Update (Tuesday, June 12): I e-mailed the Gateway links to my Czechophile son-in-law who is spending the summer in Russia; this may just be an accident of where he is and what newspapers he is reading or it may be that our commentators are right – this just wasn’t news. Nonetheless, I tend to see a certain irony – it isn’t news here because Bush has “no credibility” and it isn’t news there, perhaps because Putin has far too much “credibility.”
Gateway Pundit transcribes part of Havel’s speech from the Dissident Panel at the Democracy and Security Conference in Prague; the post includes only a paragraph of Havel’s talk but he quickly mentions topics we often return to on this blog: appeasement of those abusing human rights, the bureaucratic response of the EU to such offenses, and the sins of Cuban repression:
Vaclav Havel (through translater): Let me introduce this now using a specific example- the Cuban example…
…First… they (the EU) decide to invite dissidents to national day celebrations at the embassies. Second… they say we welcome changes but we’d like to be cautious so we’ll exclude dissidents from all of this. And now… I fear that again they are trying an appeasement policy position and I think that this conference should send a clear message to the EU leaders and say that this is not the right way to go.