At the time of the coup, Czechoslovakia was preparing a highly anticipated parliamentary election, which was due that very spring.
Furthermore, the Moscow-aligned Norwegian Communist Party (NKP) and its leader Peder Furubotn had publicly voiced support for the Soviet Union and accepted its version of events.
This had caused fear throughout the population that a similar coup and subsequent Soviet invasion could happen in Norway.
The rest of us have a hard time understanding how it could be necessary to completely disregard the parliament that the Czech people have elected.
Under these circumstances, we must accept that there is no more than one reasonable explanation, namely that the Communists did not dare leave the decision to the people in free elections.
Their representatives in parliament and local government will be able to continue their work there until the voters in free elections replace them with others.
And they will continue their efforts to win positions in the trade unions and use their influence to take action which disturbs our economy.
Beautiful declamations can no longer prevent people from seeing the brutal truth with open eyes - even if for many it will be a grim discovery.
If one should ever have the right to demand fairness and decency in public debate, it should be in a time like the one we are living through now.Due to the events in Czechoslovakia, Norway became one of the original members of NATO when it was established the following year.
The speech was also the prelude to a major political shift which saw a wave of legal and illegal anti-communist measures, peaking in the 1960s, including party exclusions, censorship of far-left media and introduction of the most comprehensive monitoring of communist and left-wing radicals in the post-war era, as documented by the report of the Lund Commission, amongst others.
This tipped the balance enough for the Labour party to lose the absolute majority it had enjoyed since the end of World War II.