Mr. Forman played the elder voice of reason to my youthful exuberance. I was only 25, while he had lived through what he saw as a comparable moment in history. He cautioned that he had seen similar signs of a thaw after reformer Alexander Dub?ek had become president in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Eight months after Dub?ek’s election, his reforms ended abruptly as the U.S.S.R. sent half a million Warsaw Pact troops into Czechoslovakia and occupied the country. Many prominent Czechs, like Messrs. Forman and Kavalek, fled abroad.
“Gorbachev’s perestroika is another fake,” Mr. Forman warned us about the Soviet leader’s loosening of state controls, “and it will end up getting more hopeful people killed.” I insisted that Mr. Gorbachev would not be able to control the forces he was unleashing. Mr. Forman pressed me for specifics: “But how will it end, Garry?”
I replied—specifics not being my strong suit—that “one day, Miloš, you will wake up, open your window, and they’ll be gone.”
It seems like Turkey may have just woke the world up.Report
My reactions to that are…all over the place.
It starts with “Didn’t we start a world war over something like that once?” moves onto “Oh god, Trump will inevitably tweet about it” and finally ends up at “Maybe Russian can have an 18 hour hearing trying to pin it on Clinton”.
In the long run, murdered ambassadors suck but….that’s one of the risks of being one, I suppose. They seemed to have caught the guy that did it, for some value of caught, so there’s that at least.Report
What, it’s invasion of Iraq because of a freaking facebook post wasn’t enough to wake the world up???Report
Nu. What was supposed to happen last month in Turkey, I wonder…Report