Opinion by David Von Drehle | Madeleine Albright’s guiding insight: The past is never past
It is an American trait to believe that history begins tomorrow. Yesterday is dead and gone, as songwriter Kris Kristofferson put it. Tomorrow is a blank page on which any new story can be written. From time to time, we quote Faulkner’s wisdom: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” But more as a sort of riddle than as a simple statement of fact.Yet here we are again in 1948, or maybe it’s 1939 or even 1919.
, bombs were raining again over Europe — for much the same reason. People are still fighting over those pieces of empire.One tiny fragment of the shattering empires was a diplomat named Josef Korbel. He was born in the kingdom of Bohemia, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and lived in the magnificent city of Prague. After the empire broke up in World War I, Prague became the capital of Czechoslovakia. Nazi Germany inhaled the country in 1939; the Soviet Union made it a satellite in 1948.
Still in his 30s, Korbel had been Bohemian, Czech and an exile from the Reich. Now a Soviet vassal? No. Using his connections with British and American diplomats, he escaped Prague one last time and was flung all the way to Denver with his wife and children — among them Madeleine, his daughter, the future head of the U.S. State Department.
The refugee Korbel became a fiercely patriotic American in every respect — except that he knew the presence of the past, knew it viscerally because he had lived it. His past had taught him that a world without order is unstable. An unstable world calls out for order. And if freedom-loving people will not establish and defend order, tyrants will be more than happy to take over the job.
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