On 31.10.2023, I attended the launch of the book "NO, Mister Minister" by the long-time diplomat Ondrej Kashina in the café Božská hlavice in Prague. It was packed. I can only recommend the audio recordingof the whole event - it's hard for words to penetrate the (in)dependent media. The discussion was also attended by František Koukolík (Czech neuropathologist, columnist and recipient of the Knight of the Czech Medical State award) and Jiří Balvín, former Director General of CT. The book is a novel with changed names. It was clear to those present what it was about. I have made several interventions in the debate and raised other important issues. The book also writes in detail about corrupt visa deals in Vietnam. Similarly, visas for the Schengen area were traded in Morocco.
I also contacted the Director of the MFA Department, who was asked to help me get a carg after the sudden recall of the Consul from Morocco, Dr. Jana Chaloupkova. It had been blocked for 10 months in Morocco by Ambassador V. Lorenc. She could have approached the Moroccan Embassy in Prague to help with the transport without the need for help from the Czech Embassy, which did not want to communicate with the carrier. The director acknowledged that it was an incredibly long time, but then she inquired somewhere and everything was different. The reason why the MFA could not help was supposed to be the proximity of Lorence and President Zeman.
Another MFA employee also knew me well. He doesn't subscribe to my newscasts anymore. He was touched that I wrote about the "porn actor" Chargee da Fair in Moscow, Jiri Chistetsky - he said he knew him and he was a decent man? I was also intrigued by the way he drank "hard" for free... Let's hope he doesn't have the same penchant for sending out embarrassing private photos to diplomats of other countries...
Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky is going to speak at the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna (7.11.2023) on the topic Geopolitical Challenges and the new Czech security strategy. I fear that the long-standing corrupt practices of the Czech Foreign Ministry threaten it much more than they help it. JŠ
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"The value of natural life, the debilitating and numbing influence of artificial social conditions, the bonds of convention and its empty forms are ideas that every educated person since Rousseau remembers. Their time is yet to come, and even today they still have to be defended, not by words, but by deeds, because words have finished their task."
ON FREEDOM OF THOUGHT AND WORD (p. 48)
John Stuart Mill
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VI. PART: Czech-Maroccogate series continued, or Morocco, the Grandmaster of Eavesdropping
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