Tuesday, February 02, 2010

Jan Palach Week


1989 was not that long ago. I wish I was in DC this time last year to have joined them.
Washington, D.C., January 26, 2009 - The brutal suppression by Czechoslovak Communist authorities of commemorative ceremonies for "Palach Week" 20 years ago this month marked the beginning of the end of the regime in the annus mirabilis 1989, according to secret police, Communist Party, and dissident documents posted today on the Web by the Czechoslovak Documentation Centre (Prague) and the National Security Archive (www.nsarchive.org) at George Washington University (Washington, D.C.).

Various independent civic initiatives (also known in the official Communist press as "anti-state" and "anti-socialist forces") had planned to lay wreaths at the site in Prague's main Wenceslas Square where the student Jan Palach in January 1969 had burned himself to death in protest against the repression that followed the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. Also planned was a pilgrimage to the rural cemetery where Palach's ashes were interred.

But the Communist secret police cracked down with beatings, tear gas, and mass arrests, including the dissident playwright and future Czechoslovak president Václav Havel. The repression occurred at the exact moment in January 1989 that the signatory countries to the Helsinki Final Act (the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, or CSCE) were meeting in Vienna, and drew widespread protests from abroad, including from U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, leading Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, and perhaps most eloquently, American playwright Arthur Miller.

Today's Web posting includes never-before-published documents from Czechoslovak archives, including the secret police reports on the demonstrations in January 1989 and the internal Communist Party briefings and instructions (the Party line) to cadres about the events of January. Also included are key Charter 77 and other dissident and samizdat statements, and several international protests of the time.
Take some time and visit the site.

4 comments:

MR T's Haircut said...

This was ONLY 20 years ago!  BH and FRY wars were only 15 years ago.. how soon we forget...

UltimaRatioRegis said...

Yes, but Tom Friedman tells us that, while there are some "excesses", totalian governments are very good at passing climate change legislation and health care reform.....

UltimaRatioRegis said...

<span>Yes, but Tom Friedman tells us that, while there are some "excesses", totalitaran governments are very good at passing climate change legislation and health care reform.....</span>

ewok40k said...

It's amazing in a few months later entire system collapsed...
I was witnessing it myself first hand as a teenager, mind you :)