Final Word from Monday, October 5, 2009
There's an old Soviet joke about how the People's Commissar decided that, due to a fuel shortage, all thermometers should be set five degrees higher. It's this kind of top-down thinking that drives Václav Klaus to compare the EU to the Soviet Union. Klaus has suggested that by adopting the Lisbon treaty, Czechs and others could "very easily and very soon slip back to the times that we hoped belonged to history." Ironically, ODS Chair Mirek Topolánek uses the need to avoid slipping back into the Russian sphere as his main reason for signing the Lisbon treaty, even if it is "shit." It's not very flattering for either side, but the Czechs are involved in a bit of a Russian civil war. On the one side are the Lisbon Bolsheviks who haven't even read the treaty. On the other side is the counter-revolutionary White Russian leader with his monarchal tendencies. History has taught us how this is going to turn out.[Czech Republic European Union Red army]
Glossary of difficult words
Russian Civil War - 1917-1923, between the Red and White armies;
People's Commissar - the highest government authority under the Bolshevik system after the Russian Revolution;
top-down - denoting a system of government in which actions and policies are initiated at the highest level;
shit - the term, in English, that Topolánek used to describe the EU constitution;
how it will turn out - it will be bloody, but the Reds will win.