#btw drnovsky is best known for importing the sos children's village model from austria

[thosearentcrimes]

as far as the czechoslovak picture goes, the main things worth mentioning imo are the involuntary sterilization of roma women (continued after the revolution), pro-eugenics articles in the reformist press during prague spring (jiri drnovsky remained a universally beloved pediatrician after the revolution and until his death, nobody else seems to have even ever noticed the pro-eugenics article), penile plethysmography (whose architect emigrated to canada in 1968 and trained ray fucking blanchard), and whatever bizarre shit the disciples of education minister and psychic magician frantisek kahuda were doing (which was carefully observed by the cia and probably prompted their own deranged magic experiments, insert dr strangelove scene, and laid the groundwork for havana syndrome shit)

the only connections with child abuse in particular are that drnovsky was a pediatrician and freund studied pedophilia, though obviously there were a lot of systems for organized child abuse like pionyr or the vykrmny that were less wacky and so didn't make it in here, it's also not clear to me what if anything the stb were doing in terms of mad science because none of this really involves them but they must have been doing something

anyway imo this gives a very different picture of what you would want to be highlighting in a fictionalization of czechoslovak cold war mad science, a missed opportunity you might say, and making it an anti-communist screed is silly ofc

the plot of monster revolves around (spoilers!) state-sponsored child torture and dangerous long term psychological experimentation/engineering conducted during the cold war in communist central europe (in particular, east germany and czechoslovakia), at its most scandalous in concert with far right nazi sympathisers. the narrative presents this as a natural fit with the "totalitarian" ideology of soviet bloc communism, and western bourgeois democrats as its natural unmaskers and enemies

in reality, bourgeois democracies in central europe were perfectly capable of systematic child abuse in the service of psychological experimentation and social engineering. denmark was the site of confirmed cia-backed experimentation on orphans as part of mkultra, and theres been argument that they were also involved in the infamous "kentler project" in west germany. west germany for decades also ran childrens "health resorts" responsible for serious abuse, often staffed by ex-nazis (unsurprisingly, given the much less intensive denazification undertaken in the west). now itd be pretty facile to use these to make the same poetic argument as monster makes with its fictitious child experimentation except flipping the sides so its clumsily anticapitalist instead of anticommunist, but it at least would have the merit of appealing to projects that actually took place