WINDOW ON CZECH HISTORY- "Republika" weekly: "Hatred grows only from a feeling of inferiority!"
In a new section called “Historické okénko” (Window on Czech History), news server Romea.cz is republishing historical texts related to our usual topics, accompanied by updates on their content. We are launching this section with an article by František Kostlán that was published in the Czech daily Lidové noviny on 5 March 1997. In this article, the author reviews the journal “Republika”, published by the Association for the Republic-Republican Party of Czechoslovakia, the followers of then-MP Miroslav Sládek (SPR-RSČ). The main actors involved with the journal were Martin Zbela, still active today, and the infamous Nazi brawler Tomáš Kebza.
“Republika” weekly: Hatred grows only from a feeling of inferiority!
The articles published in the “Republika” newspaper often prompt negative responses and protests from democratic journalists, politicians, and publicists, to say nothing of lawsuits. MPs Daniel Kroupa (ODA) and Libor Kudláček (ODA) recently said they would try to get “Republika” banned (i.e., its registration revoked).
I have used a quote from the editor (?) of Republika, Tomáš Kebza (no. 8/97), as this article’s headline. Who better to express the intellectual and mental level of the Republicans than a Republican himself? The exclamation point in the headline is also in the original and underscores the following sample of how this “pick of the Czech nation” thinks. Readers will definitely be able to form their own opinions as to whether Kudláček and Kroupa’s effort to ban “Republika” is justified.
Editor Zbela writes:
“We have become the slaves of a government establishment whose entire greatness is based on the criminality of a rotten, stinking cesspool… We, the healthy core of the nation coming together in the Republican Party, are forced day by day to listen while the foreign colonizers call us a filthy lot dangerous to democracy. Yes, I admit, we do pose a great danger to the current regime, which condemns national pride, the patriotism of the Czechs, Moravians and Silesians, and instead raises up this wandering ethnic contamination and its criminal way of life, which threatens the future of our nation… Let’s continue, under the billowing banner of our party, our long pilgrimage toward the national flag, and at the end of that fateful journey, through the mingling of these two symbols, through a great and holy clash, let’s open the gate to our new world!” (R-49/96)
Racism
Martin Zbela, who has “proven” above that the Republicans cannot be racists, poses the following question in issue 39/96: “Where to go with the Gypsy ethnicity?” After comparing this effort to Neruda’s, he attacks the problem which he calls “the Gypsy question”, on the model of his historical predecessors:
“The best ideological aid for solving this very difficult equation is the concept of garbage. We can probably assign just about everything to the garbage, starting with grocery packaging and… continuing with everything no longer useful, the presence of which in our home merely makes our life unpleasant. In such a situation, there is nothing to do but to just simply throw the garbage away. Its fate doesn’t really concern us. There are two variations: 1) It ends up in a great big dump and then travels in great containers to be incinerated [sic!], in the best-case scenario outside of the country… 2) RECYCLING. Everyone who has read this far has understood… Recycling of garbage is understood to transform unusable packaging…into usable packaging… Let’s imagine on the one hand a piece of garbage and on the other, a gypsy. We are forced to evaluate both of these products as unusable, but RECYCLING could not exist then. After this process, the factory should spit out on the one had a new, usable product, and on the other hand…? Three, two, one, drum roll – but what has happened? Oh, the shame. The factory has spit out a completely incorrigible, unusable gypsy… Gypsies should… realize…that an unenviable future awaits them… A warning, not just to the reader: We are the ones who will devise their fate!!!”
Anti-Semitism
Another author, signed by the initials (zla), asks: “Who is ruling in Poland?” and immediately answers: “The Jews, and unfortunately not just there. The view of not only today’s Europe, but also the entire world around us, is grievous, and not only on this account. The currently deleterious conditions, particularly inside our somewhat pure Europe, are fertile ground for anyone and everyone. Poland is a prime example. A great part of the history of that country testifies to the fact that the Jews belong to the Poles just like a bacillus that has eternally lived in the human organism… It might also be worth attempting to evaluate the activity and presence of Jews in the Czech Republic too – naturally, from an impartial point of view. However, I can already say with certainty that after determining the facts, we would not be able to avoid an unpleasant surprise.” (R-4/97).
Another issue features a similar revelation of historical “truth”. “The Jews were not sent to the concentration camps as punishment, i.e., on the basis of a court verdict, but usually in the beginning to prevent them doing harm from the political point of view,” Czech MP Laura Rajsiglová (SPR-RSČ) is quoted as saying in (R-7/97).
Xenophobia
When asked about the Czech-German declaration, MP and Editor-in-Chief of “Republika” Josef Krejsa said the following, among other things: “I would have let everyone who survived the Nazi concentration camps into Parliament during the voting and I would have loaned them a machine-gun. Even after the declaration, that would solve the problem. Then as a ‘Czech-German declaration’ I would sign into law the famous statement of Jan Žižka from Trocnov, among whose troops my ancestors fought at Grilnwald [sic!]: ‘Beat the foreigners and the Papists!´Nothing else works, has ever worked, or will ever work against the Germans.” (R-6/97).
Tomáš Kebza: “Total failure by Mr Dienstbier…Messrs Havel and Pithart bear their share of the blame as well… It all started with that idiotic apology by Mr Havel and the rejection of the invitation to the Warsaw meeting by Mr Dienstbier!… It was they who started that distasteful, slimy pandering to Germany, it was they who started the policy of ‘Czechs brown-nosing the Germans’, it was they who spit on all of the Czech graves! Make no mistake – if their fates are not rounded off by the laws of nature, they will face the merciless judgment of a defiled nation! They may laugh today – today, yes, but not tomorrow… One Czech must find common ground with another honest Czech. That is how Czech national solidarity will gradually arise… That is the ideal aim. We will achieve it! The gentlemen should not doubt it! The others will go where they belong! They won’t harm us any more! We will expel them from this Czech land!” (R-47/96).
The enemy within
Tomáš Kebza: “The Senate elections, elections to that deformed, stillborn bastard child of democracy, which gives us wild looks and roars at us… Anyone who believes his interests will be represented in the Senate by a genuine personage should get that nonsense out of his head. Senators like Mr Kužílek, Mr Tigrid-Schönfeld, or ‘Madame’ Burešová are the most repugnant dishes ever to see the light of day from the Czech political kitchen.” (R-43/96).
Krejsa said the following about MP Pavel Dostál (ČSSD): “Colleague Dostál recently wrote…, that if that Krejsa were to ever get into power, Krejsa would send him to the gas chambers and wave him good-bye. He’s wrong! I will not wave to him.” (R-2/97) Krejsa on Pavel Dostál once more: “I do not wish that pathological journalistic humanist with the non-white tendencies well at all, it’s thanks to him that Parliament voted (and therefore confirmed) me as a racist, so the happy gypsy can wipe his black mouth…!” (R-5/97).
“Republika” No. 46/96 immediately published two responses to Karel Steigerwald’s editorial in Lidové Noviny on the Republicans. In an article entitled “The Gypsy Lives by Lies and Dies by Truth”, author Arnošt Kafka writes the following to Steigerwald: “You throw around the words fascism, Nazism, racism, etc. … The Gypsy ethnicity is, with only rare exceptions, parasitic, a criminal ethnicity, a real misfortune for our nation… The same applies to all the other ethnicities establishing themselves here to an extent never before seen and birthing their offspring on our miniature territory.”
Tomáš Kebza is even more specific: “The esteemed Mr Liberal, would-be democrat, humanist and philo-Semite Karel Steigerwald is the living proof of my statement that there are far too many bacilli, much too much filth, too many infections in our homeland… and he proves his total human and moral inferiority, his total uselessness to the Czech nation… This journalistic ink-slinger is drowning in his compassionate, embarrassing hatred of those above him. While physically he is still among us, his spirit is in an airless grave. We are just closing the lid on his coffin. What else? Any agreements, or perhaps requests that his Majesty, with that beautiful, Czech-sounding name, Steigerwald, should join us?… All of his crimes prove he has never belonged among us, he is a foreigner in our land, he does not belong to our national and racial society… The Czech nation cannot and must not be supported by the ideas of all these Vaculíks, Kohouts, Chudožilovskýs, Kučeras, Steigerwalds and other wiseacres… They are harmful, poisonous fleas that have nested in the Czech fur. They bother us too much. Therefore, they must be swept away – to where is not our problem, but they must go… Poisonous weeds must be destroyed, from the roots to the stalk.” (One note only to this: Tomáš Kebza himself comes from a part-Jewish family.)
The hour of hatred: Samples of Krejsa’s regular column
The topic: Terrorists in Poland blow up a gas station and threaten other attacks against foreign and Jewish businesses: “The terrorist group GN-95 in the country next door to us is bothered by the dominance of foreigners and Polish Jews and therefore decided to restrict their actions on the domestic market… I am afraid, however, that if the current governing set of predominantly Jewish origin wins the elections, we will see similar ‘aeronautical days’ in our country. Bohemia must belong to the Czechs, today especially.” (R-21/96).
“In June the ‘full 20′, led by the Big Ball (otherwise known as Václav Klaus) will meet on the defendants’ bench of a court-martial, which will naturally take on even the highest state prosecutor, the highest of all judges, the MP-traitors and dubious ‘nouveaux riches’. All of the scum of democracy and the rule of law must be extirpated together with the rats… and they should all be given the ‘severance pay’ they truly deserve. SPR-RSČ is therefore announcing a tender for suppliers of hempen rope…” (R-22/96).
The topic: The “Czech Mothers” have received support from Austria for their blockade of the Temelín nuclear power plant: “I am not surprised these drugged, half-male frights with their nose-rings are demonstrating… It is no longer a surprise to me that these slackers who don’t want to work demonstrate for schillings and defend the rights of gypsies. Birds of a feather flock together.” (R-47/96).
On Václav Klaus and Pavel Bratinka: “It would be most beneficial to the nation if they both resigned… They unanimously sold this country to Germany, which can be proven to those who don’t believe it by their having raised their dirty sleeves during the vote on the Czech-German declaration. Resignation is the only way they can avoid the noose.” (R-48/96).
The topic: Grebeníček charges ODS with political racism: “I do not want to back the communist boss just because during his time in office, unlike the others, he has managed to not to behave like a political pig. On the contrary, I must improve upon his statement: ‘ODS is consciously committing the political, pro-German, social genocide of the Czech nation.’ ” (R-49/96).
Updated information about this article:
For a very long time, Tomáš Kebza belonged among the leading figures of the militant neo-Nazi National Resistance (Národní odpor – NO). He was one of their main street fighters. When it came to light that his grandfather had passed through the Nazi concentration camps as an “inferior Jew”, all was quiet in the neo-Nazi movement. Antifa writes the following about his mental state, his origins, and his violent tendencies in the article “Tomáš Kebza: Life is Beautiful”: “His disability pension for his inability to work due to a light brain dysfunction did not prevent him from becoming Vice-Chair of the Republican Youth, the youth branch of Miroslav Sládek’s SPR-RSČ, and he even ran for Parliament on the party ticket in 1998. His disability pension did not prevent him from participating in drunkenly brawling with Roma and giving the Nazi salute on New Year’s Eve 1998 at the U Kapitána pub in Prague-Karlín. Nothing prevented him from publishing in the Republicans’ gutter press, the weekly ‘Republika’, where despite his Jewish origin he published anti-Semitically tinged articles, for which he was sentenced in June 1999 to a three-year prison sentence, suspended for five years, and banned from publishing for 10 years. It was no trouble at all for him to stab Jiří Morstein in the spring of 1999 after they argued in Prague-Lhotka. He also had no problem attacking, side by side with National Resistance members, the Ladronka squat one month later. His disability pension did not prevent him from participating in an attack on a Roma party in the Modrá Hvězda restaurant in České Budějovice at the end of November 1999. In the year 2000 he resigned his membership in the SPR-RSČ, which by then was no longer in Parliament, and resigned from the Republican Youth after photographs came to light showing him giving the Nazi salute with a swastika at a National Resistance action.” (The entire article, in Czech only, is available at http://www.antifa.cz/content/tomas-kebza-zivot-je-krasny).
Martin Zbela is an ideologue and propagandist on the model of Goebbels who disseminated hatred as the (de facto) Editor-in-Chief of the newspaper “Republikánský listy” during the 1990s. Today he is an Editor-in-Chief once more, this time of the “Dělnický listy” (“Workers’ News”), and he is the Vice-Chair of Vandas’s Workers’ Social Justice Party (Dělnická strana sociální spravedlnosti – DSSS). It will surprise no one familiar with him to learn that the DSSS organizes its events together with neo-Nazis from the Autonomous Nationalists and National Resistance. Zbela was also the chair of the militant racist civic association Workers’ Youth (Dělnická mládež) for many years.
