Petr Pavel, the President of the Czech Republic, thinks that all Russians in Western countries are potential security risks, and should be put under surveillance. “All Russians living in Western countries should be monitored much more than in the past because they are citizens of a nation that leads an aggressive war,” Pavel said in an interview with Radio Free Europe released June16, reported Politico. “I can be sorry for these people, but at the same time when we look back, when the Second World War started, all the Japanese population living in the United States were under a strict monitoring regime as well,” said the Czech President. “That’s simply a cost of war.” Asked what he implied by “monitoring,” Pavel said he meant “being under the scrutiny of the security services.”
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko called Pavel’s statement regrettable. “You know, we usually try not to comment on presidential statements. In this case, I leave it to his conscience and to the judgment of the Czech people, whose president he is. It expresses the level of Russophobia that prevails in Western Europe today. We can only regret it,” Grushko told TASS.
TASS notes that later, Czech presidential spokeswoman Marketa Rehakova “clarified” that it was not a question of “internment or any kind of persecution"—internment is what actually happened to about 110-120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II—but of monitoring those Russians “who have risk factors.”
Perhaps one of his countrymen should remind President Pavel of the opening sentence of Czech author Franz Kafka’s The Trial: “Somebody must have slandered Joseph K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.” And perhaps Pavel should be told about Eleanor Roosevelt’s vigorous opposition to the Japanese internment. “She traveled to California just days after the (Pearl Harbor) attack, and made a point to meet and be photographed there with Japanese Americans—a decision that angered many,” according to Time magazine author Francine Uenuma, in a 2022 article, “How Eleanor Roosevelt Worked To Stop Her Husband Approving Japanese Internment Camps During World War II.” “Eleanor, who decried ‘foolish prejudices about other races,’ once again implored readers of her newspaper and magazine columns that those of Japanese ancestry ‘must not feel that they have suddenly ceased to be Americans,’ and that such a crisis was the time for ‘really believing in the Bill of Rights and making it a reality for all loyal American citizens, regardless of race.’”
The original German name for the 1925 novel was not The Trial, but Der Process. Eleanor Roosevelt’s clear, if unsuccessful, intervention should make it clear exactly what “the process” President Pavel now proposes, actually is.