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Show Royce Brier Bloodless Revolt May 23, 1618, two counts in the realm of Archduke Ferdinand of Styria were thrown from a castle window in Prague. The crime is called defenestration, and curiously curious-ly the counts were not hurt because they landed in a moat. V v a , 1 But it triggered the Thirty Years War, the worst in human history in proportion to the people affected. Aided by the ; Plague, it depopulated depopu-lated Europe by a third. In 1948, 330 years later. Jan of the vise being operated by Stalin in Prague. But it was too late. Excepting the Germans, the Czechs are the most competent technical people in middle mid-dle Europe, and General Patton was headed there in 1944, but political poli-tical interference from Washington slowed him down, and the Russians got there first. The country became a puppet of Moscow, which filched it of its industrial in-dustrial capability to bolster more backward eastern European puppets. pup-pets. (Most of Nasser's armor, so quickly lost last summer, was Czech, not Russian). Bloodless Revolt But the Czechs have not rested. An important part of the gradual defection of the eastern European satellites from Stalinist-totalitarian control, they have mounted a bloodless blood-less revolt. Last winter they deposed de-posed Stalinist Antonin Novotny as party chief, leaving him as president, presi-dent, but now he faces a presidential presiden-tial ouster. In daily life, in literature, culture cul-ture and right to protest, the Czechs have been steadily gaining ground against their oppressors. Recently thousands of marchers went to the Masaryk family grave with wreaths. On some were the words, "Jan, we will not forget you." Ten years ago they would have been stopped by force. But the Kremlin is not now in a position to stem the uprising as it was in Hungary in the last decade. Another wreath read, "Truth will prevail!" and one remembers Jan Masary kin in San Francisco, staring star-ing across the bay to the Golden Gate Bridge, and saying, sadly, "I wish our cause was as enduring as that steel." Maybe it is. Royce Brier Masaryk, foreign minister of Czechoslovakia, fell or was pushed from his apartment window in Prague, and died. The communist mob consolidating its power always called it a suicide, but the evidence is that he w a s thrown into a courtyard. Possessing the greatest name in the country, he was an unyielding democrat, and he stood in the path of the communists. com-munists. Tomas Masaryk, his father, was the founder of Czech independence after World War I,- and the f i r s t president. Of the Masaryks, one may say it was as if George Washington had had a son who become a great advocate of human freedom in the pre-Civil War days. Understand Peril Many Americans knew and admired ad-mired Jan Masaryk. The writer talked with him at length in San Francisco at a luncheon during the United Nations founding in 1945. He was not sanguine about the plight of freedom in postwar middle mid-dle Europe, and he was imploring Americans to understand the perils |