Volume 13, Number 10 · December 4, 1969
Inquisition in Czechoslovakia
By Hans J. Morgenthau
The political act, in its distinctive essence, is a matter of interests defined in terms of power, which ideologies seek to clothe with rational necessity and moral worth. More particularly, judgments of necessity and worth are relative to the interests and power of the observer; what appears inevitable and noble to one may be condemned as capricious and vile by another. For example, the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet army, as seen from the Western vantage point, may be judged unnecessary, an exaggerated response to a political threat, which lost the Soviet Union more throughout the world than it gained for its European empire. But from the Soviet perspective, it cannot be termed irrational, that is, without an objective connection with the interests and power of the Soviet Union. For it is an existential fact, well recognized by the Czechoslovakian historians of the nineteenth century, such as Palacky, who were also the awakeners of Czechoslovakian nationalism, that Czechoslovakia, unable to stand alone, had to lean on one or the other of its powerful neighbors to the East and to the West.
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