In the Czech Republic, it is a day for celebrating victory and remembering those who died, but it is also a day for arguing about our past and what it means. When Red Army soldiers prevented the Germans from exterminating Slavic ethnic groups, was it liberation or occupation for the Czechs and other Slavic nations?
Note the manipulative wording in the introduction. The sentence could just as easily have read: When Red Army soldiers stole watches and raped dozens of Czech women, was it liberation or occupation?
In short, the past contains an infinite number of facts, and we can therefore create different stories. We can attach great or little importance to different facts, and we can even leave some out altogether. Which of these stories is true? It is up to each individual to choose. But we compile and select these stories according to our ideas about the future. The latest generation of social scientists basically agree on this. At the beginning there is always an idea of the future. It is only on the basis of what kind of future we want that we choose the past. This applies to the lives of individuals, communities and nations.
It is also evident in the disputes about the Hussite movement and the Re-Catholicization. Are we compiling the past for a nation that asserts its interests with confidence, like the Hungarians? Or are we writing the past for a country that serves as a reservoir of slaves and cheap prostitutes?
So the question is what kind of future is being constructed by this new history, in which May 1945 was the beginning of the occupation and the Soviet Union shares responsibility for the Nazi rampage. I fear that this new history supports the intention to turn the Czechs into another Ukraine. In other words, worthless consumer material to be used without restraint in the conquest of Russian territory.
In such a story there is really only one significant event, and that is August 1968. Everything revolves around it, everything stems from it. In such a history, it is also true that every time someone criticises something Russian or argues with a Russian in a pub, for example, we make a big deal out of it.
Of course, this rightly irritates us and rightly offends our basic sense of morality. But let’s not forget that the main argument is about the future. History will somehow adjust itself.