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A History of the Czechs and Slovaks

Robert William Seton-Watson

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Description:(Taken from the Foreward)On September 11, 1918, the British Prime Minister, Mr. Lloyd George, telegraphed to Professor Masaryk, as President of the Czechoslovak National Council, "Your nation has rendered inestimable service to Russia and to the Allies in this struggle to free the world from despotism; we shall never forget it." On September 27, 1938 (almost exactly twenty years later) another British Prime Minister, broadcasting to the Empire, tried to justify his surrender by describing the Czechoslovaks as "people of whom we know nothing."The present volume is an attempt to deprive future politicians of any excuse for repeating this ineptitude. No one is more conscious than its author, of its imperfections and improvisations. It was originally planned as a companion to A History of the Roumanians (published in 1934), and to a still unfinished History of Jugoslav Unity; and it also incorporates fragments from a History of Austria-Hungary under the Dual System, begun before the last war. The only valid excuse for its completion at high pressure and its production in time of war, is that for good or for ill it is the first history which covers the whole ground, from the earliest times right on to the Gestapo Terror of to-day, and that it contains a collection of facts which, if fully accessible at the time and clearly interpreted, might have served as a timely warning.Czechoslovakia was in may ways the most promising and normal of the political creations of the Great War, full of life and ideals, led by men of high purpose and intellectual calibre. None the less this reconstituted State was the subject of many misconceptions and even calumnies and these can only be cleared away by a study of its history and origins. From this study Bohemia emerges as one of the earliest national states in Europe, with a highly developed consciousness at a time when not only Germany and Italy, but even France and Spain were still disunited. On the one hand she possessed one of the best natural frontiers in Europe, only inferior to the Alps and the Pyrenees—one which till its overthrow in 1938 had stood for more than ten centuries. On the other hand she was handicapped by her landlocked position; her attempts to reach the Baltic or the Adriatic inevitably failed. The fatal legacy bestowed upon her by geography made of the Czechs an exposed salient jutting far into the German positions; and this became all the more marked as with the centuries the tenfold more numerous Germans pushed their frontiers eastwards from the Elbe and Saale to the Oder and on towards the Vistula, at the expense of the Slav, applying the alternate methods of extermination and assimilation. But on the physical map of Europe Bohemia still stands out lozenge-shaped in the very centre of the picture. Bismarck used to call bohemia “a natural fortress erected in the centre of our Continent.” Let those who ignored this warning in 1938 be careful to complete the quotation in 1943-44; “Bohemia in the hands of Russia,” he said, “would be Germany’s enslavement, Bohemia in our hands would be war without mercy or truce with the Empire of the Czars.” A free and independent Czechoslovakia offers the only true solution.‘The great object in trying to understand history, political, religious, literary or scientific,’ wrote Lord Acton, ‘is to get behind men and to grasp ideas.’ The history of Bohemia is that of a small nation which has from early times stood in the van of intellectual, religious and political freedom. What gave its conflict with the Germans an added bitterness was that it almost always found them on the side of reaction, from the Council of Constance till the Protectorate and the Heydrich Terror. Politically there have always been ‘ragged fringes’ between German and Czech, between Magyar and Slovak; and as a ‘clean cut’ proved impossible in 1918, the new Republic of necessity rested upon two conflicting principles—in Bohemia the historic rights of the Crown of St. Wenceslas, in Slovakia the principle of Nationality, which led logically to Czechoslovak Unity. Above all, there stands out form the pages of Czech history a marked preference for leaders of the intellectual rather than the military or narrowly political type, and a no less marked capacity for recognizing and following such leaders when they appear. The reader, will, it is hoped, be able to trace a clear continuity of political thought, on what are to-day somewhat arbitrarily called ‘democratic’ lines. It will be for him to decide whether Czechoslovakia was (as its enemies contend) a mere passing aberration, at whose door some of our present ills might fairly be laid, or whether on the contrary it was a natural evolution from a long and history past, a noteworthy experiment in political and social progress, such as had already won for it a key-position amid the vast schemes of European reconstruction which must follow the agonies of war. For my part, I have endeavo...We have made it easy for you to find a PDF Ebooks without any digging. And by having access to our ebooks online or by storing it on your computer, you have convenient answers with A History of the Czechs and Slovaks. To get started finding A History of the Czechs and Slovaks, you are right to find our website which has a comprehensive collection of manuals listed.
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Pages: 413

Format: PDF, EPUB & Kindle Edition

Publisher: Archon Books

Release: 1965

ISBN

Description: (Taken from the Foreward)On September 11, 1918, the British Prime Minister, Mr. Lloyd George, telegraphed to Professor Masaryk, as President of the Czechoslovak National Council, "Your nation has rendered inestimable service to Russia and to the Allies in this struggle to free the world from despotism; we shall never forget it." On September 27, 1938 (almost exactly twenty years later) another British Prime Minister, broadcasting to the Empire, tried to justify his surrender by describing the Czechoslovaks as "people of whom we know nothing."The present volume is an attempt to deprive future politicians of any excuse for repeating this ineptitude. No one is more conscious than its author, of its imperfections and improvisations. It was originally planned as a companion to A History of the Roumanians (published in 1934), and to a still unfinished History of Jugoslav Unity; and it also incorporates fragments from a History of Austria-Hungary under the Dual System, begun before the last war. The only valid excuse for its completion at high pressure and its production in time of war, is that for good or for ill it is the first history which covers the whole ground, from the earliest times right on to the Gestapo Terror of to-day, and that it contains a collection of facts which, if fully accessible at the time and clearly interpreted, might have served as a timely warning.Czechoslovakia was in may ways the most promising and normal of the political creations of the Great War, full of life and ideals, led by men of high purpose and intellectual calibre. None the less this reconstituted State was the subject of many misconceptions and even calumnies and these can only be cleared away by a study of its history and origins. From this study Bohemia emerges as one of the earliest national states in Europe, with a highly developed consciousness at a time when not only Germany and Italy, but even France and Spain were still disunited. On the one hand she possessed one of the best natural frontiers in Europe, only inferior to the Alps and the Pyrenees—one which till its overthrow in 1938 had stood for more than ten centuries. On the other hand she was handicapped by her landlocked position; her attempts to reach the Baltic or the Adriatic inevitably failed. The fatal legacy bestowed upon her by geography made of the Czechs an exposed salient jutting far into the German positions; and this became all the more marked as with the centuries the tenfold more numerous Germans pushed their frontiers eastwards from the Elbe and Saale to the Oder and on towards the Vistula, at the expense of the Slav, applying the alternate methods of extermination and assimilation. But on the physical map of Europe Bohemia still stands out lozenge-shaped in the very centre of the picture. Bismarck used to call bohemia “a natural fortress erected in the centre of our Continent.” Let those who ignored this warning in 1938 be careful to complete the quotation in 1943-44; “Bohemia in the hands of Russia,” he said, “would be Germany’s enslavement, Bohemia in our hands would be war without mercy or truce with the Empire of the Czars.” A free and independent Czechoslovakia offers the only true solution.‘The great object in trying to understand history, political, religious, literary or scientific,’ wrote Lord Acton, ‘is to get behind men and to grasp ideas.’ The history of Bohemia is that of a small nation which has from early times stood in the van of intellectual, religious and political freedom. What gave its conflict with the Germans an added bitterness was that it almost always found them on the side of reaction, from the Council of Constance till the Protectorate and the Heydrich Terror. Politically there have always been ‘ragged fringes’ between German and Czech, between Magyar and Slovak; and as a ‘clean cut’ proved impossible in 1918, the new Republic of necessity rested upon two conflicting principles—in Bohemia the historic rights of the Crown of St. Wenceslas, in Slovakia the principle of Nationality, which led logically to Czechoslovak Unity. Above all, there stands out form the pages of Czech history a marked preference for leaders of the intellectual rather than the military or narrowly political type, and a no less marked capacity for recognizing and following such leaders when they appear. The reader, will, it is hoped, be able to trace a clear continuity of political thought, on what are to-day somewhat arbitrarily called ‘democratic’ lines. It will be for him to decide whether Czechoslovakia was (as its enemies contend) a mere passing aberration, at whose door some of our present ills might fairly be laid, or whether on the contrary it was a natural evolution from a long and history past, a noteworthy experiment in political and social progress, such as had already won for it a key-position amid the vast schemes of European reconstruction which must follow the agonies of war. For my part, I have endeavo...We have made it easy for you to find a PDF Ebooks without any digging. And by having access to our ebooks online or by storing it on your computer, you have convenient answers with A History of the Czechs and Slovaks. To get started finding A History of the Czechs and Slovaks, you are right to find our website which has a comprehensive collection of manuals listed.
Our library is the biggest of these that have literally hundreds of thousands of different products represented.

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A History of the Czechs and Slovaks

A History of the Czechs and Slovaks

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