Word: czechoslovakia
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...Africa's apartheid, but even without them, ethnic hatred can make itself felt. Traditionally, that attitude was labeled racism. But the term can hardly embrace attacks as diverse as those on black Americans in New York City, North African workers in Italy, Arab immigrants in France, Romanies (Gypsies) in Czechoslovakia, Hungarians in Romania. Very few Jews are left in Central Europe after Hitler's Holocaust, but the anti-Semitism that lay dormant under communist repression has sprung back to life. The best word to describe the whole sickening phenomenon may simply be bigotry...
Only now, as democratic revolutions take hold, is the full extent of Eastern Europe's stunning ecological disaster emerging. Flying over Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany on an otherwise clear day, one can see whole valleys enveloped in a heavy blue haze from the belching smokestacks that disfigure the landscape. Littered across the East bloc, obsolete and unsafe nuclear reactors are decaying, each threatening a reprise of the 1986 Chernobyl accident. The Danube River and Baltic Sea are deadly sumps. Many lakes and streams are fishless, forests are dying, and blackened cities are decorated with pollution-eroded sculpture...
...environmental causes. Around the East German industrial center of Leipzig, life expectancy is six years less than the national average. In the nearby town of Espenhain, 4 out of 5 children develop chronic bronchitis or heart ailments by the age of seven. Children in northern Bohemia, the heart of Czechoslovakia's industrial region, are taken out of the area for up to a month each year as a health measure...
...lignite, which is the basic fuel of the East bloc. On cold winter days in Leipzig, the yellow-brown smog emitted by coal-fired power plants is so thick that drivers are forced to turn on their headlights during the day. In the triangle comprising southern Poland and northern Czechoslovakia, which is covered by a permanent cloud of emissions from factories and power plants, residents complain that the air is so bad that washed clothes turn dirty before they can dry on the line. For miles around the notorious Romanian "black town" of Copsa Mica, the trees and grass...
...newspapers reported that Warsaw Pact troops had entered Czechoslovakia and were "fulfilling their international duty." The invasion had begun. The hopes inspired by the Prague Spring collapsed. And "real socialism" displayed its true colors, its stagnation, its inability to tolerate pluralistic or democratic tendencies, not just in the Soviet Union but even in neighboring countries. The abolition of censorship and free elections were regarded as too risky and contagious...