Betrayed by stripes? Czech PM caught wearing ‘Russian’ tie during celebration of anti-Soviet uprising
by RT
Betrayed by stripes? Czech PM caught wearing ‘Russian’ tie during celebration of anti-Soviet uprising
The Czech prime minister had to change his tie during last Sunday’s celebration of the 30th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution. The one he picked up in the morning turned out to be too “Russian” for such an occasion.
Andrej Babis started public appearances during the festivities marking Czech Republic’s bloodless anti-Communist uprising wearing a diagonal stripped tie. The stripes were white, blue and red, just like the Czech national flag. But the order was all wrong.
While the flag itself, which the nation inherited from Czechoslovakia, has two horizontal bands and a triangle, the flag of the wartime Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia had three bands ordered white, red and blue. The protectorate came and went along with the Nazi Germany, but the color order stuck and is now considered the national tricolor of the Czech Republic.
So it was a faux pas for Babis to wear the color ordered white, blue and red, doubly so because that is the tricolor of the Russian flag (as well as Slovakia and Slovenia). By evening, when the prime minister was delivering a speech at the National Museum, his tie was in line with the national colors projected on the building behind his back.
The PM explained the mistake in an interview with the newspaper Dnes, saying he had been given some 40 ties by supporters among public figures during a certain behind-closed-doors event. So he took a wrong one by mistake, and nobody among his associates noticed it in time.
So believe it or not. After all, Babis was a member of the Communist party and is one of the wealthiest businessmen in his country. Communism and oligarchs are soooooo Russian, as some pundits would lead us to believe.
