Modern Memories: The Invasion of Czechoslovakia 1968

It was a year of manic tumult.  Students revolted in Paris and other global capitals; the Tet Offensive permanently impaired the US war effort in Vietnam, at least on the home front; Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were both felled by assassins’ bullets in the United States.  “What is hard to convey,” reflected Todd Gitlin, “is the texture of shock and panic that seized the world a half-century ago.  What is even harder to grasp is that the chief political victory of 1968 was the counter-revolution.”

Such is the impulse of the revolutionary impulse: in its aftermath come the countering forces that either absorb the reform or repulse it with fanaticism.  In response to the student revolt of May came the triumph of General De Gaulle’s rightist party.  In Latin America, the spirit of Che Guevara was repulsed by authoritarian military regimes with Washington’s backing.  In Prague, socialism with a human face, as it came to be termed by the Slovak Alexander Dubček, bore witness to the monstrosity of Soviet tanks supposedly sent to put down counter-revolutionary tendencies.  The converse was true.

Again, Czechoslovakia found itself at the mercy of real estate holders that did not own them, but felt free to dispose of them.  Neville Chamberlain’s ghost, grasping the worthless paper that was the Munich Agreement of 1938, seemed to be riding again.  In a terrifying historical redux, the territory so vital to various currents in…

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