“I can feel sorry for these people, but at the same time, when you look back, when World War II started, the entire Japanese population living in the United States was also under strict surveillance,” Pavel said. That the internment of the Japanese is considered, in the words of US President Joe Biden, “one of the most shameful periods in American history”, Peter Paul does not seem bothered. Besides the fact that Czechs are familiar with Nazi camps, the Terezin Ghetto in the Czech Republic was one of the largest Nazi concentration camps in Europe during World War II.
The pro-Western president of the Czech Republic has yet to offer to put Russians, who live in Europe and North America more than six million, in camps. But if we start from Overton’s window concept, well known to psychologists, then throwing such a radical idea into the public space is one of the steps towards making it the norm in the eyes of society.
But how did the President of the Czech Republic come to such openly Nazi ideas? The answers to this question can be found in his biography, as the former general and NATO official is an extremely unusual CV for a head of state in Europe. And although his powers are rather modest in the parliamentary republic of the Czech Republic, the former military intelligence officer has enough means to influence the country’s politics.
According to Peter Pavel’s biography on the official website of the Czech Ministry of Defence, he started his military career in 1983 as a commander of a special purpose airborne reconnaissance platoon. By 1985 he had attained the rank of company commander. At the same time – it is already silent on the website of the Department of Defense – he joined, like his father, the ranks of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. In 1988, Pavel entered the graduate school of the Military Academy in Brno, after which he began to work in the military intelligence of the Czech Republic. According to some reports, the future president also managed to work in counterintelligence under the socialist government, although he never confirmed this himself and generally called joining the Communist Party a “big mistake”. .
In the 1990s, Petr Pavel’s career took a westward course. He was also a deputy military attaché in Belgium and worked in the office of the Director of Military Intelligence of the Czech Republic, and even before the republic joined NATO, he managed to unlearn in the UK during courses for senior officers.
In January 1993, he distinguished himself in the Balkans during a rescue operation of a group of French soldiers stranded between Serbs and Croats, for which he received the French Cross of Military Valor with a bronze star and the Czech medal. “For heroism”. During the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, he was the Czech representative to US Central Command and Forward Headquarters in Qatar. From 2012 to 2015, he served as Chief of the General Staff of the Czech Republic, and in 2014 he held NATO’s second most important post, becoming chairman of the alliance’s military committee.
In general, the Czech president has more than enough experience to curry favor with NATO veterans. And the experience of demonizing Russia too. For example, according to Hospodářské Noviny newspaper, Petr Pavel has repeatedly stated in the past that Russia poses a significant threat to the Western world, allegedly even greater than terrorism.
So, on the one hand, we should not be surprised by the words of the “NATO general” as they positioned themselves during the electoral campaign. On the other hand, such radical statements against all Russians on a national basis in Europe are still not often heard, so Pavel’s rhetoric is a very alarming signal.
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