Quote Originally Posted by Hanna View Post
As far as I understand, they wanted to do a bit of social democracy, and then the USSR comes in with tanks and heavy weaponry... Don't see that this is much more justifiable than the Vietnam war which was going on during the same period,

It seems to me like "apples and oranges" to compare this with the Vietnam war -- not because one was more or less "justifiable" than the other, but because the Vietnam war involved at least three different "imperialist powers" intruding into Vietnam. (First the French, who colonized what was then "Indochina"; then the Chinese, who at first simply supported the anti-French rebellion, but then became increasingly militant about establishing Communism in Vietnam and turning the country into a PRC satellite; finally the Americans, who at first simply supported the anti-communists, but then plunged into a full-scale war, using Vietnam as a "proxy" in a larger fight against "Global Communism.")

But the events of the 1968 "Prague Spring" and its subsequent repression were basically an episode in the history of Czechoslovakia's occupation by a single imperialist power -- i.e., the USSR, from the end of WWII to the end of the Soviet Union.

Again, this has nothing to do with moral justifiability; it just makes the situations... well, different.