Commentary: Extremist would be proud of Czech President's defense of him

In my commentary on the Czech President’s New Year’s speech, I wrote that Václav Klaus could not possibly sink any farther than he has already. I was wrong. Klaus is now showing not only the symptoms of a narcissist admiring his own overgrown “ego of genius”, he is also showing that he will not hesitate, when advocating his personal opinions, to use open hatred in order to divide society. The President is not shrinking from verbally joining an ideological stream that is contributing fascist and racist elements to Czech society.

Klaus has committed a classic disinformation maneuver in his recent article with the remarkable title “A small Czech Hilsner affair or, another case of the dictatorship of political correctness” (Malá česká hilsneriáda aneb další případ diktatury politické korektnosti). In this piece, the President stands up for Ladislav Bátora, saying Bátora is against the European Union, an opinion with which Klaus naturally concurs. However, he is completely silent with regard to Bátora’s problematic behavior.

In his text, Klaus completely fails to mention that Bátora ran for the extremist National Party (Národní strana – NS) as its leading candidate in the Vysočina region, or that Bátora identifies with Jörg Haider and Jean-Maria Le Pen. The President did not, therefore, have to grapple with these facts in his argument. Because he left out what was most essential, Klaus was able to claim that Bátora is “a deeply conservative, authentically right-wing person who participates in various actions against things he disagrees with.”

Those connected to Klaus’s nest at Prague Castle have always been very careful in their statements about the NS and similar initiatives and activities, but some gentlemen from the Castle, such as Ladislav Jakl or Petr Hájek, have met with many people from these initiatives during events convened by the D.O.S.T. initiative (as well as in private). However, the NS was not just a “nationalist” party, as one poorly informed news anchor on Czech Television keeps reporting (see the “Události, komentáře” broadcast of 28. 2. 2011). That journalist’s interview with Ladislav Bátoroa and sociologist Jiřina Šiklová was conducted in the spirit of Bátora’s statement that “The governing idea of the National Party is the defense of Czech national interests, which we regard as the highest ethical value of our state.”

One significant element of the NS program was the relocation of Czech Roma to India, which was eventually released as the party’s official publication entitled “The Final Solution to the Gypsy Question” („Konečné řešení otázky cikánské“). The author, Jiří Gaudin, was given a suspended prison sentence because he baldly continued the line of the Nazi “Final Solution to the Jewish question”, which ended with millions of innocents murdered. The NS, therefore, was not just a “nationalist” party, it was a racist one and never hid that fact – including when Bátora was running as their candidate. Their actions against the memorial at the site of the former WWII-era concentration camp into which the Czech Roma were herded at Lety by Písek, or their efforts to establish a memorial to the Czechoslovak prison officers who supervised the Roma prisoners of that concentration camp, are sufficiently well-known.

Jörg Haider and Jean-Marie Le Pen are known as populist, strongly fascist leaders who are no strangers to lies about and expressions of hatred against Roma people. In March 2009, for example, Le Pen declared at the European Parliament that is is evident that the gas chambers were a mere “detail” of the history of the Second World War, thereby repeating a statement for which he was sentenced in 1987. The late Jörg Haider praised Adolf Hitler for his “healthy employment policy”. He also declared that members of the SS deserve “every honor and recognition“ and compared the Nazi transports of Jewish people to the concentration camps for extermination to the displacement of Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia and Poland after the Second World War. From the beginning, the Czech NS unreservedly stood behind both of the politicians whose legacy Bátora espouses, and it is clear that the ideological paths of these actors have always been more than close.

If Václav Klaus really imagines these to be expressions of deep conservatism or those who are authentically right-wing, he does not belong at Prague Castle and should have been born in another era. Authentic conservatism, as it is understood today, is represented rather by Czech PM Petr Nečas, who is aware that a democratic politician is not allowed to cross the line of what is acceptable if he wants to preserve not only democratic values, but social solidarity. This is also why Nečas does not want Bátora to become Deputy Education Minister.

Bátora, a person who did not hesitate to run for a racist party and who identifies with populist racists and xenophobes, has nothing in common with conservatism. He does have a great deal in common with right-wing ultra-conservatism.

In his article, Klaus operates on the premise that some journalists and politicians are attacking Bátora within the framework of “the dictatorship of political correctness”. Klaus has invented this out of whole cloth. He uses the expression “political correctness” as a slur aimed at opinions (and those who hold them) which do not harmonize with his own. Again, this is completely in the spirit of some ultra-conservatives whose battle against an almost non-existent political correctness in the Czech Republic has been so protracted and nerve-wracking precisely because it is a lie. Drawing attention to Bátora’s excesses in politics and opinions is not pushing him into a corner as part of political correctness, it is merely describing things as they are.

The President goes on to cite some of Bátora’s statements and to say he identifies with the majority of them because he considers them conservative. Several of Bátora’s evaluations stick out like sore thumbs, so let’s take a look at them. For example, he writes that he rejects “truth and love as ordained from Havel’s stuffy moral and intellectual den.”

Havel’s statement that “truth and love must win out over lies and hatred” is certainly neither deeply wise nor philosophical, but it does emphasize in brief the position of a person whose moral integrity is unquestioned and is a good demonstration of his approach to life and to the world, as it emphasizes both his Christian humanism and the more recent humanist tradition. This is why ultra-conservatives and other extreme-right Czechs have so openly and stupidly attacked this slogan for quite some time. It is naturally up to the President what he thinks about this statement by his predecessor, but Klaus did not even object to the style in which his protégé made his remarks. Bátora’s style reveals to us that he is a hateful person – which in the end makes his resistance to truth and love a matter of logic.

This is also confirmed by the statement that Bátora prefers Koniáš to Halík. At least we now know where the D.O.S.T. initiative got the idea to condemn Jiří Pehe for his book “Klaus – Portrét politika ve dvaceti obrazech” (“Klaus – A Portrait of a Politician in 20 Acts”) without even reading it. Bátora and several of his fellow-travelers carried a banner calling Pehe “the scum of the earth” and shouted the same slogan in the streets. They accused Pehe of being a “collaborator with the European Union” and a “traitor”. They told the Czech Press Agency that they had not read his book about Klaus, but that it could not be anything but malicious gossip. This behavior of the “democrats” from D.O.S.T. is in full accordance with the part of Klaus’s New Year speech labeling doctors in this country as traitors (with the help of a reference to Viktor Dyk’s famous poem) because they had given notice en masse and talked about emigrating.

According to Bátora – and evidently according to his powerful protector – inciting people against an author’s book and publicly pillorying him in a way that borders on threatening him is democratic behavior. According to Koniáš, such actions, including book burning, are merely the expression of “justified censorship”. In this context, it is interesting that these backers of censorship, together with Czech fascists and neo-Nazis, are those who do the most shouting about democracy and freedom and the danger of losing them. We can also read the following sentence by Klaus about Bátora’s statements in this light: “Between Koniáš and Halík I see a difference of a mere three centuries and probably real faith in the case of the first, while the second just performs a balancing act for the media.” Here Klaus ascribes a characteristic both of himself and of Bátora, i.e., the effort to shout down differing opinions, to Halík, his lifelong enemy, and he does it using Bátora’s hateful and unvarnished approach.

Klaus chose Tomáš Halík as his enemy long ago. In July 1999 Klaus wrote an article for the daily Večerník Praha entitled “Impuls 99 nepochopením současnosti“ (“Impulse ’99 doesn’t understand today”) [Translator’s Note: Impulse 99 was a general call for a discussion of the direction in which Czech society was heading], in which he said: “The elitist group around Messrs Pehe and Halík, who…feel insufficiently recognized and appreciated, is attempting to speak to their fellow citizens otherwise than through their daily professional activities.” This is just one example of Klaus’s senile crusades against civil society and its natural authorities. Again, this is in accordance with Bátora’s position that he prefers “national solidarity to civil society”, as if these two concepts mutually excluded one another.

This is not the first time Klaus has said that to criticize the ideas which (in his view) Bátora represents is to threaten democracy. In order to hide the meaninglessness of this claim, he hides behind his qualms about political correctness, condemns the statements of civil society, etc. In Bátora’s case, no one is criticizing conservatism, and even if they were, they would not threaten democracy by so doing, as discussion is inherently a part of democracy. The media and politicians are criticizing Bátora for his NS candidacy and for backing racist politicians, not for his alleged conservatism.

The reason Klaus completely avoids this element of “authentic right-wing thought” has been very well described by Tomáš Halík, who is hated precisely for his ability to call things by their real names. After the publication of the President’s article on Bátora, Halík said of Klaus: “His increasingly greater affinity for the intellectual world of old-fashioned fascism, the credo of which has been so nicely formulated by Bátora, the leader of their flagship organization D.O.S.T., is disturbing. I am concerned because while Klaus has entertained similar opinions for quite some time, previously he would probably have been ashamed to show his cards so openly and to back these extreme-right circles so unequivocally.”

Despite Klaus’s claims to the contrary, racist and populist statements and direct and indirect support for them do pose an unequivocal threat to democracy. Democracy must be protected against extremists and their tyrannical demonstrations. The democratic mechanism in and of itself does not include any elements for that defense.

It is possible to agree with Klaus that we should discuss some of the topics mentioned by Bátora more, as well as more openly. I too am sometimes irritated by Euro-simpletons who praise everything Brussels and are incapable of criticizing the EU even when it is evidently called for. I too could not believe my eyes when people who criticize the corrupt way in which public tenders are issued were ready to fight to the death for the late architect Kaplický’s “octopus” (a very ugly project which did not display any respect for the site or for the work of the architect’s predecessors), which evidently only won thanks to a manipulated selection proceedings (for example, by changing the conditions of the competition midway through). I also believe it is necessary to mull over the shape of coexistence between people of various cultures (multiculturalism) and to do our best to draw out the balance of agreement on that issue, etc., etc.

Of course, this does not mean I would immediately go to the media in support of Bátora, as I am aware that to do so would also support the unacceptable things he represents. As an intelligent person, Klaus certainly is also aware of this, but he publicly stood up for Bátora nonetheless. Now we must think about what his real motives were for doing so.