In the previous part of this post I discussed the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (ÚSTR) and the reason it was created—in short, the history of Nazi occupation and communist rule left a complex moral legacy that needs investigation and thoughtful incorporation into the country’s political discourse and education.
I was prompted to that discussion by an event this past week, involving the institute, one of its historians, and the current prime minister, Andrej Babiš.
Babiš is, to put it mildly, a controversial figure.
Showing posts with label This week in Prague. Show all posts
Showing posts with label This week in Prague. Show all posts
Thursday, June 21, 2018
Sunday, June 17, 2018
Scars of dictatorship: Part I
The Nazi and communist periods run across Czech history like a scar, and these days it seems to be festering, rather than healing.
In the particular incident I’m referring to, a historian who works at the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes was criticized by the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, for calling out behavior that has echoes of the kind of thing that happens in totalitarian regimes. But we need to back up and look at why there is an Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (ÚSTR).
The underlying idea is that when a nation has been through a dictatorship, its society has been warped by the crimes of that government, and as part of the healing process, it is useful to have a body whose job is to document those crimes and understand the damage they caused.
There are the relatively obvious harms, of people being jailed or killed for saying the wrong thing, having the wrong friends, coming from the wrong parents. Those are bad enough, and the people who were killed are never coming back, and the people who were jailed are never getting those years back. But at least the harm is visible and easy to understand.
Both regimes, however, created a kind of damage that was more woven into the fabric of society, which made it harder to see and much harder to talk about “right” and “wrong.”
I think Americans view a totalitarian regime as some sort of alien organism, something outside the society. There’s the general public, who are “good,” who are “victims,” and there’s the regime, which is perpetrates evil.
Reality is much more complicated.
In the particular incident I’m referring to, a historian who works at the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes was criticized by the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, for calling out behavior that has echoes of the kind of thing that happens in totalitarian regimes. But we need to back up and look at why there is an Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (ÚSTR).
The underlying idea is that when a nation has been through a dictatorship, its society has been warped by the crimes of that government, and as part of the healing process, it is useful to have a body whose job is to document those crimes and understand the damage they caused.
There are the relatively obvious harms, of people being jailed or killed for saying the wrong thing, having the wrong friends, coming from the wrong parents. Those are bad enough, and the people who were killed are never coming back, and the people who were jailed are never getting those years back. But at least the harm is visible and easy to understand.
Both regimes, however, created a kind of damage that was more woven into the fabric of society, which made it harder to see and much harder to talk about “right” and “wrong.”
I think Americans view a totalitarian regime as some sort of alien organism, something outside the society. There’s the general public, who are “good,” who are “victims,” and there’s the regime, which is perpetrates evil.
Reality is much more complicated.
Friday, April 27, 2018
Blind justice
Can you go into debt for something you logically can’t owe?
It sounds like a neat trick, but the Czech justice system is Just That Good.
Prague’s public transit system is an honor system with inspections.
You are required to have a valid ticket in order to ride, but they don’t check you on your way onto the bus with a farebox, or on your way into the subway with a turnstyle.
But they carry out random inspections, and if they ask you for a ticket and you don’t have one, you pay a substantial fine—currently 800 Kč (about $40) if you pay the inspector right there, or 1,500 Kč if you simply take the ticket and pay later.
People who are blind are entitled to free travel on public transportation. The transit system issues you an ID card explaining your condition, and you show that when the inspectors come around asking to see people’s tickets.
In other words, it is logically impossible for you to be riding without a ticket.
Vladimir Patera lost his sight in childhood and has the appropriate travel card from Prague Public Transit, so he was surprised when he started getting debt collection notices relating to incidents of riding without a ticket between 1998 and 2003.
(Details of Patera’s case are from “Úspěch Vladimira Patery [Vladimir Patera’s success]”, Respekt, April 23-29, 2018, pp. 27-8.)
Maybe someone had misused the birth certificate he’d lost while moving house? He’d show his transit ID and the mistake would be recognized.
But two levels of courts said that Patera should have defended himself what is known as the “discovery process,” and that once a debt-collection proceeding has been started, it’s too late to deal with the factual substance of the case.
Patera said he had never received notice of the discovery process, but that didn’t help him.
The debt collectors garnished his wages and ended up collecting 200,000 Kč from him.
It sounds like a neat trick, but the Czech justice system is Just That Good.
Prague’s public transit system is an honor system with inspections.
You are required to have a valid ticket in order to ride, but they don’t check you on your way onto the bus with a farebox, or on your way into the subway with a turnstyle.
But they carry out random inspections, and if they ask you for a ticket and you don’t have one, you pay a substantial fine—currently 800 Kč (about $40) if you pay the inspector right there, or 1,500 Kč if you simply take the ticket and pay later.
People who are blind are entitled to free travel on public transportation. The transit system issues you an ID card explaining your condition, and you show that when the inspectors come around asking to see people’s tickets.
In other words, it is logically impossible for you to be riding without a ticket.
Vladimir Patera lost his sight in childhood and has the appropriate travel card from Prague Public Transit, so he was surprised when he started getting debt collection notices relating to incidents of riding without a ticket between 1998 and 2003.
(Details of Patera’s case are from “Úspěch Vladimira Patery [Vladimir Patera’s success]”, Respekt, April 23-29, 2018, pp. 27-8.)
Maybe someone had misused the birth certificate he’d lost while moving house? He’d show his transit ID and the mistake would be recognized.
But two levels of courts said that Patera should have defended himself what is known as the “discovery process,” and that once a debt-collection proceeding has been started, it’s too late to deal with the factual substance of the case.
Patera said he had never received notice of the discovery process, but that didn’t help him.
The debt collectors garnished his wages and ended up collecting 200,000 Kč from him.
Tuesday, April 17, 2018
The Nikulin file
Amidst the insanity that is closing in around Donald Trump, a seemingly bit player is a Russian named Yevgeniy Nikulin. But while he’s peripheral to the events in the U.S., he’s been a prominent part of the political narrative here, and the growing tug-of-war over whether the country will continue the alignment with the U.S. and Western Europe that it’s built since 1989, or will instead revert to its post-World-War-II position in Russia’s orbit.
As the Guardian reported all the way back in January, 2017, Nikulin was arrested in Prague the previous October (i.e., of 2016) “on an Interpol arrest warrant issued by US authorities.”
The U.S. requested his extradited in connection with various alleged pieces of hacking, including on the site Formspring, used by Anthony Weiner for his public-self-immolation-via-sexting.
But once he was arrested, it turned out that the Russian government wanted him extradited to their country, on allegations from 2009 that he hacked into a bank account and stole 110,000 rubles.
(If I can dig up that article, I’ll come back and amend this.)
As it turns out, Nikulin was finally extradited to the U.S. just at the end of last month and has entered a plea of “not guilty” in San Francisco.
We’ll see where his case goes from here and whether and how it ends up being linked with Russian interference in the 2016 election. According to the Guardian last year, “One theory is Nikulin – even if not personally involved in the election hacking – may know other hackers who were.”
But it was also something of a flashpoint here in the Czech Republic.
As the Guardian reported all the way back in January, 2017, Nikulin was arrested in Prague the previous October (i.e., of 2016) “on an Interpol arrest warrant issued by US authorities.”
The U.S. requested his extradited in connection with various alleged pieces of hacking, including on the site Formspring, used by Anthony Weiner for his public-self-immolation-via-sexting.
But once he was arrested, it turned out that the Russian government wanted him extradited to their country, on allegations from 2009 that he hacked into a bank account and stole 110,000 rubles.
“He was never formally accused at that time. I think the reason is that he was recruited [by the Russian security services],” said Ondrej Kundra, political editor with the Czech weekly magazine Respekt, which has reported that the Russian services offer alleged offenders immunity from prosecution in exchange for collaboration.At the time of that Guardian article, the expectation was that the Czech Ministry of Justice would make a determination by the end of February—of 2017! That obviously didn’t happen, because last fall there was an article in Respekt about him still being held in Czech prison, and under somewhat unusual conditions. I don’t have the article at hand, but if memory serves, his detention was accompanied by special security measures, not because he was especially dangerous or a flight risk, but because of the sense that somebody might try to do him in while in prison.
(If I can dig up that article, I’ll come back and amend this.)
As it turns out, Nikulin was finally extradited to the U.S. just at the end of last month and has entered a plea of “not guilty” in San Francisco.
We’ll see where his case goes from here and whether and how it ends up being linked with Russian interference in the 2016 election. According to the Guardian last year, “One theory is Nikulin – even if not personally involved in the election hacking – may know other hackers who were.”
But it was also something of a flashpoint here in the Czech Republic.
Thursday, April 5, 2018
Whaddayaknow?
 |
| From here |
Back in Soviet times, the two main newspapers were Pravda (The Truth) and Izvestia (The News). And the standard joke was,
“There’s no truth in The News and there’s no news in The Truth.”
It was understood that the Communist Party, through its own organ Pravda and through the “government” newspaper Izvestia, was telling the people what it felt they needed to know. People read the paper, but also tried to divine what the authorities might be hiding.
The extent of the propaganda was evident in the experience of one of my Russian-language professors at Indiana University. In the summer of either 1986 or 1987 he led a student group to the Soviet Union, and they were supposed to visit Sochi, on the Black Sea. But once they were in the USSR, they were informed that they would be unable to go Sochi because of “civil unrest” in the city.
When they got back to the U.S., my professor learned that the real cause was a catastrophic malfunction of the city’s sewage system. As he commented, adopting a mock-Russian accent, “Yes, is civil unrest in Sochi. Can only mean that streets are full of shit.”
The remarkable thing, of course, was what it revealed about the information policy of the Soviet regime. It was understandable that they would try to hide the reality of what bad shape their infrastructure was in. It was more surprising that they would rather give foreigners the impression that people were rioting in one of their cities.
Saturday, March 17, 2018
A crippled society
It’s hard to compete with the madness that’s been coming out of the White House for the last 16 months, reaching something of a crescendo this last week.
But let this serve as your periodic reminder that the insanity we see in the U.S. is part of a pattern across much of the world, just with a smaller vocabulary, weirder hair, more porn stars, worse lawyers—and nuclear weapons.
The Czech president (Miloš Zeman) was just inaugurated for his second 5-year term and gave not so much a vision of his renewed term as a call to arms against journalists who work at publications not under the control of his allies.
The prime minister (Andrej Babiš) looks like he’s trying to get the right people into place to prevent investigation of his alleged fraudulent use of subsidies from the European Union. Before he became prime minister, he was minister of finance as a junior coalition member of the previous government. There’s evidence he used that position to protect biofuel subsidies that are a tremendous source of profit to him as the country’s largest owner of canola-growing acreage, farm-chemical manufacture, and biofuel processing.
You could say there are two kinds of entrepreneurs. The “productive” type are good at making something, or providing some sort of service, or overseeing others in the efficient provision of goods or services. Their activity makes a country richer.
The other type are good at working the inside angles, using financial tricks to put the competition out of business, assembling an empire through connections and skullduggery. The effects are felt most directly by those who work in the companies they take over, but ultimately, their activities come at the expense of the society as a whole, even as they enrich themselves and their cronies.
I’m reading Žlutý baron (Yellow Baron), a book-length piece of investigative reporting on Babiš, and the authors make a strong case that he is decidedly in that second category of entrepreneur. He doesn’t seem to know much about how to produce a good product with a workforce that is fairly compensated and enjoys their work. Rather, he knows how to take over those kinds businesses, using access to finance and friends in the right places, then squeeze the workers and the product quality to fatten his bottom line.
In last October’s elections, he campaigned on the idea that he would run the government like one of his businesses.
And he got a plurality of Czech voters.
Tomio Okamura campaigned against Islam and foreigners, and ended up 11% of the seats in parliament.
Another 7% went to the communists, who seem to be working behind the scenes with Okamura’s party to keep Babiš’s government in place, even without a formal majority.
The president is bending the constitution by indefinitely leaving in place a government that can’t assemble enough votes in parliament to formally declare it to be the legitimate government.
This dysfunction in so-called “high politics” is linked with some real ugliness in daily life on the ground, as can be illustrated with a sampling of incidents from last November.
But let this serve as your periodic reminder that the insanity we see in the U.S. is part of a pattern across much of the world, just with a smaller vocabulary, weirder hair, more porn stars, worse lawyers—and nuclear weapons.
The Czech president (Miloš Zeman) was just inaugurated for his second 5-year term and gave not so much a vision of his renewed term as a call to arms against journalists who work at publications not under the control of his allies.
The prime minister (Andrej Babiš) looks like he’s trying to get the right people into place to prevent investigation of his alleged fraudulent use of subsidies from the European Union. Before he became prime minister, he was minister of finance as a junior coalition member of the previous government. There’s evidence he used that position to protect biofuel subsidies that are a tremendous source of profit to him as the country’s largest owner of canola-growing acreage, farm-chemical manufacture, and biofuel processing.
You could say there are two kinds of entrepreneurs. The “productive” type are good at making something, or providing some sort of service, or overseeing others in the efficient provision of goods or services. Their activity makes a country richer.
The other type are good at working the inside angles, using financial tricks to put the competition out of business, assembling an empire through connections and skullduggery. The effects are felt most directly by those who work in the companies they take over, but ultimately, their activities come at the expense of the society as a whole, even as they enrich themselves and their cronies.
I’m reading Žlutý baron (Yellow Baron), a book-length piece of investigative reporting on Babiš, and the authors make a strong case that he is decidedly in that second category of entrepreneur. He doesn’t seem to know much about how to produce a good product with a workforce that is fairly compensated and enjoys their work. Rather, he knows how to take over those kinds businesses, using access to finance and friends in the right places, then squeeze the workers and the product quality to fatten his bottom line.
In last October’s elections, he campaigned on the idea that he would run the government like one of his businesses.
And he got a plurality of Czech voters.
Tomio Okamura campaigned against Islam and foreigners, and ended up 11% of the seats in parliament.
Another 7% went to the communists, who seem to be working behind the scenes with Okamura’s party to keep Babiš’s government in place, even without a formal majority.
The president is bending the constitution by indefinitely leaving in place a government that can’t assemble enough votes in parliament to formally declare it to be the legitimate government.
This dysfunction in so-called “high politics” is linked with some real ugliness in daily life on the ground, as can be illustrated with a sampling of incidents from last November.
Sunday, March 11, 2018
Adventures in misgovernment
This Thursday at noon there will be a 30-minute “cautionary strike” by students from several universities in Prague and other Czech cities.
Above all we demand:
1) That the president of the Czech Republic fulfill his constitutional responsibility and names a premier who has support [in parliament] and who isn’t under criminal indictment.
2) That the caretaker government not undertake fundamental or personnel-related steps and that it not create new constitutional arrangements.
3) That the Senate come out strongly against the failure to uphold constitutional traditions.This takes some unpacking.
Tuesday, February 6, 2018
Don't ask for an apology
Some light morning reading:
No. Don’t ask for an apology.
Don’t demand an apology.
Don’t talk about an apology.
Some context, for those three out of the four of you reading this who have no particular reason to follow Czech politics.
“SPD” stands for “Freedom and Direct Democracy”. The second part of the party name represents their support for governing by referendum, and the “freedom” part is, I guess, freedom from the evil diktat of Brussels.
Tomio Okamura, the head of the party, is the son of a Czech mother and a Japanese father (hence the name). He spent some of his youth in each of his two ancestral countries, but since the fall of communism in 1989 he has essentially lived here in Prague. He made bank as a travel agent, using his natural advantage to cater to the market in Japanese tourism to the Czech Republic.
He seems to be a political opportunist with few beliefs but no qualms about jumping on any cause that he thinks will get him votes. As I wrote about him here, he jumped on board the “Dawn” party in 2013. The original purpose of the party was to rework the Czech constitution in the interests of making a more effective democracy.
Okamura figured out how effective it was to slam the local Roma population for being slovenly, and instead of reworking the Czech constitution, he rebuilt the party platform on the basis of ethno-nationalist hatred of Roma.
Then he siphoned into his own pockets the money the party had received from the state for funding its operations.
The Museum of Roma culture is demanding that Tomio Okamura, the chair of the SPD party publically apologize for his statement about the concentration camp for Roma in Lety u Písku. In a conversation for DVTV on Saturday, citing a book, he said that the camp wasn’t fenced in and that the people there were free to come and go. According to experts from the Museum of Roma Culture this is an untrue claim which exacerbates anti-Roma attitudes in society and tramples the memory of victims of the persecution and genocide against the Roma during the Second World War. It was not possible to get a statement from Okamura. According to the spokesman of the SPD, he was ill.
No. Don’t ask for an apology.
Don’t demand an apology.
Don’t talk about an apology.
Some context, for those three out of the four of you reading this who have no particular reason to follow Czech politics.
“SPD” stands for “Freedom and Direct Democracy”. The second part of the party name represents their support for governing by referendum, and the “freedom” part is, I guess, freedom from the evil diktat of Brussels.
Tomio Okamura, the head of the party, is the son of a Czech mother and a Japanese father (hence the name). He spent some of his youth in each of his two ancestral countries, but since the fall of communism in 1989 he has essentially lived here in Prague. He made bank as a travel agent, using his natural advantage to cater to the market in Japanese tourism to the Czech Republic.
He seems to be a political opportunist with few beliefs but no qualms about jumping on any cause that he thinks will get him votes. As I wrote about him here, he jumped on board the “Dawn” party in 2013. The original purpose of the party was to rework the Czech constitution in the interests of making a more effective democracy.
Okamura figured out how effective it was to slam the local Roma population for being slovenly, and instead of reworking the Czech constitution, he rebuilt the party platform on the basis of ethno-nationalist hatred of Roma.
Then he siphoned into his own pockets the money the party had received from the state for funding its operations.
Saturday, October 21, 2017
Volby!
The title means, "Election!"
I wrote this post Friday and Saturday, while the voting was going on, but then wasn't able to get it posted until now, when the results are in.
They don't look good. A party with an authoritarian streak came in first with about 30% of the vote, and 39% of the seats in parliament.
The Thatcherite party was second with 11% of the vote and 12.5% of the seats.
The most vigorously anti-foreigner (and anti-EU) party was fourth, with 10.6%. Several parties have understandably said they won't enter a coalition with this SPD party, but that gives more power to the biggest party.
It's a mess.
Yesterday and today the Czech Republic is holding parliamentary elections—like many places, they have more than one day of voting, and one of those days is for many people not a work day.
The country is a land-locked nation in the middle of Europe with no particular importance in itself for the U.S., but there are two reasons Americans might want to spare a little attention from the unfolding disaster at home and look this way.
One is that there are implications for the European Union, and that is something that matters for the U.S. But first I want to look at the local political scene for what it suggests about a two-party system vs. a multi-party system, and the role that new parties play. And it’s not clear that we in the U.S. have the worse end of the deal.
I wrote this post Friday and Saturday, while the voting was going on, but then wasn't able to get it posted until now, when the results are in.
They don't look good. A party with an authoritarian streak came in first with about 30% of the vote, and 39% of the seats in parliament.
The Thatcherite party was second with 11% of the vote and 12.5% of the seats.
The most vigorously anti-foreigner (and anti-EU) party was fourth, with 10.6%. Several parties have understandably said they won't enter a coalition with this SPD party, but that gives more power to the biggest party.
It's a mess.
 |
| "Enough already! We won't back down to the people making a boogieman out of Europe." A poster for the TOP 09 party on a trolley-stop shelter near our apartment. They were the only party I saw that made a major point of being pro-E.U. They barely squeaked into parliament. Parties with a strongly skeptical or outright negative view of the E.U. took over 50% of the votes. |
Yesterday and today the Czech Republic is holding parliamentary elections—like many places, they have more than one day of voting, and one of those days is for many people not a work day.
The country is a land-locked nation in the middle of Europe with no particular importance in itself for the U.S., but there are two reasons Americans might want to spare a little attention from the unfolding disaster at home and look this way.
One is that there are implications for the European Union, and that is something that matters for the U.S. But first I want to look at the local political scene for what it suggests about a two-party system vs. a multi-party system, and the role that new parties play. And it’s not clear that we in the U.S. have the worse end of the deal.
Sunday, October 15, 2017
Welcome to the cafe
One of the benefits of living outside the country for a time is the opportunity to see your native land through others' eyes (to some extent). Just like a fish doesn't know it's in water, certain things about our day-to-day environment elude us simply because they are so familiar.
Other times, the "Aha" comes from seeing other people's misperceptions about where you're from.
This week’s example is Czech architect David Vávra in an interview with the newspaper Lidové noviny. He had a lot of interesting things to say about reconciling the need to make a city livable for modern life while preserving the historic character that people value.
A related issue is the Marian column that used to stand on Old Town Square, one of the tourist highlights of the city.
Many Czech towns have these monuments from the Baroque era, signs of devotion to the Virgin Mary, also called “plague columns,” as they might be put up in thanks for the ending of a plague.
A significant part of Habsburg rule had been forcible recatholicization of Czech society after 200 years of uneasy religious pluralism. Some Czechs thus identified the columns with oppression suffered by their people under the Habsburg yoke.
In 1918, shortly after the creation of Czechoslovakia out of part of the ruins of the Habsburg empire, a crowd of Czechs took down the column in Old Town Square in a burst of what they perceived as patriotism.
Now some people are advocating for the column to be rebuilt, arguing for its value both as a piece of public art and as part of the historical fabric of the square. Others oppose the column’s restoration, continuing to identify it with religious oppression.
In the discussion with Vávra, the interviewer makes the connection between the issue of Prague’s Marian column and the current controversy in the U.S. over Confederate statues.
Other times, the "Aha" comes from seeing other people's misperceptions about where you're from.
This week’s example is Czech architect David Vávra in an interview with the newspaper Lidové noviny. He had a lot of interesting things to say about reconciling the need to make a city livable for modern life while preserving the historic character that people value.
A related issue is the Marian column that used to stand on Old Town Square, one of the tourist highlights of the city.
 |
| The Marian column on Old Town Square, from here Just to the left of the column is the church of St. Nicholas, designed by Dientzenhofer (see below). All the way at the left is the "new" wing of the city hall of Old Town, later destroyed in the Prague uprising against the Nazis in May, 1945. |
A significant part of Habsburg rule had been forcible recatholicization of Czech society after 200 years of uneasy religious pluralism. Some Czechs thus identified the columns with oppression suffered by their people under the Habsburg yoke.
In 1918, shortly after the creation of Czechoslovakia out of part of the ruins of the Habsburg empire, a crowd of Czechs took down the column in Old Town Square in a burst of what they perceived as patriotism.
 |
| A crowd gathers around the fallen column, in the background the newly empty base. From here |
In the discussion with Vávra, the interviewer makes the connection between the issue of Prague’s Marian column and the current controversy in the U.S. over Confederate statues.
Wednesday, October 4, 2017
Fan mail
In my previous post on l'affaire Blaive, I mentioned that there are people who will actively support a dictatorship, for a range of reasons. One of those reasons is that they are more or less in agreement with what the regime is trying to do.
One such is a letter written to Britské listy in response to an interview that Jan Čulík, the site's main editor, had conducted with Dr. Blaive.
Looking at the events of 1989 from the West, we had a narrative of a populace that was oppressed by a hated government. Anna Kouzlová's letter suggests that this narrative is much too simple.
I can see two main possibilities:
Mr. Čulík, I clicked on Britské listy for the first time in a long time, to see if you three idiots had found your way to common sense, and I watched your video.
I must say that that woman has her head screwed on right and is objective, even if you tried really hard to point her in the direction of expressing tendentious nonsense like you are in the habit of doing.
We regular people didn’t feel this nonsense, and anyway, why are you surprised that people chose a regime without servants and beggars? We had employment security, at work nobody treated us like slaves, something that we got a strong feeling of after the “glorious revolution” subsidized by the West!!
Mr. Čulík, I’m well past 70 and I can compare and unlike you I have life experience and still have my common sense.
As an eight-year-old girl I had to go with my mother to slog away in a farmer’s field. There were nine of us children, and in order for the farmer to plough our field we had to do quite a bit of serious labor!
Today’s brainwashed youth who moan so much about how their parents had their farm fields expropriated, I’d like to know if they would have toiled in those fields. It wouldn’t have been them—for that they had us poor people.
What do you idiots today have to say about how things were under Papa Masaryk,* how much poverty there was and shooting at workers, how ordinary people were dealt with. I heard those facts every day from my grandma and grandpa; today the truth is silenced and twisted. Supposedly it was a democracy, and we’ve got the same kind of democracy today—democracy for thieves and scoundrels, a decent person doesn’t have any rights. I experienced on my own back how today’s “demokratúra”** works, so some little fool somewhere babbling on about democracy and freedom just shows how messed up his head is.
One such is a letter written to Britské listy in response to an interview that Jan Čulík, the site's main editor, had conducted with Dr. Blaive.
Looking at the events of 1989 from the West, we had a narrative of a populace that was oppressed by a hated government. Anna Kouzlová's letter suggests that this narrative is much too simple.
I can see two main possibilities:
- She's misremembering her own feelings about the regime - she was unhappy with it at the time, but her experiences with the post-1989 world have made communism look good to her in hindsight.
- While the communists were still in charge, she was in fact fine with the system, liked it better than what has come afterward, and better than what came before (she says she's "well past 70," so she was born around 1940, so her earliest memories are likely the Nazi occupation, and then the brief period of more-or-less democratic rule between liberation from the Nazis in May, 1945 and the communists' seizure of power in February, 1948; she has no direct memory of the interwar Czechoslovak Republic, but had - as we all do - stories from her parents, who would have spent their childhood and young adulthood in the interwar Republic.
Mr. Čulík, I clicked on Britské listy for the first time in a long time, to see if you three idiots had found your way to common sense, and I watched your video.
I must say that that woman has her head screwed on right and is objective, even if you tried really hard to point her in the direction of expressing tendentious nonsense like you are in the habit of doing.
We regular people didn’t feel this nonsense, and anyway, why are you surprised that people chose a regime without servants and beggars? We had employment security, at work nobody treated us like slaves, something that we got a strong feeling of after the “glorious revolution” subsidized by the West!!
Mr. Čulík, I’m well past 70 and I can compare and unlike you I have life experience and still have my common sense.
As an eight-year-old girl I had to go with my mother to slog away in a farmer’s field. There were nine of us children, and in order for the farmer to plough our field we had to do quite a bit of serious labor!
Today’s brainwashed youth who moan so much about how their parents had their farm fields expropriated, I’d like to know if they would have toiled in those fields. It wouldn’t have been them—for that they had us poor people.
What do you idiots today have to say about how things were under Papa Masaryk,* how much poverty there was and shooting at workers, how ordinary people were dealt with. I heard those facts every day from my grandma and grandpa; today the truth is silenced and twisted. Supposedly it was a democracy, and we’ve got the same kind of democracy today—democracy for thieves and scoundrels, a decent person doesn’t have any rights. I experienced on my own back how today’s “demokratúra”** works, so some little fool somewhere babbling on about democracy and freedom just shows how messed up his head is.
Tuesday, October 3, 2017
It's really not a game
I’m trying to wrap up this series on the issues raised by the French historian Muriel Blaive, so that I can get into other stuff, like Tomio Okamura throwing the word “traitor” at Czech representatives in the EU parliament who voted for refugee quotas, and those representatives then getting death threats. Or the last-gasp campaign of TOP 09 (the electoral sensation of the 2010 campaign), on the reasonable slogan that “The EU needs to be changed. But with us, not without us.”
But I do have some threads to try to tie off.
I introduced the basic argument, then looked at the implications in terms of current politics, before providing an analysis of the dynamics of totalitarianism through the simplifying lens of game theory.
And the big simplification in that last piece was the clean distinction between a “bad” government and a population full of “good” people being oppressed by their bad government.
As I argued in the first of my posts on this, I think Blaive seriously misses the boat in trivializing the communist dictatorship when she quibbles over the word “totalitarian.” But she also asks a real and important question, about the extent to which Czechs were purely victims in World War II, and by implication the extent to which they were purely victims under communism.
To be clear, Czechs were victims of Nazi aggression in World War II, and the communist leaders conveyed to President Beneš in February 1948 that if he didn’t approve the takeover of the government by the communists, there were Soviet forces ready to back the communists, so in a meaningful sense they were victims of an imposed government in the case of communism as well. But Blaive is right that a narrative of pure victimhood is too simple.
But I do have some threads to try to tie off.
I introduced the basic argument, then looked at the implications in terms of current politics, before providing an analysis of the dynamics of totalitarianism through the simplifying lens of game theory.
And the big simplification in that last piece was the clean distinction between a “bad” government and a population full of “good” people being oppressed by their bad government.
As I argued in the first of my posts on this, I think Blaive seriously misses the boat in trivializing the communist dictatorship when she quibbles over the word “totalitarian.” But she also asks a real and important question, about the extent to which Czechs were purely victims in World War II, and by implication the extent to which they were purely victims under communism.
To be clear, Czechs were victims of Nazi aggression in World War II, and the communist leaders conveyed to President Beneš in February 1948 that if he didn’t approve the takeover of the government by the communists, there were Soviet forces ready to back the communists, so in a meaningful sense they were victims of an imposed government in the case of communism as well. But Blaive is right that a narrative of pure victimhood is too simple.
Friday, September 29, 2017
Czech Idol, politics edition
With the wave of ethno-nationalism sweeping many countries, there are a lot of places where you could ask, “Who is this country’s Donald Trump?”
The Czech Republic is fortunate in having many candidates.
There’s the Czech president himself, one of the earliest people on the international scene to support Trump’s candidacy. He seems to share the US president’s deeply held belief that women are to be judged primarily on a man’s impression of her physical attributes, with attractive women being as naked as possible, and unattractive women being kept well covered. And he loves playing to Islamophobia and xenophobia. Like Trump, he sometimes seems more comfortable with Putin than with leaders of other EU countries.
We can’t count out Andrej Babiš, the man who seems likely to emerge from the October elections as prime minister. Like Trump, he only recently moved from business to politics, positioning himself as an outsider who will shake things up and clean up corruption, while quickly getting entangled in corruption of his own. Unfortunately for his candidacy as the local Trump, he seems to actually be successful in business, with no bankruptcies to his name—a nearly disqualifying omission.
The outgoing prime minister, Bohuslav Sobotka, can stake some small claim: in the face of his party’s declining popularity he made a last-minute play to local anti-Muslim sentiment. But other than that he’s more or less typical of the center-left Social Democratic party he belongs to, so in terms of broad policy positions he’s got none of Trump’s predilection for soaking the poor while comforting the rich. And as for his xenophobia, not only is it Johnny-come-lately, you can kinda tell his heart’s not in it.
I’m starting to think the complete package might be Tomio Okamura.
The Czech Republic is fortunate in having many candidates.
There’s the Czech president himself, one of the earliest people on the international scene to support Trump’s candidacy. He seems to share the US president’s deeply held belief that women are to be judged primarily on a man’s impression of her physical attributes, with attractive women being as naked as possible, and unattractive women being kept well covered. And he loves playing to Islamophobia and xenophobia. Like Trump, he sometimes seems more comfortable with Putin than with leaders of other EU countries.
We can’t count out Andrej Babiš, the man who seems likely to emerge from the October elections as prime minister. Like Trump, he only recently moved from business to politics, positioning himself as an outsider who will shake things up and clean up corruption, while quickly getting entangled in corruption of his own. Unfortunately for his candidacy as the local Trump, he seems to actually be successful in business, with no bankruptcies to his name—a nearly disqualifying omission.
The outgoing prime minister, Bohuslav Sobotka, can stake some small claim: in the face of his party’s declining popularity he made a last-minute play to local anti-Muslim sentiment. But other than that he’s more or less typical of the center-left Social Democratic party he belongs to, so in terms of broad policy positions he’s got none of Trump’s predilection for soaking the poor while comforting the rich. And as for his xenophobia, not only is it Johnny-come-lately, you can kinda tell his heart’s not in it.
I’m starting to think the complete package might be Tomio Okamura.
Sunday, September 24, 2017
It's not a game
I’ve written a couple of times about the controversy surrounding the work of the French historian Muriel Blaive, an advisor to the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (ÚSTR) who has recently publicized findings that, she says, call into question whether the communist regime was truly totalitarian.
The core of her argument seems to be that when you look in the files of the secret police, you find far more cooperation with the government than resistance, and I wanted to look at the question of resistance to dictatorship through the lens of game theory.
For simplicity, assume you have a nice, clean division between an evil, totalitarian regime and a populace made up of good people who are the regime’s unwilling subjects.
If on bold soul refuses to comply and speaks out, he or she is easily dealt with. Arrested, killed, tortured, whatever—it is, after all, an evil, totalitarian regime unconstrained by a sense of justice.
On the other hand, if the entire populace rose as one and at 9:00 one morning simply withheld compliance, there’d be nothing the regime could do. You can’t arrest everyone. If the entire public decides, “We’re done with this,” then it’s over.
And presumably it doesn’t even take everyone acting at once. Is it 50%? 25%? There’s some critical value for the portion of the populace that needs to rise as one in order to sweep away a totalitarian regime. Above that, you’re golden. Below that, you’re in jail, or dead.
And that leads to the coordination problem. Standing up is scary, but you’re willing to do it if enough other people are as well. “I will if you will.” But how do I know you will?
Planning for it is difficult, because if the regime catches you talking about resistance, that’s almost as bad as being caught actually resisting.
And even if you could plan, how do you commit?
“I will if you will.”
“I will.”
“Good. I will too.”
“Will you really?”
“Yes. Trust me. Will you really?”
You’re taking an awfully big risk with that trust.
And it’s not just with one other person, or a handful of people, but with thousands, tens of thousands, almost all of them perfect strangers to you.
The core of her argument seems to be that when you look in the files of the secret police, you find far more cooperation with the government than resistance, and I wanted to look at the question of resistance to dictatorship through the lens of game theory.
For simplicity, assume you have a nice, clean division between an evil, totalitarian regime and a populace made up of good people who are the regime’s unwilling subjects.
If on bold soul refuses to comply and speaks out, he or she is easily dealt with. Arrested, killed, tortured, whatever—it is, after all, an evil, totalitarian regime unconstrained by a sense of justice.
On the other hand, if the entire populace rose as one and at 9:00 one morning simply withheld compliance, there’d be nothing the regime could do. You can’t arrest everyone. If the entire public decides, “We’re done with this,” then it’s over.
And presumably it doesn’t even take everyone acting at once. Is it 50%? 25%? There’s some critical value for the portion of the populace that needs to rise as one in order to sweep away a totalitarian regime. Above that, you’re golden. Below that, you’re in jail, or dead.
And that leads to the coordination problem. Standing up is scary, but you’re willing to do it if enough other people are as well. “I will if you will.” But how do I know you will?
Planning for it is difficult, because if the regime catches you talking about resistance, that’s almost as bad as being caught actually resisting.
And even if you could plan, how do you commit?
“I will if you will.”
“I will.”
“Good. I will too.”
“Will you really?”
“Yes. Trust me. Will you really?”
You’re taking an awfully big risk with that trust.
And it’s not just with one other person, or a handful of people, but with thousands, tens of thousands, almost all of them perfect strangers to you.
Friday, September 22, 2017
The point of an argument
In an earlier post I discussed the work of the French historian Muriel Blaive, who splits her time between Prague and Vienna and who is an advisor to the director of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, or ÚSTR. Blaive is giving interviews about research she’s done in the archives which revealed more cooperation with the former communist government than resistance to it.
I discussed in that earlier post why that conclusion is potentially problematic in itself. But that raises the question of the larger meaning of her findings. In part, that relates to improving our understanding of how dictatorships work, whether we choose to call them “totalitarian” or merely criminal.
Marek Švehla suggests another factor that could be at play.
He first argues that Blaive’s work is missing the forest for the trees.
I discussed in that earlier post why that conclusion is potentially problematic in itself. But that raises the question of the larger meaning of her findings. In part, that relates to improving our understanding of how dictatorships work, whether we choose to call them “totalitarian” or merely criminal.
Marek Švehla suggests another factor that could be at play.
He first argues that Blaive’s work is missing the forest for the trees.
The absolute rulers didn’t need to negotiate with any of their subjects, and to the extent they did so, it was in insubstantial spheres of life in the Czechoslovak state, not in the principal matters. For that, we don’t need to pay for who knows how expensive research in a specially established institution.
For example, research into the question of why Czechs so easily came to terms with the normalization regime [the re-imposition of stricter controls on political views after the Warsaw Pact invasion of August, 1968] says a lot about us, but little about the system that ruled this country and punished the thought that things could be different. In short, a dictatorial or totalitarian (whichever you prefer) regime can’t be characterized on the basis of the privileged or satisfied members of society, but rather by those most oppressed. In other words, you can’t put on one side of the scale 10 judicial murders and on the other 10 million satisfied vacation-goers and pretend that the second of those is equally important information for the judgment—and condemnation or, perhaps, commendation—of the regime. (Marek Švehla, “How satisfied were the satisfied vactioners?” Respekt 37, 11 – 17 Sept., 2017, pp. 10-11)
Wednesday, September 20, 2017
Just how bad was it?
It’s taken for granted in American discourse that communist rule in Eastern Europe was bad.
It was a police state in which people were punished for criticizing the government, or sometimes even for not supporting it visibly enough.
A wide range of books and music were banned because the governments thought they were bad influences.
The “Iron Curtain” had to be made into a full-on militarized border, not to keep the capitalists out, but to keep the citizens of the Soviet-bloc countries in. Some risked their lives to get out, and some of those made it, while others ended up dead or in prison.
And while the state-run economies did manage to industrialize formerly agrarian societies, but they brought stagnation in places like the Czech lands that started the communist period relatively advanced, and they had trouble everywhere with innovation and the efficient use of labor and capital, so that by the 1980s there was an obvious gap between the Soviet bloc and the west in terms of technology and the material standard of living of the median citizen.
So to an American it’s hardly a controversial statement to say that the communist regime here was bad.
But the Czechs—or at least some of them—are having an interesting discussion about just how bad it was, and about the meanings of specific words used to describe it.
In 2007 the Czech government created the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (USTR, Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů), focused on the Nazi occupation from 1939 to 1945 and the communist period of 1948 to 1989.
It was a police state in which people were punished for criticizing the government, or sometimes even for not supporting it visibly enough.
A wide range of books and music were banned because the governments thought they were bad influences.
The “Iron Curtain” had to be made into a full-on militarized border, not to keep the capitalists out, but to keep the citizens of the Soviet-bloc countries in. Some risked their lives to get out, and some of those made it, while others ended up dead or in prison.
And while the state-run economies did manage to industrialize formerly agrarian societies, but they brought stagnation in places like the Czech lands that started the communist period relatively advanced, and they had trouble everywhere with innovation and the efficient use of labor and capital, so that by the 1980s there was an obvious gap between the Soviet bloc and the west in terms of technology and the material standard of living of the median citizen.
So to an American it’s hardly a controversial statement to say that the communist regime here was bad.
But the Czechs—or at least some of them—are having an interesting discussion about just how bad it was, and about the meanings of specific words used to describe it.
In 2007 the Czech government created the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (USTR, Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů), focused on the Nazi occupation from 1939 to 1945 and the communist period of 1948 to 1989.
Friday, September 15, 2017
Who watches the watchers
As I wrote about in an earlier post about goings-on in Prague, the man who’s most likely to be prime minister after next month’s elections is also facing trial for having used fraudulent bookkeeping to get an EU subsidy to a farm/resort he owned.
Last week, parliament debated whether to strip Andrej Babiš and a colleague of parliamentary immunity so that they could stand trial. They voted pretty decisively to do that, but of course not everyone was happy with the whole situation.
Bohuslav Chalupa, a member of Babiš’s ANO party, said:
He’s also illustrating one of my “favorite” types of arguments, one that only works if you assume that you’re right about something else besides the thing you’re arguing. Only he’s not even doing that right.
Last week, parliament debated whether to strip Andrej Babiš and a colleague of parliamentary immunity so that they could stand trial. They voted pretty decisively to do that, but of course not everyone was happy with the whole situation.
Bohuslav Chalupa, a member of Babiš’s ANO party, said:
What happens once the court, say, proves or doesn’t prove Mr. Babiš’s guilt in this affair? What punishment will there be for those who falsely accused him, right before the elections, motivated by ANO’s high popularity? And I mean politically punished as well. Whether for instance the investigator will be dishonorably discharged from the Police of the Czech Republic?As Respekt comments, Mr. Chalupa is presenting here his idea of independent policy investigation. (“Fokus agenda”, Respekt, Sep. 11 – 17, p. 22)
He’s also illustrating one of my “favorite” types of arguments, one that only works if you assume that you’re right about something else besides the thing you’re arguing. Only he’s not even doing that right.
Friday, September 8, 2017
Babiš and the briar patch
I wrote in my initial report from here about the corruption case surrounding Andrej Babiš.
He’s one of the richest people in post-communist Europe and a member of parliament, and he was the minister of finance until her resigned under the pressure of some apparently incriminating evidence about involvement in corruption.
The police now say they have enough evidence to take him to trial, so they’ve asked the parliament to hand him over for trial by suspending his immunity as a member of that body.
It wasn’t clear whether parliament would go along, but in the end they did, by an overwhelming vote: 123 out of 134 present in favor of suspending Babiš’s immunity, with four against (and apparently 7 abstaining).
For Babiš’s colleague Jaroslav Faltýnek was handed over by a vote of 120 out of 133, with five against.
(The quotes and data here are from Lidové noviny.)
In the parliamentary debate, Babiš’s substantive defense seems to be that the money wasn’t misspent, but was all used for the intended purpose of developing The Stork’s Nest, rather than being stashed away somewhere in Panama. “If I wanted to commit subsidy fraud, there’d be nothing easier than setting up an offshore firm somewhere in Cyprus. Nobody would have traced it there.”
He’s one of the richest people in post-communist Europe and a member of parliament, and he was the minister of finance until her resigned under the pressure of some apparently incriminating evidence about involvement in corruption.
The police now say they have enough evidence to take him to trial, so they’ve asked the parliament to hand him over for trial by suspending his immunity as a member of that body.
It wasn’t clear whether parliament would go along, but in the end they did, by an overwhelming vote: 123 out of 134 present in favor of suspending Babiš’s immunity, with four against (and apparently 7 abstaining).
For Babiš’s colleague Jaroslav Faltýnek was handed over by a vote of 120 out of 133, with five against.
(The quotes and data here are from Lidové noviny.)
In the parliamentary debate, Babiš’s substantive defense seems to be that the money wasn’t misspent, but was all used for the intended purpose of developing The Stork’s Nest, rather than being stashed away somewhere in Panama. “If I wanted to commit subsidy fraud, there’d be nothing easier than setting up an offshore firm somewhere in Cyprus. Nobody would have traced it there.”
Thursday, September 7, 2017
How do things die?
We begin this episode with a light discussion of the proper terms to use when dogs die, but then progress through the more serious topic of the burkini (trust me, as it’s being discussed here, that is a more serious topic), which leads in turn to choice of allies and ultimately, how we know anything.
The Christian Democratic – People’s Party (KDU-ČSL) is a small party with a relatively committed base among religious Catholics (unfortunately for the party, that’s an elderly and shrinking population). After their disastrous results in the 2010 elections, they chose a new head, a young guy, a veterinarian, Václav Bělobrádek.
A fresh face.
The kind of guy who will scold a woman on Facebook for posting about her sadness that her dog died.
This part gets very tricky to explain, because Bělobrádek is obsessing about the choice among many different words for the end of life, and the punch is in the connotations that each one has for a Czech speaker, because the translations more or less overlap, but I’ll do my best to render his post into English with the appropriate flavor for an English speaker.
The woman described her dog’s passing with the verb “umřít,” which slovnik.seznam.cz translates as “die / exit / decease / pass away”. From those options, let’s go with “die,” and see what Bělobrádek—a veterinarian—had to say about the matter.
The Christian Democratic – People’s Party (KDU-ČSL) is a small party with a relatively committed base among religious Catholics (unfortunately for the party, that’s an elderly and shrinking population). After their disastrous results in the 2010 elections, they chose a new head, a young guy, a veterinarian, Václav Bělobrádek.
A fresh face.
The kind of guy who will scold a woman on Facebook for posting about her sadness that her dog died.
This part gets very tricky to explain, because Bělobrádek is obsessing about the choice among many different words for the end of life, and the punch is in the connotations that each one has for a Czech speaker, because the translations more or less overlap, but I’ll do my best to render his post into English with the appropriate flavor for an English speaker.
The woman described her dog’s passing with the verb “umřít,” which slovnik.seznam.cz translates as “die / exit / decease / pass away”. From those options, let’s go with “die,” and see what Bělobrádek—a veterinarian—had to say about the matter.
He didn’t die. Only people die. Animals perish, pass on, snuff it (in the case of animals, this doesn’t have a vulgar connotation), drop dead, extinguish, are killed, are cut down … Giving animals human characteristics and applying human terms to them (die, food, eat, take a poop) is modernist, leftist, and liberal, typical of bourgeois eco-ethno-bio scrawny folks with beads around their necks, earings in their noses, belly buttons, and eyebrows, with loose-hanging skirts and drinking tea from a bowl.
Friday, September 1, 2017
This week in Prague
My family and I are spending my sabbatical in Prague for the 2017-18 academic year, as we did in 2010-11. I’ll be based for the year at Czech University of Life Sciences (in Czech, Česká zemědělská univerzita, or Czech Agricultural University).
Part of what I do when I’m here is sample from the local media to try to build a sense of what’s going on in the society. The picture that develops is, like any, incomplete and shaped not just by what I’m observing but by the biases I bring, as well as my substantial but imperfect background knowledge.
The Czech Republic, or Czechia, to use the term that the country has adopted as the official short form of its name in English, is in some sense an unimportant place: 10 million people speaking a language that few foreigners bother to learn, a country outside the “core” of the European Union, a place unfamiliar enough to Americans that after the Boston Marathon bombing, Fox News put up a map that showed the Czech Republic but labeled it “Chechnya”. (Well, that’s Fox News, so I guess that last point doesn’t prove much.)
And yet, like almost anything in the world, we can learn from it if we pay attention, and the contrasts with the U.S. can help us see our own society in a new light. The U.S. has been largely the master of its own fate for a couple of centuries; the Czech lands have been part of others’ imperia for most of the last five centuries. The U.S. has continued under the same written constitution since 1789; the Czech lands experienced seven different regimes just in the 20th century. In the 20th century U.S. culture outgrew its inferiority complex relative to Europe and became the world’s dominant cultural force, first with jazz, but then with movies, rock, rap, etc.; Czechs have a proud cultural heritage, but it’s more of a specialty taste than a mass phenomenon.
The title of this post is aspirational, expressing a hope that I will follow through on writing regularly about the political and economic scene around me. I will necessarily be writing from my own particular areas of concern, but I aim to catch the interest of an open-minded American reader.
Driving in from the airport, I noticed that the trees in the median of Europe Ave. were numbered: 23, 22, 21, … I asked the cab driver what they were for. “Just identification, maybe for gathering data. Maybe some company wants to sponsor them. Maybe it’s the EU.”
There is a high degree of euroskepticism here, and this off-hand remark by the cabby seemed part of that. Anything that has an aroma of senseless bureaucratic meddling is probably the fault of “Europe.”
This is an unavoidable topic in the run-up to October’s parliamentary elections. One of the larger parties here, ODS (Civil Democratic Party) has toyed with euroskepticism for years. Now they’re playing this interesting game of declaring themselves to be pro-EU while undercutting that by making demands about negotiating a permanent option for the Czech Republic to not join the euro currency that circulates in most of the EU countries. (Marek Švehla, “Useful idiots and Protectorate scribblers”, Respekt, 21-27 August, 2017, p. 11)
Part of what I do when I’m here is sample from the local media to try to build a sense of what’s going on in the society. The picture that develops is, like any, incomplete and shaped not just by what I’m observing but by the biases I bring, as well as my substantial but imperfect background knowledge.
The Czech Republic, or Czechia, to use the term that the country has adopted as the official short form of its name in English, is in some sense an unimportant place: 10 million people speaking a language that few foreigners bother to learn, a country outside the “core” of the European Union, a place unfamiliar enough to Americans that after the Boston Marathon bombing, Fox News put up a map that showed the Czech Republic but labeled it “Chechnya”. (Well, that’s Fox News, so I guess that last point doesn’t prove much.)
And yet, like almost anything in the world, we can learn from it if we pay attention, and the contrasts with the U.S. can help us see our own society in a new light. The U.S. has been largely the master of its own fate for a couple of centuries; the Czech lands have been part of others’ imperia for most of the last five centuries. The U.S. has continued under the same written constitution since 1789; the Czech lands experienced seven different regimes just in the 20th century. In the 20th century U.S. culture outgrew its inferiority complex relative to Europe and became the world’s dominant cultural force, first with jazz, but then with movies, rock, rap, etc.; Czechs have a proud cultural heritage, but it’s more of a specialty taste than a mass phenomenon.
The title of this post is aspirational, expressing a hope that I will follow through on writing regularly about the political and economic scene around me. I will necessarily be writing from my own particular areas of concern, but I aim to catch the interest of an open-minded American reader.
Driving in from the airport, I noticed that the trees in the median of Europe Ave. were numbered: 23, 22, 21, … I asked the cab driver what they were for. “Just identification, maybe for gathering data. Maybe some company wants to sponsor them. Maybe it’s the EU.”
There is a high degree of euroskepticism here, and this off-hand remark by the cabby seemed part of that. Anything that has an aroma of senseless bureaucratic meddling is probably the fault of “Europe.”
This is an unavoidable topic in the run-up to October’s parliamentary elections. One of the larger parties here, ODS (Civil Democratic Party) has toyed with euroskepticism for years. Now they’re playing this interesting game of declaring themselves to be pro-EU while undercutting that by making demands about negotiating a permanent option for the Czech Republic to not join the euro currency that circulates in most of the EU countries. (Marek Švehla, “Useful idiots and Protectorate scribblers”, Respekt, 21-27 August, 2017, p. 11)
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