The Riverlands

So, for those of you who read my story about the riots in the Basque Country the weekend we were up there, I heard one from another American student studying in Prague yesterday that tops it by far.  (She was taking a free weekend to visit an old friend in Spain, and we started talking because it turns out she goes to ASU.  And boy, the stories…)

So apparently, there’s this political group in the Czech Republic called the Young Democratic Somethings-or-Other…that the whole world knows are Neo-Nazis.  And I guess not too long ago–at some point this fall–they put in an application to do a political demonstration “to protest the Iraq war.”  Except that everyone knows they’re Nazis, and they were applying for the date that just happened to be the anniversary of Kristelnacht.  So naturally, it turned out that their organization wasn’t officially registered, and they got turned down.  (The way it works in the Czech Republic, I guess, is you can demonstrate over anything you want but you have to register your organization and reserve the date and place ahead of time, I’m assuming to keep rival political groups from demonstrating in the same place and getting into fights.) So Prague’s very tiny remaining but very active Jewish community got right on it, of course, and nabbed the date and place (the city’s central square) for some other political demonstration, so that the Nazi group couldn’t register and then get it.

That was the set-up.   Now apparently this girl (her name is Cassie)’s Czech teacher was Jewish and very much involved in politics, and the thing was, everyone was expecting the Neo-Nazi group to make trouble and try to trash the Jewish quarter, legally registered Iraq-war protest or not.  And the counter protest the Jewish community was organizing was basically there to try to prevent anyone from getting into the Jewish quarter that wasn’t supposed to be there.  So naturally, this teacher thought to invite his class along to participate.  And naturally (we had a long discussion about the sorts of things you love to do that you only tell your parents about afterwards,) Cassie decided to go along.

She said it was like a military zone.  There were hundreds of police in full riot gear, stationed on every corner for blocks heading into the Jewish quarter, a helicopter overhead (the first time she’d seen a helicopter in Prague,) and tanks.  Yes, tanks.  And the Jewish protestors were gathering inside the Jewish quarter preparing to march from there to the city square, and the Neo-Nazi group was lined up outside the Jewish quarter, all of them hooded and masked with bandanas, and she said it was the scariest thing she’d ever seen in her life.  She said she went with the march along its heavily-guarded route to the city square, and once it arrived safely, headed off to another part of town and went shoe-shopping.  And apparently just in time, because right after she left, the Nazis showed up in the city square.  She saw it all on the news later.  Apparently the police formed a barricade, the Nazis charged it, there was a long struggle and then someone threw a can of tear gas–they think it definitely wasn’t the police–and all hell broke loose.  She said they arrested over 650 people–over 80 of them foreigners, interestingly enough–and a few people were seriously injured.

So yeah.  If anyone’s feeling bored and looking for a little adventure in their life, it seems there is still plenty to be had in certain parts of Eastern Europe.  And I don’t think they should spend any time worrying about me here in Spain (ahem, you know who you are,) because hey, I could have gone to Prague.  And we should all take a moment and make a small mental note that, just in case we were ever tempted to think otherwise, fascism is definitely not dead yet.