Amid the cheers last night at Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s celebration of the ouster that led to President Biden being quickly and quietly replaced by Vice President Harris on the national ticket, you could almost hear the rumblings of a time thought to be long past.
On August 21st, 1968—not that much more than half a century ago—Soviet tanks rolled into Prague, then-Czech Socialist Republic, and occupied the country.
Despite the fact that the Czechs were, in fact, socialist and were, in fact, part of the Warsaw Pact, 1968 saw them invaded by over half a million soldiers from other Pact nations—the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Poland, and Hungary.
Why did these nations turn on their ally and invade?
Well, it turns out, communism and socialism aren’t that neighborly after all.
Put simply, and shortly, the other communist members of the Warsaw Pact didn’t like the “Prague Spring,” or the loosening of government restrictions on the economy, media, and academia, that had occurred after the election of the new Czech First Secretary, Alexander Dubček.
Dubček’s undoing of about a decade of tight-fisted communist rule by decentralizing authority, democratizing the public square, and allowing freedom to creep back in was a massive threat to the other socialist members of the Warsaw Pact—if the Czechs enjoyed their taste of freedom, how long would their regimes last?
So, invasion—which the Soviets couched as “fraternal help”—was the only option.
Against the backdrop of this historical anniversary, we see something of the opposite of the Prague Spring occurring on the national stage. Presidential hopefuls, rather than decentralizing the economy and increasing freedom, are focused on centralizing power and federal authority. The Harris campaign recently proposed a “ban on price gouging.” Said ban could be known by another name—price controls.
As the Democratic National Convention continues, there’s no shortage of love for federal programs and centralized federal power. In fact, across the progressive Left, there is a drive for even more centralized power in the form of international compacts—whether that’s increasing authority to the UN or “planning world economies” at the World Economic Forum, there’s a distinct bent toward centralized power.
This is, of course, not surprising—socialists and communists love centralized power, because with it comes control. There’s no control over the free market, no control with a free media, and no control with an armed populace—that’s why the socialist and communist tune is to impose price controls, limit free speech, and disarm the populace.
Looking at Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, makes the comparison even more apt. This is a man who helped create a state-wide “snitch line” where people could rat out their neighbors and colleagues for COVID restriction violations—a policy which communist authorities loved to use, and a culture that my grandmother experienced in communist Czecho.
However, while many are shocked that Walz engaged in something so blatantly un-American, we have to remember that this is a man who openly praised China—a nation with a surveillance enforced “social credit” system—and described socialism as “another person’s neighborliness.”
I’d ask the Czechs of 1968 how “neighborly” their neighbors actually were.