Czech Republic

From RationalWiki

The Czech Rebublic is a country in Eastern Central Europe. It has had a tortuous history:

915-938: Ruled by Duke Vaclav I of Bohemia, immortalised in song as Good King Wenceslas. He allied himself with Henry the Fowler, possibly in order to get a free turkey every Christmas.

1419 and 1618: the defenestrations of Prague

1918: Czechosolvakia breaks away from the collapsed Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I. Franz Kafka is a citizen of the new country. Czechoslovakia becomes an island of democracy surrounded by fascists (a bit like Austin, then).

1938: Sold down the river by Neville Chamberlain in order to fend off Hitler for a while longer^[1] Czechoslovakia is occupied by the Nazis and dismembered.

1948: After liberation (yay!) Czechoslovakia is taken over by Communists at Stalin's behest (boo!)

1968: The "Prague Spring" - communist leader Alexander Dubček introduces "socialism with a human face" (i.e. - being nice to people), and is rewarded for his efforts by being invaded by the USSR and several other Warsaw Pact countries.

1977-89: it all gets a bit weird from here. The plastic people of the Universe, a subversive rock/jazz band doing Frank Zappa numbers under the guise of lectures about American Decadent Capitalism, are imprisoned for playing music without a licence. A group of dissidents (including Vaclav Havel) protest. They, too, are imprisoned, but as they are all playwrights and journalists they manage to get the message out about what's happening in the country. Eventually, 12 years later the dissidents head a mass pro-democracy movement (called Civic Forum, the blandest title of a revolutionary movement ever) which kicks out the Communists and restores democracy, with Havel as one of the coolest presidents of anywhere ever. Thus, the only rock band in the world who ever changed history weren't The Beatles or the Clash but a covers band from Prague.

1992-3 Slovak politian Vladimír Mečiar wants to be Prime Minister, but his Slovak party is too small to form a government. He craftily (and successfully) agitates for Slovakian independence, and gets to be PM after all. The Czech Republic is born.

2004 The Czech Republic decides that it's far too interesting, so it joins the European Union.

[edit] Famous Czechs

• Good King Wenceslas
• Franz Kafka
• Karel Čapek, who gave us the word "robot"
• Vaclav Havel
• Milan Kundera
• A shitload of tennis players
• Antonín Dvořák, composer who had to go to America and tell the them how good their own music was and to stop listening to European composers all the time.
• Miloš Forman, director of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
• Eva Herzigova
• Ivana Trump

[edit] Other things

• The Golem of Prague (a Jewish robot made of clay. Or something)
• Budweiser beer - the proper one, not the shitty American stuff.
• Skoda - the car that became the butt of a thousand jokes.
• The White Shorthair and Brown Shorthair goats
• The Gipsy wall

[edit] References

1. ↑ An opportunity he completely squandered, but that's another story.