How the Czechs are fighting the marshmallow EU tyrant

Our pet peeve - the liberal we like to talk to and listen to. He hates our faith and fights us on it. But read Hitchens and see why we listen to him when he talks sense, which is most of the time

PETER HITCHENS: via Mail Online:
Compare the pasts of the two men, especially in the fateful year of 1968, the beginning of the modern era. In that year, Klaus was experiencing the towering hope of the Prague Spring - a brief dash for freedom - and the miserable disappointment and fear that followed its merciless repression by genuine, iron-bound killer tyrants.

Cohn-Bendit was a rather mature student, leading the playtime revolutionaries of Paris in calls for easier access to the girls' dormitories. These 'revolutionaries' never risked anything serious in their lives or had a clue about what it meant to live in a secret police state, for all their cries of 'repression'.

Cohn-Bendit, once called 'Danny the Red', has remained in the forefront of radical chic.

He is now as Green as he used to be Red, an intolerant zealot of the man-made climate-change lobby, a supporter of liberal wars and a keen Europhile.

Flanked by an Irish Euro-MP (embarrassed by his countrymen's rejection of Lisbon), Cohn-Bendit spoke to Klaus as if the President of the Czech Republic were a disobedient subordinate. He also rudely thrust an EU flag across the President's desk.

But this bumptious pipsqueak got more than he bargained for.

Having first lectured the President on how he was wrong about global warming (Klaus is a courageous sceptic about this, too) he started telling him what his presidential duties were, that he would have to sign the Lisbon Treaty if the Czech Parliament approved it (which is incorrect). Then, amazingly, he told the Head of State: 'I don't care about your opinions on it [the Treaty].'

Czechs are sensitive about being ordered around by politicians from other countries.

They remember how Hitler screamed so wildly at poor President Emil Hacha in 1939 that the aged professor collapsed and had to be revived by injections. They remember Josef Stalin telling them they couldn't have American Marshall Aid, and Leonid Brezhnev telling them to strangle the Prague Spring.

Klaus struck back hard.

'This is incredible,' he retorted. He directly compared Cohn-Bendit's dictatorial lecture to the past behaviour of the Kremlin. 'I did not think anything like this was possible. I have not experienced anything like this for the past 19 years [since the Soviets left]. I thought it was a matter of the past, that we live in a democracy.'

Then he added these inflammatory words, which the EU would much rather nobody had uttered: 'But it is post-democracy, really, that rules the EU.'

And post-democracy is not democracy - Czechs are especially good at spotting the difference between the real thing and counterfeits, having been told under communism that they lived in a 'democracy' when they most certainly didn't.