Posted on 07/31/2010 3:57:37 AM PDT by Clive
PRAGUE — I had just left university when I first visited Communist Europe — crossing the wall into East Berlin and immediately being smothered by that choking cloud of oppression that hovered over Marxist states like some clinging miasma.
We’re told today that under Communism there was no unemployment, no homelessness and complete equality.
It’s true that everybody did work, often in soul-destroying and dangerous jobs. True that everybody had a place to live, usually in an over-crowded apartment without privacy or dignity.
As for equality, this is absurd. The elites may have changed under Marxism, but they were still elites.
In place of aristocrats, businessmen — or the new middle class — were party members and bureaucrats, police officials and, most of all, intelligence officers.
Hungary and East Germany were better off than Poland and Czechoslovakia and everybody was better off than Bulgaria, but it was all an artificial and hideous mess.
Now there is freedom. Yes I know that sounds trite, but not if, like so many people you meet here, you actually experienced the lack of it.
Some Czech Catholics, for example, told me how under Communism they would have to attend mass at different churches every week so as not to be detected, questioned and perhaps arrested and even incarcerated for as long as the state decided was appropriate.
Lack of humour — or control of laughter — is always a good indicator of an evil regime.
Dissident comedian
A friend in Prague explained about a dissident comedian who had told a joke in public against Communist anti-Semitism.
“There is a bread queue with lots of people. The secret police arrive and ask if there are any Jews there. A few say that they are Jewish. The cops tell them to get lost. Later the cops return, asking if there are any non-party members there. Lots of people put up their hands. They too are told to get lost.
“Later still the cops return and tell the people in hushed tones that actually there was no bread in the first place. ‘Typical’, says one party member, ‘Jews always get the best deal.’ ”
It’s a wonderful, funny condemnation of racism, but the comedian was arrested for — wait for it — spreading anti-Semitism.
A Marxist regime that uses anti-Semitism to control the people fails to understand humour and arrests a man for exposing and mocking anti-Semitism.
It’s no coincidence Kafka lived here!
Today, openness and free expression are as real as the bricks and stones of the city.
Naturally with this new liberation come some unhappy consequences. Prostitution, drugs and economic challenges being just a few.
But alcohol abuse and the exploitation of women was common under the Communists, and some of the worst problems Prague faces today come from westerners taking advantage of this stunningly beautiful city.
It has always amazed me in Canada to see people, young students as well as older activists, championing Marxism and socialist revolution in parades and on their little websites.
Moscow did, as a great man said, operate an empire of evil and what has replaced it is not perfect but it is a heaven compared to that leftist hell.
Some people will never learn, but the Czechs have.
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Far, far better than the bombed-out slum known as Detroit or the totally corrupt Chicago!
>>Some Czech Catholics, for example, told me how under Communism they would have to attend mass at different churches every week so as not to be detected, questioned and perhaps arrested and even incarcerated for as long as the state decided was appropriate. <<
I’m in a Slovak parish.
Our pastor tells that the church doors were open, and there was mass, but a local government official would scribble names of attendees and they would be last in line for food and housing.
Living five+ years in Bratislava, Slovakia, I made a number of trips into Praha and other points in the Czech Republic.
Former Communist central Europe may be the last bastion of
free western civilization.
It is not plagued with socialism, as the UK and the rest of western Europe.
If I had not opted for the very low cost of life, and sweet young women of the Philippines, I would still be there.
“I’m in a Slovak parish.”
You should visit Bratislava some day.
It is quite Catholic, and surrounding the “old town” there are
five or six very beautiful and ornate Catholic churches, all within a ten minuet walk of each other.
The one that I often visited is just on the town square of old town. Enormous marble columns, wall paintings, and plenty of gold adorn the interior.
There is no way that it could be duplicated today.
I would love to go over there.
I visited Prague about five years ago, and it’s the free-est place I’ve ever seen, including the US. If Obama makes himself into our fuhrer, we are fleeing to Prague.
Everyone I saw was well-dressed, carried a cell phone, drove a nice car, and walked a pedigreed dog. but two sure signs of a free, civil, society - there was a tobacco department in Debenham’s department store, and there was a massive anti-Castro rally for a free Cuba.
And the beer was amazing.
In fact, the Czech Republic has been in a diplomatic conflict with Castro over the EU’s cozy relationship with Cuba that reminds the Czechs of Europe’s once cozy relationship with the Soviets who were grinding Czech freedom under their boot heels.
>>Most parishioners were lucky to find a priest who wasn’ an informer. <<
REALLY?!?
My Pastor’s father is a nuclear scientist and highly valued.
Maybe that’s why they weren’t bothered as much.
I can’t speak for Czechoslovakia, but you have to assume it was the case. In Lithuania, for example, you couldn’t become a Roman Catholic priest without the permission of the Soviet government. In the rest of the Baltics, the same held true for the Orthodox and Lutherans. (I believe the head of the Orthodox Church in Latvia admitted to supplying information to the KGB). The Soviets were evil.
I have been to Prague many times and I love the city. Prague was the only city in Europe that the Germans did not bomb during WW2. It’s an amazingly clean and safe city. Better yet, the countryside is full of treasures to see. The roads are fantastic. And yes, the beer is great, Zatec beer is the best of the best and is now available in the US. It comes in 16.9 Oz bottles. You will see more beautiful women in the Czech Republic than anywhere else.
I lived in Sweden for four years and my ex husband was Polish, from right across the Czech border. We spent a lot of time in both countries (his entire family was still living there) and as a straight woman, I agree; I have never in my life seen as many beautiful women as I did in Czech! (But the best looking men in Europe were in Norway! Incredibly tall and a good mix of dark and light hair, not just the stereotypical blondes.)
I preferred the Krucevice dark, but I didn’t encounter the Zatec. I’ll have to give it a try, if it’s available in the US. Ditto, on the beautiful women, a feature not likely to get my wife’s interest.
One thing that was amusing and would be terribly annoying to the preservation nazis. I live in a historic townhouse in the historic district, and have developed a distain for preservation nazis, even though I’ve chose to keep my house as preserved as I can aford. That is the facades of 500 year old buildings, now used as apartments in Prague, covered in satellite dishes.
As the Soviet overlords would not have permitted cable tv, satellite dishes would be the easiest, quickest, and cheapest way for the newly free Czech people to get good TV.
I was also impressed by the historic struggles of the Bohemian and Moravian people for freedom. In the fifteenth century, they through the Hapsburg representative out of a window (the first Defenestration of Prague), sparking the Hussite wars, during which the Hussites with help from the Jews, kept the Catholic Hapsburgs at bay in a struggle for religious freedom that preceded Martin Luther by a century.
Then in the seventeenth century, they threw another Hapsburg representative out of the window (the Second Defenestration of Prague) when the Hapsburgs were dictating to the Bohemians who was to be their king. That event sparked the Thirty Years War.
The Czechs finally got their freedom after WWI, only to have it betrayed at Munich by the Brits and the French, and then after WWII by the victorious allies.
Now that they are free, they are taking on the politically correct in Europe, who are cozying up to Castro, as well as the global warming fanatics. They hate being told what to do.
Being a small country, they have had trouble preserving their freedom, and, if the handbasket transporting the West arrives at its destination, I’m not sure that Czech liberty would survive, but I’m sure that they would, once again, go down fighting.
Once I was at a client’s office with a colleague who took pride in standing out because of his appearance. He was tall, but a software engineer, so you can rest assured it wasn’t because of his Armani suit and shoes. We went to lunch with two independent contractors from Russia and the deli lady called my colleague by his first name, remembering him from the day before because of his appearance. As we sat at a table my colleague was beaming that the lady had remembered him. The Russians said had that happened to them they would have been scared to death that someone bothered to remember their names.
That has to b e a terrible way to live.
Very interesting article and comments for an article posted right before this one on Howard Zinn:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2562225/posts
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