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The Czech and Slovak governments have accused Russia of rewriting history after Russian state TV broadcast a documentary about the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Warsaw Pact - Pages Declassified, broadcast on state-run Rossiya 1 TV, argued that the Soviet-led military alliance was a purely defensive organisation in the face of an "aggressive" Nato alliance.

The programme claimed a Nato-backed "armed coup" was being planned under the cover of the "legend of peaceful civilian uprising with the romantic name of the Prague Spring".

The Habsburgs, a family of aristocrats originating in modern Switzerland, ruled the Holy Roman Empire and then the Austrian Empire for over 600 years

The first true collector among the Habsburgs was Ferdinand I (1503-64)

Rudolf II (1552-1612), the grandson of Ferdinand I, made the Kunstkammer internationally famous

One of the most striking positive trends in the world these days can be found in the democratic strength, character and leadership of Germany.

This came to mind as I was reading German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s speech this week in Prague, in which he promised that his country would support Ukraine “reliably and for as long as it takes.” He explained that Germany had “undergone a fundamental change” on providing military aid to Ukraine. He affirmed Germany’s support for a stronger, more integrated Europe — one that would welcome new members that aspire to Europe’s democratic values and ideals.

This is all part of what he calls a Zeitenwende in German foreign policy, a “turning of the times.”

America is itself a footnote to Caryl’s book, as are the Soviet Union and the European Union. Globalization may be Caryl’s subject, but he does not see it as a process advanced by American foreign policy and the American economy. Globalization reflects “the twin forces of markets and religion,” most vividly, the Chinese market and political Islam.

The book’s temporal frame is intended to provoke. Caryl accords the Paris or Berkeley or Prague of 1968 no lasting political stature. Nor is 1989 the year in which everything happens. Those years imply a Eurocentric emphasis, too rooted in the socialist dream or too disconnected from the salience of modern religion. Caryl argues that market capitalism and political Islam were the primary forces shaping the past 34 years. Embodying these forces were Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, and the Ayatollah Khomeini. The successive collapse of Western-style modernization and of Soviet-style communism in Afghanistan completes Caryl’s story.

Economics and technology are limited in their explanatory capacity, Caryl concludes in his epilogue. Hence, “politics is ultimately a category unto itself. And we cannot understand political dynamics without recourse to the ideas that motivate people to action.” Religion is the deepest motivation, especially when it activates “the cherished sources of identity that give meaning to [people’s] lives.”

First, its characters are a warm tribute to the three main populations targeted by the Nazis.

Second, the film focuses on the Nazis’ motivations, a poisonous cocktail of bias, greed, and disdain for law.

Third and most important, the film’s use of comedy turns out to offer a fresh way to talk about the run-up to World War II and the Communist era that followed.

Fifty years ago this month, France erupted. Students lobbed cobblestones at riot police in Paris’s Latin Quarter. Millions of union workers went on strike. The government of President Charles de Gaulle tottered. Today, the events of May 1968 are generally regarded as more of a cultural milestone than a political one, a time when the ideals of a rising generation collided with the mores of an older, more powerful establishment. Fifty years later, the legacy of those historic weeks remains a subject of debate between the country’s conservative and progressive factions. It is, as the philosopher André Glucksmann described it in 2008, “a monument, either sublime or detested, that we want to commemorate or bury.”

Mr. Caron’s photographs of joyful, radiant students capture what made the unrest seem to some “a huge collective fiesta,” as the journalist Marc Kravetz once described it. But in his photographs of the turmoil in the Latin Quarter — armed riot police racing through the streets, students hurling projectiles through the air — Mr. Caron appears to be documenting nothing less than urban guerrilla warfare (much like this week’s May Day riots). In these photos, Mr. Caron’s experience as a combat photographer helped give his photos a cinematic immediacy and power that quickly made them among the most widely circulated at the time. The protests fizzled in June, President de Gaulle remained in power, and Mr. Caron moved on to other conflicts. In 1969, he photographed the troubles in Northern Ireland and the anniversary of the Prague spring in Czechoslovakia. In 1970, he was taken hostage for a month while covering the civil war in Chad with a group including Mr. Pledge. Just a few months after their release, Mr. Caron traveled to Cambodia, where, one day, he disappeared in Khmer Rouge-controlled territory, never to be seen again. He was 30.

by January 1918 there were dangerous shortages, especially of food

Prompted by the difficult food situation and inspired by the Bolshevik victory in Russia (see Russian Revolution of 1917), a strike movement developed in the Habsburg lands

Demands for more bread and a demand for peace were combined with nationalist claims resulting in open opposition to the government

Courts are a key to understanding European history. Defined as ruling dynasties and their households, courts transformed countries, capitals, constitutions and cultures. Great Britain and Spain, for example, both now threatened with dissolution, were originally united by dynastic marriages; between, respectively, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile in 1469; and between Margaret Tudor and James IV King of Scots in 1503, leading to the accession a hundred years later of their great-grandson, James I, to the throne of England. 

The House of Orange was crucial to the formation of the Netherlands, the House of Savoy to the unification of Italy, the House of Hohenzollern to that of Germany. Dynasties provided the leadership and military forces that enabled these states to expand. As Bismarck declared, while asserting the need for royal control over the Prussian army, blood and iron were more decisive than speeches and majority decisions. 

Like previous European conflicts, including the Napoleonic Wars and repeated wars ‘of Succession’, the First World War was in part a dynastic war; between the Karageorgevic rulers of Serbia, whose supporters had murdered the previous monarch from the rival Obrenovic dynasty, and the Habsburgs, determined to oppose Serb expansion, symbolised by another Serbian victim, the assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand; and between the Hohenzollerns and Romanovs for domination in Eastern Europe. The fall of four empires in 1917-22 – Romanov, Hohenzollern, Habsburg and Ottoman  – was a European cataclysm comparable to the fall of the Roman Empire 1,500 years earlier. 

a Habsburg Emperor attended mass in the Imperial Chapel of Schönbrunn for the last time

The congregation, made up of loyal servants of the dynasty, knew that this was to be the last occasion of its kind

They knew that a whole political and social order had come to an end, that a whole way of life had become empty and meaningless. The next day, as the armies in France stopped fighting, Charles formally renounced his share in the government of the Austrian Empire; that evening, he left Schönbrunn with his family

Charles X was the last Bourbon monarch of France, best known for igniting the July Revolution with his unpopular political positions

A devout Catholic and royalist, he resisted the constitutional reforms instituted by Louis XVIII during the Bourbon Restoration.

Louis Antoine—the first member of the next generation of Bourbons

In Prague, there’s a popular website with a reputation among journalists and politicians for publishing content seemingly aimed at stirring up trouble or disrupting the status quo, exaggerating facts, and blasting out sensational headlines

the profusion of such sites here seems to reinforce some Czech voters’ skepticism of the existing political system—and, by extension, could serve as an indirect boon to its anti-establishment political parties.

This weekend, voters in the Czech Republic went to the polls to elect a new parliament. Andrej Babiš, a businessman with populist leanings, and his ANO (“YES”) party came in first with just under 30 percent of the vote. Babiš, one of the Czech Republic’s richest men, has been frequently labeled a “Czech Donald Trump” by English-language media—and while the comparison is far from perfect, Babiš’s victory has observers concerned that his ascendance could signal a shift away from the West. What’s more, several other anti-establishment parties, including the far-right Freedom and Direct Democracy Party (SPD) and the Pirate Party, also made gains. All told, anti-establishment parties won almost 60 percent of the vote here.

Ransomware has become a scourge in the United States, and hospitals are among the softest targets. In 2019, 764 American health care providers — a record — were hit by ransomware. Emergency patients were turned away from hospitals, medical records were inaccessible and in some cases permanently lost, surgical procedures were canceled, tests postponed and 911 services interrupted.

little has been done to deter the attacks and the responses of targeted institutions are often shrouded in secrecy. Despite F.B.I. advisories warning victims not to pay their extortionists, cyber insurers have advised victims to pay ransoms, calculating that the payments are still cheaper than the cost to clean up and recover data.

The attacks cost organizations more than $7.5 billion in 2019, according to Emsisoft, a cybersecurity firm that tracks ransomware attacks. An increasing number of victims are choosing to pay, as many as three of four,

he great liberal commentator Walter Lippmann wrote at the height of the Cold War: “You can’t decide these questions of life and death for the world by epithets like appeasement. I don’t agree with the people who think we have to go out and shed a little blood to prove we’re virile men.”

Lippmann also wrote, in September 1961: “This being the nuclear age, it is the paramount rule of international politics that a great nuclear power should not put another great nuclear power in a position where it must choose between suicide and surrender.”

The West was obliged to watch in impotent horror as the Russians crushed the anticommunist Poles in 1945, then the Hungarian rebels in 1956, then the Czechs of the 1968 “Prague Spring.” There was also the 1959 Chinese seizure of Tibet. The list is a long one.

I was thrilled when the Biden administration came in with a plan for big federal investments in the American industrial base, tariffs, support for labor unions and actions against monopolies. No one knew what to call it — Post-neoliberalism? Democratic capitalism? Neopopulism? — but for the first time in generations a U.S. administration was saying that people should control the market, not the other way around.

But if it was the right path, why didn’t more voters trust President Biden on the economy?

To understand who Ms. Harris is, you have to know who she used to be.