A sad day on my calendar. August 21. 54 years ago today, the combined armies of the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia and put an end to what we loved calling the “Prague Spring” - a period of political and economic resurrection
Having seen what Nazism had done to my parents and what Communism had done to the country I was born in, raised in and which I loved, I became an enemy of any sort of collectivism very early on. Western liberal capitalism has been the most successful engine for lifting people out of poverty and every attempt at collectivization, nationalization, government meddling and bureaucratic suffocation has lead to misery far greater, far deeper, far more pernicious than anything capitalism could serve up.
Freedom of speech is sacrosanct to me. It doesn’t matter how hateful your pronouncements, how offensive your rhetoric - you must be free to shout it from the rooftops. My mother, God rest her soul, was an Auschwitz survivor. I have nothing but contempt for the vermin that crawls from under a rock every now and again and claims the Holocaust didn’t happen. But they should be free to say it, write it, publish it, free to offend whoever they want.
Any censorship is poison and government censorship is the kick that puts us on a slide to authoritarian, collectivist hell. Your words may offend me but feel free to publish them. Make a fool of yourself, go ahead. Only in a free marketplace of ideas will we be able to weed out the bad ones and keep going with the good ones.
I believe government should be limited to fighting wars and delivering mail (I’m not so sure about the mail, but we’ll let that go for now) It should not meddle in almost anything else. Every time I hear “It’s for the public good”, I am instantly reminded of headlines in the Czech Communist rag “Rude Pravo” (translation: “Red Justice” or “Red Right”), the type of headlines the Prague Spring sought to do away with and the Red Army rushed in to revive.
The individual is supreme and our rights are God given. All the government can do is grant privileges - never rights. It is my right to walk free, to walk tall, to walk proud, to walk unmasked, to travel where I want, how I want, to commune with whomever I want, whenever I want, to say what I want. These are my rights than no government should get away with stealing. Sadly, we have allowed that theft in the last 30 months and now we must work hard to defeat the idea of collectivism and to get our rights back. If we don’t, our American Spring will become a long American winter…even without the help of Warsaw Pact armies.
My most acute memory, still today, 54 years on, remains waking up at 3 am in the morning of August 21, 1968 and hearing my parents whisper in their bedroom. A transistor radio was stuck to my dad’s ear and he told me in a quiet, resigned voice: “That’s it, son. Prague Spring is over. The tanks will be rolling in soon”
And two hours later, the building shook as armored vehicles passed by and jets screamed overhead. I will never forget. NEVER! And I will never allow my freedom to be stolen again - not least my freedom to walk down the street smiling at passers-by. “I’m not a number! I’m a free man! I’m not a mask! I’m a free face”
This should be required reading at schools all over! Thank you!
This is a post to share far and wide. Very poignant and important.