M.A.,M.Sc.,Ph.D. Dušan Tříska

"I think the rough encounter [with Václav Klaus] took place on a ski course where I had his younger son Honzik in my group. I have them boarded here. I tell them, top ski, bottom ski, weight on top ski, bottom ski, hands forward, butt to the back. Then I see a gentleman coming from above, coming around the carved curves, stopping by us. And he's Klaus. In front of the kids, he started to nag me, why are you standing there, why are you doing this, why aren't you doing that. He started testing me with skiing books. If I take one textbook or prefer another. I said, but I have a second-class instructor course. Well, instead of telling him to go to hell, I, the proudest guy of all proud guys, was bewitched by him. He's mesmerizing. There are dozens of stories. Finally, I told him we'd move on. Anyway, I was annoyed all day that he let me, a distinguished member of the Academy of Sciences, a longtime instructor... Then we had a long conversation about science and economics. This was our first intense meeting. There I concluded that the journey with Josef Zieleniec, was wonderful, sensational, and an intellectual firework that I will never forget... but you have to kick off your heels and go into that standard textbook economic theory and confront it. Because it has its textbooks, its universities... Which doesn't mean I can't criticize it. But it's one thing to criticize and another to build a temple of knowledge. So that was the moment."

"Lustration, that was... Langos. Ján Langoš. He was the Slovak Minister of Finance [actually the Federal Minister of the Interior]. I used to go... It was 1990. In June, before the elections, the Bartoncik case blossomed. He was a People's Party member. They started working with the archives. Minister Sacher, Langoš came across the archives and now it blossomed, one way or another. A lustration commission was set up in parliament. I used to go to parliament, I was a star there. I told everyone who was going to be rich and who was going to be poor, and they were hanging on my lips. And now all sorts of names were popping up, Bedřich Moldan was another famous one, before the lustration law. It was a wild lustration. In the autumn of 1990, I went to Klaus and told him: 'I hear this, so I'm telling you upfront that I talked to them. When they called me, I saw no reason why I shouldn't go with them, and drink coffee with them. And he - I remind you that this was in the autumn of 1990... I abdicated on 1 April 1991, when Langos came to the Ministry of Finance and told Klaus the result of the investigation. The lustration law had been in force since December 1991. So this was well before the lustration law was in force. However, Klaus listened to this and said: 'It's nothing, we have all encountered these structures. However, as I say, it was on April 1, 1991, the date is interesting, and Langos came, Klaus called me and said, 'So Langos was here, he brought the result of the investigation and told me this thing.’ So I suppressed my tears, went to the office and wrote my abdication. An hour later I came back and brought it to him. I stayed in that ministry, first as a formal adviser and then as an established figure, until the fall of the Klaus government in 1997, and I was part of that association, which Klaus was terribly reproached with from those ODS structures." 

"I was told that one of the professors was throwing some kind of party and if I wanted to come. It was on a weekend. I secretly snuck in through the gatehouse. We who were assigned to the military court lived separately. I went to Prague, I went to the party. And within three days a sixty-three, black official car arrived in Litomerice. In Litoměřice there is a court and a prison where Jiří Müller and Holeček were sitting. They took me there. Calm, cool, no drama. One of them told me that I had broken the rules." - "What were the rules?" - "Unauthorized abandonment of the crew, that was the main offence we tried in that court. Leaving the crew without a pass. Plus failure to report contact with a stranger. That was another offence. My reaction was, "Wow, my mommy's twice your rank and my daddy's on the general staff. So get a grip.' I think that's how I talked to them... That's how it went. I finished my military service and then these gentlemen started communicating with me relatively regularly, once every two months or so. There were about fifty meetings in all. This lasted until 1985."

“Well, of course, I can see the trends for the worse in it. But it is hard to explain, or rather, it is easily misunderstood… that a libertarian, this brutal and cruel market and things like that… have something in common with the extreme Left, and that is that they hate the globalization. They hate it, because globalization stifles competition, it stifles competitive environment. When those massive corporations are being established, such as… for example, now you basically only have one or two companies at most in the whole world which deliver information technologies, Microsoft and I don’t know, all of these, and even the Volkswagen here is spread out over half of Europe and it has as if occupied the Czech Republic, you know, and all these things. The rule which I constantly repeat is that the danger lies in the principle ‘too big to fail,’ meaning that a company is too big to go bankrupt, so to speak – every unit that you create should have this characteristics that it should be bankruptable, that it should be able to collapse if it so deserves. Of course, there need to be rules. But I cannot imagine that Microsoft would go bankrupt, right… The automobile producers, such as Volkswagen, will have problems, but every German government will save Volkswagen. It is already an unbankruptable entity, a globalized entity, and such companies themselves will start to govern, because the politicians will become their subjects. And in other words, as I say, in America it had happened long ago, in 1956, that at that time the environment was such that several large corporations were administratively divided into smaller parts or as I say: let’s divide Microsoft into sixty Microsofts and the necessary condition is that these smaller units ought to be bankruptable. Everyone will say: that would cost us the savings and all this research and development… That’s what the central planners say: Let’s concentrate it, let’s condense it and we shall be effective! It is not so, nothing like that is a cause for effectiveness; it is a cause for degeneration, for suppression of competition, in the political as well as in the business sense. I still repeat: Milton Friedman. There is a video, try to find it, there are several videos with Milton Friedman, with this guru of us libertarians, the pro-market libertarians where Jane Fonda, she is a liberal, a Leftist, green liberal, she is already as if… and she and Milton Friedman are in agreement regarding those large corporations, and Milton Friedman is there with his motto that a government ought to have a policy, it ought to create a policy – he says a pro-market policy, and not a pro-business policy. And this is the fine distinction which is so hard to explain. Pro-business means that you see some Microsoft company and you pave the way for it. Pro-market means competition, competition, competition. Let not Bill Gates sleep on his laurels. He has no reason to worry, because he knows that half of the world would go bankrupt if his software stopped working. And this is simply wrong and we have had experience with this in the central planning system. We have experienced it, and this is the idea that is behind globalization, and the political globalization is the worst of all.”

“Of course, from the viewpoint of some normal criteria Korea obviously looks horrible, there is not doubt about that, but it has a dynamic, it changes, it develops and apparently it also develops a certain perspective on the problem, which is the same as ever, all this is a game of superpowers for the arrangement of that region, whether it is South Korea or North Korea, the same as was the case with North and South Vietnam and there is also the position war between China and Russia and America, right. Surprisingly Europe is as if present there a little bit, too, but it is too for her. But for those countries it is a crucial region, so to speak, this is well known. Depending on how much these three crucial players will be able to agree on something, then the progress in the region will proceed correspondingly, and it seems, or it is my hope, that some outcome, some agreement of those states, superpowers, should be reached. At the same time, of course, there is the issue of the unification of the peninsula, and I am strongly critical of that, and perhaps a bit in a paradoxical and surprising way, because I still keep pointing to the unification of Germany, but these are processes which are politically unavoidable and which probably cannot be prevented, and it would happen - the unification of Germany. But basically, they are complicating the adaptation processes of one party or the other, I would say. I think and hope this would not happen in Korea. And it sounds paradoxical and perhaps silly that the democratic South Korea and the despotic North Korea… and I do not wish their unification. I think that by unifying, the adaptation process on part of North Korea would only get complicated. I simply wish them the best, and I do not wish for them the unification of Korea, because simply from the technical point of view, it would make matters complicated and overnight there would be 25 million people from North Korea who would become second-class citizens. And what had happened in the German Democratic Republic was not healthy and it doesn’t help the country, I would say. So I warn against this model wherever I go. Nevertheless, it seems that if they were kept separated and their interests would be... America in peace and China in the north, in the best scenario, and the Chinese model of this crazy socialist capitalism, you know, which is immensely successful and it seems to be… but again, I remind this everywhere, that Vietnam was unified because the North conquered the South. They all thought that it would happen the other way round – that the advanced, pro-American South would take over the undeveloped and insanely communist North, but it turned out that it had happened the other way round and that it was probably good for the country. It is crazy, I know, I know it’s a thin line. When somebody talks about it, I always add that in reality there are very few people who truly understand that region and there are only the interests of those countries there. They all forage whatever they can there, and we, with the luxury of the distance from there, can only wonder how it is going to turn out. Sometimes the people who live there become a toy in hands of those superpowers, which is the worst that can happen to them. Now it seems hopeful to me and the reason why I think so is that something had meanwhile happened in North Korea and above all that something had happened on the level of America-Russia-China. Especially between America and China, I would say.”

„The regime no longer had this hint of repressiveness it had when it was young, so to speak. It was absolutely depleted, and at that time I didn't meet — that's what I tell my students, if I have the chance – a single devout communist-minded person. Far and wide not one person. Even my dad seemed to have fallen into some kind of hopeless state of despair, and that was… I almost felt sorry – like, one would like to argue with someone about those basic communist ideas, because on the other hand, half of the globe was controlled by it... Like, Marxism is an important school of thought in all textbooks. It's not just like fooling someone.“

„And I said something to our group, 'Well, because there is going to be a price increase,' and a sixty percent increase was expected, while on TV they said it would be thirty percent, and I said, 'we should compensate those people somehow, this state doesn't have money, but it has a crazy amount of assets, so something in this direction.' Well, I said something along the lines of giving people some discounts on those potential shares when those companies turned into joint stock companies, and Gabo Eichler said that famous sentence, also quoted and published a few times: 'And why don't you give it to them for free?'“

„Of course, I was under that influence, no doubt. I went to piano lessons and there was always a bust of Stalin on that piano, for a long time, until the year sixty-eight it sat there. I know that in the first year of high school, at the 'jedenáctiletka' (eleven-year secondary school) – it was the year sixty two, sixty-one – there were some first conflicts, revolting students gathered near the Máchá monument on Petřín, and for the first time there was Public Security or the police present. And I know that it was dealt with at that school and I was a member of the Czechoslovak Youth Union (ČSM) main committee, it was the union organization at the time, and I know that it was – and I think for the first time – no, not for the first time - the last time I stood up for the regime. Yeah, I said they did it right for some reason. Until then, I went to the May Day parades and I really enjoyed it. I chanted: 'He who stands on the sidewalk does not build a republic. They build tanks in America, they don't have any readers left.' And I organized dozens of those gatherings, I was an enthusiastic pioneer, I had a pioneer headscarf that I even wore in class photos. I assume I definitely was terrifying the teachers or I don't know – those who knew what environment I was from, and I think I obviously acted in a way that I wouldn't want to see again now.“

„My grandmother, my mother's mother, she was very close to me, my closest grandparent. She was a founding member of the Communist Party. So while we're here at this workplace, maybe it's worth saying. The tumultuous part of her career as a party founder in 1921 was the fact that she left the party in 1929 in protest of the 'Gottwaldization' of the Communist Party and she later became a Social Democrat. So in our family, the personnel questionnaires included: 'Founding member of the party', and her withdrawal from the Communist Party in 1929 was kept significantly hidden.“

„From meeting Václav Havel I got the impression - it was a very short experience on that plane, of course - that he was disoriented. Maybe he was under some influence, I don't know what, he seemed a bit like that. Unlike Klaus, who was sitting in a tie writing some notes - just the exact opposite, the absolute opposite. I'm on Klaus's side, of course, but then I experienced him when Shimon Peres was here, who I was in charge of, because he was the Minister of Finance at the time. We visited Václav Havel at the Prague Castle and I know that I crushed Klaus by telling him that I was enchanted by Havel. He was in amazing shape, Havel I mean. Well, unlike on that plane, and then I understood that he was very charismatic…“