I’m in Prague this week lecturing at the Prague University of Economics and attending (last weekend) the Prague Conference on Political Economy. My host (Professor Josef Sima) picked me up at the airport and as soon as we got into the city one of the first sights that caught my eye was a large black pickup truck with a Confederate battle flag covering the entire back window. It is most likely a remnant of the successful, peaceful secession of Slovakia from Czechoslovakia in 1993, creating the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Having looked up the history of this peaceful secession on the internet I learned that the old Czechoslovakian government did not have sufficient coercive force –and the will to mass murder its own people — in order to stop it. Not that there weren’t Czecho-Lincolnites in the government who wanted to.
Thank God for the Czechs and Slovaks that they did not have a Lincoln who would have slaughtered them all by the thousands while wrapping his war crimes in religious rhetoric.
