Julius Zajac: Ascendancy of extremists and liars may augur a new kind of totalitarianism in the Czech Republic

A President who has won election thanks to a brazen (non)-campaign, among other things. A President whom the courts have ruled is a liar.

A Prime Minister being investigated by the police. A vice-chair of the lower house who is a Czech-Japanese patriot considered to be an extremist and populist and who is reported for criminal activity because he lies about the former concentration camp at Lety – exactly on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The law should be upheld here, and detracting from the gravity of the Holocaust should be punished by the courts. Otherwise the President could start holding parties in the former camp at Terezín, or someone will hold a culinary contest in the former camp at Buchenwald.

A governing coalition is now taking form here comprised of ANO, the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSČM) and the “Freedom and Direct Democracy” party (SPD). This is just one indication that democracy in the Czech Republic is coming to an end.

The comrades, the extremists, and those who are capable of anything want the Czech Republic to leave the EU and NATO. They want to close the borders again, and they are drafting laws against Islam.

All those ideas are so very necessary, right? What’s more, these people behave like boors in public and make it clear that lying to the public is absolutely in order.

Their friends, including elderly pensioners, create false alarms and spread them around. Slowly but surely, their desperation will lead this country down the road to ruin.

I believe the reasons for all of this can be found in our past. The communist dictatorship had a bigger influence on the Czech nation than we anticipated.

People are accustomed to going to the polls once every four years – and that is the extent of their active political participation. After that, they follow politics from afar. 

Sometimes they curse a bit about what is going on. They do not have the feeling that they should take action, though.

People here are accustomed to going along with everybody else and to keeping their mouths shut. It is also a fact that politics here is not public service, but a business.

For that reason, morality comes last for politicians. What comes first is ensuring one’s seat for the next four years, one’s influence and one’s power.

People are now seated in Parliament who create hoaxes or who share them with others. If even a legislator cannot tell a truthful text from a deceptive one, if it does not occur to him to check his sources of information, then things here in the Czech Republic are actually really bad.

We have legislators here who are unable to say a single sentence that is clear and meaningful. Here I have in mind Czech MP Rozner (SPD), whose rhetoric has become so famous that he is the butt of jokes all over the country.

When Rozner doubted the existence of the concentration camp at Lety he wasn’t so funny anymore. That’s not a problem for him, though.

Rozner is now hiding under his leader’s wings and the taxpayers are gladly paying his fabulous salary. His voters, paradoxically, fell for the SPD’s favorite slogan, “Money to the decent, not to the parasites”.

There are also people seated in the Czech Senate who are distorting facts. Take, for example, Czech Senator Jan Veleba, who is able to turn turn an incident of assault into one of “defense”.

Veleba attempted to turn a boxing assailant into a “victim” and he didn’t stop there. He even praised him as a national hero who was defending the (absent) President at that moment. [Editors’ Note:  The person in question, Mr Karel Slezák, died of a heart attack some time after the incident and Veleba wrote an article praising him.] 

I have the feeling that these former communists, these dinosaurs, may never leave the public arena. Even if they disgrace themselves in front of the entire nation on DVTV, they will stick around.

One of their kind is even the chair of the independents’ faction in the Senate! How is that even possible?

Now I will use a certain Czech saying: Things can only get worse! I have noticed that the SPD voters have one thing in common.

They all parrot whatever their leader says in his Facebook videos. He tells them that Czech Television lies, and that the EU is a dictatorship, but I have also noticed that they are able at one stroke not just to accuse an entire nation of stupidity (mainly Germany), but to pass judgment on it.

That is very dangerous. What would the SPD fighters have gone to battle over if the refugee crisis hadn’t happened?

Their first “target” would decidedly have been Romani people. If humanity had not already experienced the Second World War, then I can imagine them calling for labor camps and their leader proclaiming something about order and “Arbeit macht frei“.

What should we do next? For years I believed that when the younger generation grew up and took hold of the reins here that all would be different, but I am beginning to doubt that.

After all, the way one is raised is absolutely influential and as we are learning, young people here are EU skeptics and prejudiced against Jewish and Romani people. Their parents call that the benefit of experience.

Despite this, I am not losing hope in the younger generation. I am, however, afraid for the Czech Republic.

I am afraid the Bolsheviks, the fanaticized mob, and the yokels are sending the country to hell. I am afraid that the ascendancy of extremists and liars may augur a new kind of totalitarianism.

If these people manage to get this country to leave the EU and NATO, then we will return to the year 1989 and maybe even to some earlier point in time. As we know from the presidential elections, all they need to succeed is a deceptive, nationalist campaign.