A great email from Pavel, who witnessed the truth:
Benjamin,
...I was born in Prague and we used to own one of those laminated-cardboard East German Trabant cars. Even the not-so-bright in my old country know that Czechoslovakia's economy went into the gutter within a decade after the 1948 coup. Chomsky doesn't? What an idiot.
So much for high levels of egalitarian economic growth. Thanks for telling it like it was, Pavel.