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“The cold war was over.
It seemed an almost casual resolution to a sequence of stunning events:
10 years in Poland, 10 months in Hungary, 10 weeks in East Germany, 10 days in Czechoslovakia.
The power of people in one place accelerating the pace of change in the next. The Soviet
Union itself yet to come. China still to come...... (Tunisia
2011....?) Peter Jennings (1990)
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Benjamin Barber - Quote.....Democratic beginnings in Africa & Native American influences......Greece Q:How
are Ancient Greece and Columbus alike - Answer: White men 'discovering' something (democracy and
America) that had existed for a very long time ......
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Czechoslovakia On 17 November 1989, the communist police violently broke up a peaceful pro-democracy demonstration, brutally
beating many student participants. In the days which followed, Charter 77 and other groups united to become the Civic Forum,
an umbrella group championing bureaucratic reform and civil liberties. Its leader was the dissident playwright Vaclav Havel.
Intentionally eschewing the label "party", a word given a negative connotation during the previous regime, Civic Forum quickly
gained the support of millions of Czechs, as did its Slovak counterpart, Public Against Violence. Faced with an overwhelming
popular repudiation, the Communist Party all but collapsed. Its leaders, Husak and party chief Milo Jakes, resigned in December
1989, and Havel was elected President of Czechoslovakia on 29 December. The astonishing quickness of these events was in part
due to the unpopularity of the communist regime and changes in the policies of its Soviet guarantor as well as to the rapid,
effective organization of these public initiatives into a viable opposition.
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