Blog

By Dr. Josef A. Mestenhauser, My focus in some recent articles was on the year 1948 from a Czech perspective. I was an active participant in  events at that time and have found it hard to explain our inept leadership and apathetic public, both of which allowed the...

By Dr. Josef A. Mestenhauser   (Part One of Dr. Mestenhauser’s article appeared in the June/July Slovo.) Proclaimed on Apr. 5, 1945, the Kosice Program—although written by the communists--defined the postwar state of a democratic Czechoslovakia. Two ministers were to...

By Dr. Josef A. Mestenhauser Contemporary political, economic and social scene in the Czech and Slovak Republics have been largely defined by the dissidents and their generation of the Dubcek’s Prague Spring 1968 era. This seemed to hide the fact that there was an...

By Dr. Josef A. Mestenhauser That is the question that we do not often ask. Instead we focus on the cost of education that is climbing and affects virtually everybody’s checkbook. Yet ignorance does cost a lot, more than most people recognize, and the Czechs could...

By Dr. Josef A. Mestenhauser Most of us know that the entire village was leveled, that men and boys over 15 years were executed, that women and children were send to concentration camps, and that children were separated from parents. The brutality of this “event” far...

By Dr. Josef A. Mestenhauser I was introduced to the concept of the Civil Society during my sabbatical leave in the Philippines in the late sixties where I studied leadership and organizations in the context of social and cultural change. In travels throughout the...

By Dr. Josef A. Mestenhauser This is a complex question. It can be answered in terms of our own associations, such as Sokol, or the Czech and Slovak Cultural Center because part of the concept of the civil society does imply existence of many voluntary associations....