Word: palach
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...behind" Adamec's death. A former Finance Minister and two-time Prime Minister, Klaus was elected six days before Adamec died and many see his victory as a triumph of the robber-baron capitalism that so disgusted Adamec. Zdenka Kmunícková, a psychiatrist who attended the burned Palach, says the self-immolations come at a time when the strain of the postcommunist era is building. Milan Cerny, a psychiatrist who was at the time of Palach's death Kmunícková's boss at the psychiatric research center in Prague, blames the deaths on the Palach mystique...
...match. Passersby rushed to his aid, putting out the flames with coats and a fire extinguisher. But paramedics couldn't save him. Adamec called his self-immolation "Action Torch 2003" and chose his location carefully - just steps from the spot where a history student named Jan Palach had set himself on fire in 1969 to protest the crushing of the Prague Spring by Soviet tanks. Adamec explained in a 1,500-word suicide note posted on the Web that he was following Palach's example to protest "the so-called democratic system where not people but money and power rule...
...grim knock-on effect came as little surprise to those familiar with Czech history. In 1969, 28 Czech residents set fire to themselves in the 31?2 months after Palach's death, which brought some 200,000 people into Wenceslas Square to light candles and lay flowers. Thirty-four years later, relatively few came to mourn Adamec. But his death and the copycat immolations that followed have become a kind of Czech Rorschach test, as people seek and find explanations that may have more to do with themselves than with the suicides...
...farfetched to connect the suicides of two young men - one possibly facing jail, the other lovelorn - to the stress of postcommunist life? Jaroslava Moserová doesn't think so. A senator and physician who treated Palach in the days before he died, she thinks she understands the strain these men were under. She compares the 1989 collapse of communism to tearing down a zoo and letting the predators loose. The past 14 years have been a chaotic, confusing time. But this response, she says, "is futile. During Palach's time there was no other way [to protest...
...lively entrepreneurial city -- Western glitz and electronics and hard money flowing in; the platzes swarming with backpackers; McDonald's opening a second branch, this one on Wenceslas Square, where the "velvet revolution" transpired in November 1989. The new McDonald's is in sight of the spot where Jan Palach set himself on fire for Czechoslovak freedom in 1969, the spot where Havel laid flowers in 1989 and was arrested for the deed. Now a deadpan sword swallower resembling Leonid Brezhnev draws a crowd of American children, and punkers with spiked Mohawk haircuts wander the medieval lanes...