class, then you know what happened when the naive Trojans fell asleep...

Think about it... and do not fall asleep.

April 19, 2005

No more unheeded warnings...

2006-02-20T20:51:00.000-08:00

(older article, yes, but not outdated)

Yesterday, October 9, 2001, I was watching Bill O'Reilly ask Newt Gingrich a question on his show that CNN and other mainstream left-leaning media pundits wouldn't dare ask: "How much blame for events of Sept.11 can be put on Bill Clinton and his administration?"

Newt, given his rich personal history with Clinton and being a patriot, just smiled and side-stepped the question: "While this a valid point, the primary blame still lays with terrorists".

One can only feel sorry for president Bush, when we realize that he now has to undo all the damage caused by Bill Clinton in the area of international relations or matters of national security. Before the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington nobody paid much attention to the fact that Bill Clinton allowed the Chinese communist army to create a beachhead in San Diego (by leasing a decommissioned military base to a Chinese company named COSCO - China Ocean Shipping Company), and that he allowed the same company to take control of the Panama Canal after the U.S. very unwisely (and on Clinton's orders) pulled out of the area. Or how Bill Clinton compromised the integrity (and security) of NATO by single-handedly forcing the admission of the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary into NATO without them really qualifying for something of that magnitude.

After the events of September 11 everybody is paying attention to warning signs that used to be ignored - that is, to all warnings related to the more obvious terrorist possibilities. But there is still a few not so obvious areas. Let's take for example the above mentioned Czech Republic...

The Czech Republic - consisting of the western-part of the former Czechoslovakia - switched from being a member of the communist Warsaw Pact to becoming a member of anti-communist NATO without any major internal political or social changes. It is a trick that even the great Houdini would not be hard pressed to pull off - but Clinton did. It is akin to Hitler's Germany (after causing WWII and killing over 6 million Jews) becoming "a democratic country" overnight with no punishment for the guilty and with the same people in government.

Czechoslovakia was always a "big-league" supporter of world terrorism. There were four major terrorist training camps in Czechoslovakia (the biggest one in Zastavka u Brna), where Czechoslovak government experts trained terrorists not only from Palestine and Libya, but from most Arab countries, one of the most notable being Carlos "The Jackal." According to Jan Frolik, the director of the Czech government archives, this terrorist school was officially called the "Institute for foreign studies" and had the code name "Pristav" (The Port). None of the camp's organizers and instructors were ever brought to justice or even remotely pursued - just the opposite. One of the instructors at the "Pristav," Richard Falbr, is now the head of the Czech trade unions and a "senator"!

The most infamous Czech product was (and still is) of course the plastic explosive Semtex (made in a factory in Semtin near Pardubice). To blow a Boeing out of the sky over Lockerbie Scotland, the Libyans needed less than a pound (0.30 kg) of Semtex. According to Frolik, Czechoslovakia sold over 900 metric tons (that's almost two MILLION pounds!) to the Libyans, 14 metric tons (30,000 lbs) to Vietnam and even at the time of the "Velvet Revolution" they were sending 200 kg (440 lbs) of Semtex and 1000 kg (2200 lbs) of "classic" TNT to Guinea. Frolik mentioned, among other things, shipments of 110 Scorpion mini-machine guns, hundreds of pistols, thousands of rounds of ammunition and eavesdropping equipment to Yasser Arafat. The Western world can hardly consider the Czech Republic an ally: they never cooperated and habitually hid everything they could - and continue to do so until today.

Support of and connection to terrorism is not a thing of the past: the Czech Republic is unable to come clean even today. Muhammad Atta, who piloted one of the jets into the World Trade Center towers was in Prague just before he left for the USA for the final time aboard a Czechoslovak Airlines flight. He met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence agent, probably got his orders and left. The Czech intelligence knew about it and did nothing.

According to Czech media reports, a Czech instructor who trained terrorists in Osama bin Laden's organization in Afghanistan (and who has since left the area) was in fact a member of the Czech military intelligence. The Czech minister of defense claims he knew nothing about it. Well, let's hope that if not him, then the Americans did know - according to another suppressed report, the government of the Czech republic was given (by their American counterparts) a list of about 1000 Czech citizens suspected of having ties to terrorists. What a surprise!

An even more chilling angle; according to British Islamic terrorism expert Simon Reeve and his sources, associates of Osama bin Laden were purchasing biological weapons in the Czech Republic as recently as 1995. The institute working on biological weapons still exists in Techonin near Hradec Kralove and according to Reeve's sources, the price the biological weapons went for was $7500 for one glass capsule. Not so unexpectedly, Czech minister of defense Tvrdik and minister of the interior Gross are, of course, claiming total and utmost ignorance of the matter.

Of the 18 cabinet members of the current Czech government, 17 of them were members of the communist party (including prime minister Zeman). While the alleged membership of President Havel in the communist party is still being disputed, in neighboring Slovakia (not in NATO - yet) even the current president was a communist and a Politburo member. No big deal!

Something should be done about it. The U.S. government has stated repeatedly that it will pursue all countries which "harbor, train or finance" any terrorist activities. In the light of the information above I believe that the Czech Republic is qualified with these specific boundaries. Even if the current situation may only be a fraction of the dirty sins of the past, the Czech Republic's top offices are still manned by the same people who were in charge when they were happening, there was no distancing from that past, no investigations, no punishment for the guilty. What's worse is that those very same communists are now sitting in NATO headquarters in Brussels, listening intently to secrets they should not have any access to in the first place, just waiting for the right opportunity to stab the free world in the back and squeal their secrets to the KGB, for which they all worked all those years ago. What are we waiting for? Until we will find that, for example, they forwarded all available information on Bush's Missile Defense Plan they got as NATO members directly to Moscow, Beijing or North Korea? It'll be too late then. Who's paying attention to the warning signs now?

Given the current tense situation, I think that president Bush has the right to ask for at least a temporary suspension of the Czech Republic from NATO, as well as demand and receive removal and/or resignation of the current communist-stained Czech government officials from their posts and request a full investigation of any terrorist-related activities sponsored and financed by the previous or current governments of Czech Republic/Czechoslovakia.

If they ignore it, or are difficult - let's give them a warning. Just like we did to the Taliban. Either comply or face the consequences. Support for terrorism must not be a subject for negotiations. Give them fourteen days to think about it and then use all necessary force. Everybody's equal. I don't see a reason why the terrorism-supporting government of the Czech Republic should be treated any different than the Taliban.

Ross Hedvicek
Thu, 11 Oct 2001

Communists Still Run Eastern Europe

2006-02-20T20:43:00.000-08:00

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2005/5/6/132542.shtml
Reprinted with permission.

Communists Still Run Eastern Europe
John LeBoutillier

Saturday, May 7, 2005

Often things look differently years after the fact. The perspective of time
gives us a better, clearer view.

As President Bush flies around Europe this week - including a controversial
visit to Moscow - we need to take a look back at the supposed revolution(s)
that swept Eastern Europe 15 years ago.

At that time, we all hailed the peaceful events that seemingly brought down
the communist regimes behind the Iron Curtain as 'miracles.' The ending of
these murderous regimes - without riots, mass killings and violence - was too
good to be true!

Well, guess what?

It indeed was too good to be true!

Because all those Communist leaders and subordinates not only went
unpunished for their crimes, most of them remained - and still remain - in power!
In Russia, the 'former' KGB operative, Vladimir Putin, has seen to it that
his KGB cronies exert enormous 'backroom' power while he steadily undoes
democratic reforms and re-consolidates power in his presidential office.
All the previously state-owned enterprises that were sold off were grabbed
by Communist or KGB insiders, who then made billions of dollars off these
transactions. (You know the old saying: Who are the world's biggest capitalists?
The Communists!)

And the apparatchiks - the bureaucrats, the people who run everything in a
government-dominated society - from the Soviet days are the very same people
in the very same jobs!

Clearly, when 1989 saw the 'crumbling' of the Soviet Empire, the Communists
in all the Eastern European nations all adopted the same standard playbook:
"Just say you are a former Communist and stay in power."

And in all these nations - Russia, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic,
Slovakia and Romania - the same pattern followed: With the 'ending' of Communism,
the West - armed with tons of cash - came calling.

Billions of dollars of American aid poured into these countries - and thus
into the pockets of the very same Communists who built their careers on hating
America.

NATO began admitting these nations. Why not? They seemed as if they had
renounced their Soviet patrons and were now free to follow their hearts and join
the good guys.

Yes, the people of these nations wanted - and still want desperately - to be
on our side. But their leaders and their military officials are all
Communist leftovers who are now inside our henhouse living off our eggs.
And these 'renounced' Communists are everywhere. Just this week, it was
revealed that Polish President Kwasnieski - himself a lifetime Communist - is now
being considered by the Bush White House to be the next secretary-general of
the United Nations!

Kwasnieski is so reviled in Poland that Lech Walesa hasn't talked to him in
years and only reluctantly shook hands with him at Pope John Paul II's
funeral in Rome last month. But Kwasnieski has ingratiated himself with GW Bush by
dispatching Polish troops to Iraq - over the protests of the majority of the
Polish people. Now it is payback time.

A 'former' Communist running the U.N.? Why not? He'll feel right at home
there.

Next: The Truth About the Czech Republic

Communists Still Run Eastern Europe, Part II Czech Republic

2006-02-20T20:38:00.000-08:00

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2005/5/10/190148.shtml
Reprinted from NewsMax.com

Communists Still Run Eastern Europe, Part II Czech Republic
John LeBoutillier

Wednesday, May 11, 2005

Read Part I: Communists Still Run Eastern Europe
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2005/5/6/132542.shtml

"Things are not what they seem to be" is totally applicable to the so-called demise of Communism in Eastern Europe. While we all cheered the apparent end of the Soviet Empire, it has been replaced by a hybrid form of continued Communist control by evil, clever and totally corrupt life-long Communists who will never relinquish power.

The best example of this has been detailed by an excellent Miami writer, Ross Hedvicek, himself a former Czech citizen. Mr. Hedvicek is alarmed by what has happened to his former country - and how we Americans have been duped into thinking all is peaches and cream now in Eastern Europe.

He writes: "The two main Czech political parties, CSSD and ODS, are heavily populated by ex-communists, who (after the fake Velvet Revolution) simply left their original Stalinist Communist Party and joined these two. The KSCM (non-apologetic Stalinist communists) is the third-strongest party in the country. And that in spite of the fact that the country has a currently standing law (198/93 Sb), proclaiming communist ideology, parties and regimes ILLEGAL!"

"Take a look at the Czechoslovak/Czech Prime Ministers of the past 15 years - when the country was allegedly "democratic": Milan Cic, Marian Calfa, Petr Pithart, Josef Tosovsky, Vaclav Klaus, Milos Zeman, Vladimir Spidla, and Stanislav Gross. Out of those eight people, five were communists and the remaining three were politically so far left, that they would qualify for the communist label without any difficulty. And now, with the latest leftie Prime Minister Sanislav Gross having to resign because of corruption, we already know that the next Czech Prime Minister will be another ex-communist."

"In the current armed forces of the Czech republic (army and air force) all senior officers (I am not talking about some junior lieutenants) are ex-communists and as senior officers they represent their country at NATO headquarters in Brussels. I doubt it would be too big of a stretch of the imagination to assume that they forward all NATO military secrets to their old buddies and schoolmates (since they all have Soviet schooling) in Moscow as soon as any such secrets reach their desks."

Mr. Hedvicek then writes about the Czech judiciary. If you think we have a problem here with our liberal federal judges, just read about what has happened in the Czech Republic:
"Former president Vaclav Havel gave lifetime tenure to communist judges from pre-revolution Czechoslovakia (to be a communist was a prerequisite for the job), so they feel quite secure. Before they were judging according to the Stalinist rule book, now the same people are supposed to uphold democratic laws and justice. Havel's successor, current Czech president Vaclav Klaus, recently refused to name approximately 36 new judges. Why? Because they were too young and lacked a communist past! The abuse of power in the Czech justice system is rampant - a perfect example would be the judicial persecution of Vladimir Hucin (www.hucin.com), who was imprisoned without charge or trial during Havel's presidency and is still being dragged through the courts just for his opposition to communism."

Clearly, "the fix is in" in Prague. Just listen to what this Czech patriot, Mr. Hedvicek, writes: "It is a mystery to me why, 15 years after the country's alleged switch to democracy, the Czech Republic cannot - or does not want to - produce quality people with a clean past to represent them abroad and fill the top positions of their government. Why are only ex-communists available? Is it accidental? A freak of nature? Or worse - intentional?"

Indeed, it is totally intentional. The bad guys ain't giving up power. Period.

We were all naive to think that once the Berlin Wall crumbled, all these Communists would just go away. They didn't. They stayed. They merely took off their ‘Proud to Be a Communist' buttons and put on new "Proud to Be a Pro-Western Capitalist" buttons.

You can imagine Mr. Hedvicek's shock just two weeks ago to read in a Czech newspaper about a conference to be held that week in Prague. There was a "gathering of Stalinist communist parties (including Cuba, China, Belarus, etc. - a total of 35 communist parties) in Prague's hotel Olympik starting on April 23, 2005.

Communists from all over the world know very well that in the Czech Republic they are among friends and that they will be warmly welcomed. So - not in Beijing, Pyongyang or Havana - but in Prague, Czech Republic. Seems that the civilized West would be much better off if Czechs were still behind the barbed wire on the other side of the Iron Curtain."

As. Mr. Hedvicek points out, this remaining Communist control of the Czech Republic also applies to Slovakia. "Over 90% of government officials in the aforementioned two countries are in one way or another stained by their membership in the communist party, its clones and variations or by collaboration with the oppressive communist regime. And the most ridiculously corrupt and incompetent characters are always at the top."

This all goes back to the supposed ‘end' of Communism in Czechloslovakia - to the heady days of what was then known as the Velvet Revolution, which saw the famous poet Vaclav Havel ascend to the presidency. Havel was, in those, days seen as an equal to Pope John Paul II and Lech Walesa for having stood up to the Communists.

But the truth is another matter. As Mr. Hedvicek writes, "A few years after the Velvet Revolution, transcripts of tapes were published in Prague. Transcripts of talks Havel held with representatives of the communist government in November 1989, talks about transfer of power. Incredible scenes of primitivism and unheard-of bluntness and horse haggling as to who will get what position in the next government in exchange for communists going unpunished. And Havel kept his word to the people responsible for tens of thousands of deaths, communist concentration camps, and hundreds of thousands of lives destroyed. Not only did they all go unpunished, but also they were all involved in "privatization" of the state-owned properties and eventually they all became rich. They went from nomenklatura communists directly to hard-core capitalists in a few short steps. All in the name of Havel's Velvet Revolution. Unreal!"

Unfortunately, it was - and still is - too real for the Czech people.

And we Americans have deluded ourselves into thinking that New Europe is free.
Ross Hedvicek is a true patriot - an American and a Czech patriot. Thank goodness he is alerting us to what is happening in Eastern Europe.

Why aren't the American media reporting this?

Why are the American people kept in the dark about the truth?

Won't Get Fooled Again? Oh, really?

2006-02-20T20:28:00.000-08:00

I suspect that the opinion expressed in the Who song by the same name is mistaken. Americans have been lied to repeatedly - especially by people and nations pretending to be their newfound friends. Just open the newspaper and read...

The headline "Havel takes up studies in US" definitely got my attention. Seems that alleged humanist and former Czech president Vaclav Havel just arrived for a two month stay in the US capital - mainly to study and possibly to prepare to resume his literary career. According to aide Jakub Hladik, Havel plans to spend most of his time at the US Library of Congress in Washington. Havel postponed the trip twice last year due to poor health.

Well, well, well... Whoever issued the invitation to Havel (and approved the funds covering his expenses) probably did not know (or did not care) that Havel's command of the English language is very close to non-existent and therefore sending Havel to study English language documents is an akin to sending famously-fat opera singer Luciano Pavarotti to figure-skating classes.

And who is Vaclav Havel, after all? During the first months after the Czech Velvet Revolution he undoubtedly looked like a hero of his time, a humanist and a positive kind of guy.

Only with the hindsight of the last fifteen years we can tell that... well, we were fooled again. Nowadays we know that Havel and Havel alone can be credited with protecting communists and communist power in the former Czechoslovakia. Not one hair fell from a single communist head: communists transformed (under Havel's presidency) political power into economic power without actually giving up any of their political power - they just changed their party cards and melted into other political parties. No one was prosecuted. No one was punished.

Today's Czech Republic is a country still ruled by virtually the same people who ruled it during communist times - thanks to Vaclav Havel, the person receiving study grants from the U.S. Congress. According to Transparency International http://www.transparency.org , corruption in the Czech Republic during Havel's extended presidency rose to a level surpassed only by Nigeria.

When it comes to Havel's alleged humanitarianism, well, he certainly talked about it (especially if he received an honorary degree and a free lunch in return) but back home, in the Czech Republic, he refused to intervene in multiple cases of human rights abuse. One example is the case of Vladimir Hucin, a man who was imprisoned for more than a year without being charged or tried of any crime, and after being released is still being dragged through the court system on obviously trumped up charges. What is Havel's link to all this? Then-president Havel gave lifetime tenure to all ex-communist judges and these very same judges now legally torture Vladimir Hucin just because he is a known anti-communist. Havel could have put a stop to it anytime he wanted - but he did not. Why? Because he did not want to. In unrelated news: Havel's successor, current Czech president Vaclav Klaus recently refused to name 36 or so new judges, because they were too young and lacked a certain something ... a communist past! So it goes in the Czech Republic.

The question is, now that it is clear that studying documents in a language that he understands only slightly better than Swahili, how will Vaclav Havel spend his U.S. taxpayer paid vacation in the United States? I am sure that he will meet with a lot of fellow humanitarians (who love public funding very much as well, thank you) like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Bill and Hillary Clinton. Maybe he will write an article for the New York Times (not to worry, somebody will translate it for him), get a few free lunches, get a few more honorary degrees from some left-wing university. He'll probably even attempt to crash a party at the White House - just like the current Czech president Vaclav Klaus did a few weeks ago, when he showed up uninvited at Dubya's door. (Attention Secret Service! Have your Mace and expandable batons ready!) One thing is for certain: he will definitely enjoy himself in the company of our local leftist and radicals.

And that's simply wrong, I say. Not on my dime.