~ Who knew that General Jan Sejna, who fled Czechoslovakia to the west as the Soviet army invaded in 1968, actually left his country implicated in a corruption scandal during Dubcek's short-lived Prague Spring?

Wiki says 72 Czechs and Slovaks were killed while over 300, 000 fled the country. Meanwhile the USA and its right-wing puppet regimes in Latin America were busy murdering hundreds of thousands of indiginous peoples in Latin America and overthrowing governments around the world.
A cold war was waged throughout Europe while dirty wars were waged against tiny Latin American countries by a vicious nuclear-powered empire.

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Originally posted by kropotkin1951:
Mind you after Hungary in 56 it wasn't really a surprise that the Prague Spring was crushed.

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As Harold Pinter has said:

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Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.

But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now. Although constrained, to a certain extent, by the existence of the Soviet Union, the United States' actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked.

Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America's favoured method. In the main, it has preferred what it has described as 'low intensity conflict'. Low intensity conflict means that thousands of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued - or beaten to death - the same thing - and your own friends, the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace in US foreign policy in the years to which I refer.

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At least the Russians did the dirty work of policing their sphere of influence themselves. The Americans have enlisted, funded, and trained far more murderous tyrants throughout the Cold War. Even the most vicious communist movement -- the Khmer Rouge, whose atrocities are laid at the feet of communism, was supported by the US to weaken Vietnam. Afghanistan is the one counter example of Russia's capacity for destructive warfare. But alas, we have few remembrance of the hundreds of thousands of non-whites, but so many of the couple of thousand Europeans. It is this imbalance that is the most offensive.

[ 22 August 2008: Message edited by: ceti ]

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Originally posted by Stockholm:
so I see that the only response to what the USSR did to Czechoslovakia is to say "the Americans did stuff that was just as bad in their sphere of influence".

That's pretty lame.

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What is lame is picking one event in Europe from 1968 and thinking that it defines the time.

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Who said it "defines the time"? I started a thread about the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia because it was the 40th anniversary of it yesterday. When its the 30th anniversary of the American invasion of Panama, maybe i'll start a thread on that.

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Originally posted by Stockholm:

I'm sorry that some people find embarrassing to be reminded of the Soviet atrocity that destroyed the Prague Spring. Don't blame me. Blame Brezhnev.

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Originally posted by Stockholm:

Who said it "defines the time"? I started a thread about the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia because it was the 40th anniversary of it yesterday. When its the 30th anniversary of the American invasion of Panama, maybe i'll start a thread on that.

I'm sorry that some people find embarrassing to be reminded of the Soviet atrocity that destroyed the Prague Spring. Don't blame me. Blame Brezhnev.

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Originally posted by Fidel:
As long as we have two stoogeocratic old line parties at the helm in Ottawa, it doesn't matter what Canadians think.

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Originally posted by kropotkin1951:
Too Err is Devine.

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Canadians are used to erring. They've erred for the last 140 years in a row. If any party's credibility is zero for following Crazy George II into Afghanistan, it's the Liberals! for dragging Canada into this quagmire.

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Suharto is directly responsible for one of the greatest acts of mass murder in post-World War II history: the genocide that accompanied his rise to power in 1965.

Supposedly reacting to a Communist-backed attempt to overthrow the government, Suharto seized power from President Sukarno, a leader of the non-aligned movement.

Suharto immediately organized a systematic slaughter of the ethnic Chinese minority, which was believed to be the main base of support for the Communist Party. Conservative estimates of the death toll are in the hundreds of thousands; a 1977 Amnesty International report cited a tally of "many more than one million."

But Suharto is a U.S. ally, and has conducted his atrocities with either the approval or the active participation of the U.S. government. For the establishment press, that has made all the difference. Even as he balks at some of the strings attached to International Monetary Fund loans, thereby incurring mild criticism of his "crony capitalism," prominent newspapers still can’t seem to face squarely Suharto’s bloody history.

Sometimes Suharto’s record of violence is ignored or absurdly trivialized: The Boston Globe awkwardly summed him up as someone "who has been praised for modernizing Indonesia’s economy over the last three decades but squelching opposing views." Squelching? One doubts the Globe would use that word to describe Pol Pot’s reign in Cambodia.

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Originally posted by Stockholm:
Why don't you start your own thread about Indonesia instead of showing such disrespect to the victims of Soviet imperialism in Czechoslovakia?

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Originally posted by Stanley10:
...and McCain said, "we're all Czechs now."

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I don't care if you managed to dig up one person who misses the Soviet police state in Czechoslovakia. Talk to some Chileans, you won't have to look very far to find someone who thinks Pinochet was a great man - that doesn't make the fascist coup in Chile any less of a tragedy.

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there were things that he misses about Soviet rule

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Let me guess...they made the trains run on time - no sorry, that was Mussolini.

[ 23 August 2008: Message edited by: Stockholm ]

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I don't care if you managed to dig up one person who misses the Soviet police state in Czechoslovakia. Talk to some Chileans, you won't have to look very far to find someone who thinks Pinochet was a great man - that doesn't make the fascist coup in Chile any less of a tragedy.

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I didn't dig him up. Before he and his Vietnamese-born (she left Vietnam in '75 - go figure) wife moved to Alberta, they were pretty well the only people we socialised with.

I didn't say he missed the Soviet state, but he did say there were positive things about it.

I don't know many Chileans either, although back in the 70s I once called a Chilean woman, who said Pinochet was good and Allende bad, a fascist. She didn't mind.

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On August 21 1968 troops from five Warsaw Pact countries entered Czechoslovakia, an action that has stuck in people’s memories over the years. Miloslav Vlcek, speaker of the Czech Chamber of Deputies, says people do not remember it was not only about August 21.

“We forget it was the reforms of ‘the Prague Spring’ that led to this. Today we must not put all the blame on Russia - it did apologise for the Soviet Union’s deeds. But take other countries of the Warsaw pact who were also involved - we have good relations with them today,” says Vlcek.

Creating ‘socialism with a human face’ was in people’s hearts and minds. The Soviet Union trusted Alexander Dubchek, the new leader of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, to build any kind of socialism - as long as it did not hamper the interests of the Warsaw Pact treaty.

Marat Kuznetsov, a former Russian diplomat in Czechoslovakia, who worked in the Soviet Embassy in Prague back in 1968, says the Warsaw Pact bringing troops into Czechoslovakia should be put into the geopolitical context of the time.

“It was at the height of the Cold war, not just a confrontation of two socio-political systems but also of two political blocks: NATO and the Warsaw Pact. The military parity was fragile and unstable - but the whole world depended on it.”

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World remembers Prague Spring

For those interested, there's even a video by Academician Vladimir Lukin, now the Human Rights commissioner of the Russian Federation ...link

If aggression can be justified on such a basis, then so can U.S. aggression. I know some posters here judge a country's (or a party's) actions by which country (or party) it is, rather than by what the actions are. We can't afford that kind of partisan blindness.

[ 23 August 2008: Message edited by: unionist ]

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Originally posted by unionist:
N.Beltov, if Russia had some marginal justification for invading Georgia in hot pursuit of Saakashvili's storm troopers, the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies had none in Czechoslovakia or Hungary or Afghanistan. Maintaining "military parity" is a feeble excuse for committing unprovoked military aggression. It's too late to rewrite that history.

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Well, they were embattled (truly) and they had become theoretically rigid. And they probably suspected, with reason, that the CIA was involved.

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Originally posted by Stockholm:
Oh so now Dubcek was a CIA agent - give me a break.

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I didn't say that. Nor does it follow from what I did say.

[ 23 August 2008: Message edited by: RosaL ]

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unionist: Maintaining "military parity" is a feeble excuse for committing unprovoked military aggression.

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Yes I agree with you but it's interesting that the Russian makes that argument anyway. I know that the US advocated a doctrine known as "M.A.D." (mutually assured destruction) in a wider context which was a similar doctrine to the one the Russian commentator defended.

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If aggression can be justified on such a basis, then so can U.S. aggression.

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Exactly.

The Czech commentator's remarks were interesting as well in that he identified that it was not just Russian troops in Prague (just as it is not only US troops in Iraq or Afghanistan).

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it was not just Russian troops in Prague

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That's true, there were also troops belonging to Russian colonies...

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You do realise that the Soviet Union and its political system no longer exists, right?

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You do realise that the Soviet Union and its political system no longer exists, right?

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Originally posted by RosaL:

Well, they were embattled (truly) and they had become theoretically rigid. And they probably suspected, with reason, that the CIA was involved.

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Originally posted by Stockholm:

That's true, there were also troops belonging to Russian colonies and puppets like Poland, Hungary and East Germany - it must have been a real delight to the Czechs to see German troops invading them for the second time in a generation.

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It goes without saying that Brezhnev had no excuse to send the tanks, as it equally goes without saying that the Doctor and the Madman had no excuse to bomb Cambodia or murder Chilean democracy.

It doesn't make you a toady of capitalism to say that there was no justification for crushing the Prague Spring. If Dubcek had prevailed, Eastern Europe would have democracy AND socialism now, and so might Russia. There was no possible downside.

It's about consistent standards. Tyranny is tyranny is tyranny.

The martrys of Prague Spring and the martyrs of Chile and Central America were on the same side of history. As were Brezhnev, Nixon and Reagan.

And no, Stocks, what happened in Prague forty years ago is nothing like what just happened when Georgia launched its unprovoked and unjustified military campaign to re-persecute South Ossetia.
Dubcek was fighting to humanize the Czechoslovakian state and to make it genuinely socialist. In Georgia we have a right-wing dicatator(everyone knows the Georgian election was a joke)fighting a right-wing Russia over territory. There is nothing positive on either side.

And no, no "social democrat" should ever take the side of a country just because it wishes to be a member of the reactionary militarist cabal known as NATO.

[ 23 August 2008: Message edited by: Ken Burch ]

[ 23 August 2008: Message edited by: Ken Burch ]

Why have you been the cheerleader for the right-wing Georgian militarists anyway? This isn't a cold war thing and clearly Georgia as a state is just as bad as Putin's Russia.

Saakashvili is no Dubcek, no Nagy, no Havel. He's not worth your support, especially since nothing he's doing could ever lead to a social democratic Georgia. If "social democrats" ever won a Georgian election, you know as well as I do that Saakashvili would have them lined up and shot.

Stop getting in touch with your inner Cold Warrior already wouldya? This is a different era.

[ 23 August 2008: Message edited by: Ken Burch ]

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Yes, but we aren't talking about the present we are talking about a tragic event that occurred in 1968 when the Soviet Union and its imperialist political system was very much alive.

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So why not save your efforts to whine about the imperialist system that is currently very much alive, instead of telling us we should support it?

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Why have you been the cheerleader for the right-wing Georgian militarists anyway?

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Originally posted by Stockholm:

I'm not. I'm simply giving a reality check to all the numbskulls here who keep being cheerleaders for the right-wing Russian militarists.

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Okay, they're right-wing militarists in Russia and China, two countries which North Atlantic Treaty mongers have continued to encircle with hundreds of military bases, nuclear weapons, and now "anti-ballistic missile shield" to defend against non-existent Iranian missiles, since 1991.

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Originally posted by unionist:

I have no doubt the CIA was involved. But how does that justify foreign troops entering Czechoslovakia without colour of right?

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I think it's possible, however, that you got the response you got because you've tended to bait people here about the old Soviet thing.

There's probably a natural tendency on the part of some here to be wary of a trap in some of the things you post.

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Originally posted by al-Qa'bong:
Babblers are opposed to the Soviet invasion of Cechoslovakia? Why would anyone but a numbskull think otherwise?

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I can really only think of one or two long time Babblers who might not have supported Dybcek's reforms. Interestingly one of my favourite east block movies was produced and released during the Prague Spring. Based on the novel "The Joke" by Milan Kundera.

The Joke (1969)

It was of course banned after the Soviet invasion.

[ 23 August 2008: Message edited by: Cueball ]

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Babblers are opposed to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia? Why would anyone but a numbskull think otherwise?

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Originally posted by Stockholm:

Because it seems to take some people such a long time to acknowledge any fault on the part of the Soviet Union - if ever.

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[ 24 August 2008: Message edited by: Fidel ]