In his blog entry Must We Adore Vaclav Havel? (no we shouldn't), Michael Parente publishes an excerpt from his book Blackshirts and Reds (1997) pp. 97-99: I.
While provides a good essence of what Vaclav Havel did and did not do as well as some insight into Havelite ideology, there is one passage that is not entirely accurate. Let me quote this excerpt:
"In the Czech and Slovak republics, former aristocrats or their heirs were being given back all lands their families had held before 1918 under the Austro-Hungarian empire, dispossessing the previous occupants and sending many of them into destitution."
This is not exactly accurate however. The restitution was selective and was to an extent determined by ethnicity. Czech Republic is an ethnic state. Like are Estonia or Latvia - though of course Czechs are indefinitely better people than either Estonians and Latvians and unlike the latter two Czechs and Moravians do posses their own history and culture. I even would testify Czechs have numerous good human qualities and for the most part fantastic people, while Estonians and Latvians are not (and that is a generalization because there are still good Esths, don't know much about individual Letts as from what I know their case might be hopeless, but I am sure even a few Letts have not yet lost last vestiges of their humanity).
An ethnic state is an entity that emerged between Russian and former Austrian and German empires in the aftermath of World War I as either a separate "state" or a "republic" within former USSR, mainly with help of the so-called allies, and justified by ideas of Woodrow Wilson (the 20th century most destructive man) and Vladimir Lenin (runs in the semi-finals. Obviously Wilson and Lenin were not members of the same gang of conspirators but ideas of ethnic determination rechristened as "national" determination for the goals of projecting power, be in American or Bolshevik, were similar). Outside of the USSR the ethnic state has been instrumental in conducting US influence where none was historically present or acting as transplanted power base for American imperialism (which in terms of geopolitics assumed all of the roles of the German Nazism after the Second World War) . Collectively those states and statelets are always somebody's "Trojan Horse". They are a remote control sort of power dressed up in the costume of national or rather determinatio. Their sole reason for existence is the ethnicity of their members and the tribal allegiance. Because those states are nonviable (in the original sense of the word) on their own, they rely upon support of and hope for their defense (which may or may not be forthcoming) by a third power or sometimes powers which always remain outsiders, are physically located outside of their region. That definition applies to practically all post WWI and post WWII ethnostates with possibly an exception in the form of the former Yugoslavia and Finland. Frequently a mere possibility of losing overseas support from a the adopted daddy leads to those statelets collapsing in an instant and sometimes they fail in a spectacular manner.
Thus said the restitution policy in the Czech Republic was not supposed to cover Nazi collaborators. However Vaclav Havel, who comes from a family of Iron-Cross-wearing Goebbels-kissing Nazi collaborators, "excepted" his own dishonorable self and "restituted" a number of properties, some awarded by the Nazis which since became public property, to himself.
But that was it. Besides that restitution only took place when the nationality or rather background was Slav, and ethnicity Czech or Slovak. People of German descent or foreigners who did not cooperate with the Nazis and had nothing with to do with them (such as Princes of Liechtenstein) never got back ancestral properties that was stolen from them by the nationalist Czech state. Over two million people of wrong ethnicity, so called Germans, disenfranchised, stripped of citizenship, beaten up, and expelled (and quarter a million, mainly women and kids, murdered) under criminal misrule of Edvard Beneš (Edward Benesch) , who unlike Havel were not Nazis, and who did nothing wrong except speaking a wrong language, were not compensated in any form.
In fact the topic of official Czech crimes between 1945 and 1948 was never on the agenda as that short era was deemed "democratic" (it was just violent though it now seems both words are increasingly becoming synonymous) and neither was the restitution for the victims. Restitution nvolved mainly those who were either extremely favorable to the nationalist Czech state or the "own kind" selected with tribal criteria. In that respect the Czech restitution did not differ from the restitution policies in the former Soviet republics of Estonia and Latvia.
While provides a good essence of what Vaclav Havel did and did not do as well as some insight into Havelite ideology, there is one passage that is not entirely accurate. Let me quote this excerpt:
"In the Czech and Slovak republics, former aristocrats or their heirs were being given back all lands their families had held before 1918 under the Austro-Hungarian empire, dispossessing the previous occupants and sending many of them into destitution."
This is not exactly accurate however. The restitution was selective and was to an extent determined by ethnicity. Czech Republic is an ethnic state. Like are Estonia or Latvia - though of course Czechs are indefinitely better people than either Estonians and Latvians and unlike the latter two Czechs and Moravians do posses their own history and culture. I even would testify Czechs have numerous good human qualities and for the most part fantastic people, while Estonians and Latvians are not (and that is a generalization because there are still good Esths, don't know much about individual Letts as from what I know their case might be hopeless, but I am sure even a few Letts have not yet lost last vestiges of their humanity).
An ethnic state is an entity that emerged between Russian and former Austrian and German empires in the aftermath of World War I as either a separate "state" or a "republic" within former USSR, mainly with help of the so-called allies, and justified by ideas of Woodrow Wilson (the 20th century most destructive man) and Vladimir Lenin (runs in the semi-finals. Obviously Wilson and Lenin were not members of the same gang of conspirators but ideas of ethnic determination rechristened as "national" determination for the goals of projecting power, be in American or Bolshevik, were similar). Outside of the USSR the ethnic state has been instrumental in conducting US influence where none was historically present or acting as transplanted power base for American imperialism (which in terms of geopolitics assumed all of the roles of the German Nazism after the Second World War) . Collectively those states and statelets are always somebody's "Trojan Horse". They are a remote control sort of power dressed up in the costume of national or rather determinatio. Their sole reason for existence is the ethnicity of their members and the tribal allegiance. Because those states are nonviable (in the original sense of the word) on their own, they rely upon support of and hope for their defense (which may or may not be forthcoming) by a third power or sometimes powers which always remain outsiders, are physically located outside of their region. That definition applies to practically all post WWI and post WWII ethnostates with possibly an exception in the form of the former Yugoslavia and Finland. Frequently a mere possibility of losing overseas support from a the adopted daddy leads to those statelets collapsing in an instant and sometimes they fail in a spectacular manner.
Thus said the restitution policy in the Czech Republic was not supposed to cover Nazi collaborators. However Vaclav Havel, who comes from a family of Iron-Cross-wearing Goebbels-kissing Nazi collaborators, "excepted" his own dishonorable self and "restituted" a number of properties, some awarded by the Nazis which since became public property, to himself.
But that was it. Besides that restitution only took place when the nationality or rather background was Slav, and ethnicity Czech or Slovak. People of German descent or foreigners who did not cooperate with the Nazis and had nothing with to do with them (such as Princes of Liechtenstein) never got back ancestral properties that was stolen from them by the nationalist Czech state. Over two million people of wrong ethnicity, so called Germans, disenfranchised, stripped of citizenship, beaten up, and expelled (and quarter a million, mainly women and kids, murdered) under criminal misrule of Edvard Beneš (Edward Benesch) , who unlike Havel were not Nazis, and who did nothing wrong except speaking a wrong language, were not compensated in any form.
In fact the topic of official Czech crimes between 1945 and 1948 was never on the agenda as that short era was deemed "democratic" (it was just violent though it now seems both words are increasingly becoming synonymous) and neither was the restitution for the victims. Restitution nvolved mainly those who were either extremely favorable to the nationalist Czech state or the "own kind" selected with tribal criteria. In that respect the Czech restitution did not differ from the restitution policies in the former Soviet republics of Estonia and Latvia.
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