Who's the true successor?

As anyone reading enough of my posts knows, I read a fair amount of Britské listy. The web site has a particular point of view, and so I keep asking myself whether the writers there are to some extent simply malcontents, making mountains out their molehills of disagreement with a legitimate government. But this issue of debt collection seems to go to something undeniably rotten in the state.

As detailed here, the current law was originally proposed in 1999, worked its way through the process, and was eventually signed into law by the president--at that time, the president was Václav Havel. The legislative process shaved a couple of excesses off the original form of the law, but left many of them in. It really does look like a legal regime meant to help unethical people get control of other people's assets by turning trivial debts into large sums and then blocking control over the victim's wealth.

And it's a multipartisan effort. The law was proposed by legislators from the Christian Democrats and from the Freedom Union (a now-defunct party with libertarian leanings). The government at the time, which didn't block its enactment, was headed by Miloš Zeman, a Social Democrat. It was signed by Havel, the great humanist and humanitarian whose life story seemed to embody the triumph of idealism even amidst the muck of real life and real politics. And it has since been carried on with narry a complaint by further governments, whether headed by ODS (the Civil Democratic Party) or ČSSD (the Social Democrats).

As another post asks in its title, Why aren't (at least) the left-wing parties intervening against the debt-collection extortion of the population? "How is it possible that when ČSSD was in power it allowed such a drastic privatization of one of the state's existing powers into the hands of a fistful of predatory entrepreneurs? Why hasn't the battle against the debt-collection lobby been topic number 1 of leftist politics for a long time already?" It's like the dog that doesn't bark--as the author says, one possible answer is that everyone who is or might be in power finds the current situation advantageous to themselves.

All of that is background for the following commentary about students and their political activities. The other piece of background is the fact that communist parties throughout the Soviet bloc made a big deal out of their anti-Nazi credentials. There were two parts of that credential. The first was the rather obvious contrast between communists on the left and Nazis on the right. The second was the fact that the Soviet Union played the largest single role in the defeat of Hitler's Germany. Conveniently overlooked were the facts that Stalin had seen fit to make a pact with Hitler to divide up the space between them, and that setting ideology aside, the Nazis and the Soviet communists shared a fondness for killing people or otherwise ruining their lives, either because of the victims' opposition to the ruling ideology, or just out of shear cussedness. But hey--bygones! What's important was that, by the end of World War II, everybody knew that Nazis were bad, everybody knew that communists were enemies of Nazis, and so if you encouraged people to have anti-Nazi demonstrations, you (the government) could have them doing something you approved of, even if they didn't have much use for you.

As I mentioned in another post, the recent local and Senate elections produced relatively strong results for the KSČM, the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia, which in turn has prompted a great deal of angst among people who identify the KSČM with the KSČ, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, that ruled from 1948 to 1989. Students from the gymnasium (high school) in the town of Třeboň demonstrated against the communists, eliciting the following response.

Open letter to the Třeboň students
Demonstrating against the KSČM in 2012 is like using a demonstration against the Naziism of 1989 to support the communist regime
by Boris Cvek

Dear students of the Třeboň gymnasium (and also all other students who are bothered by the KSČM),

I often hear or read about you, usually in admiring tones, about how you're supposed to be an emancipated, independent generation, which won't stand for the communists. But have you ever asked yourselves what's so horrible about the communists?

You must have answered that question by saying that, thanks to their ideology, anywhere in the world where communist parties have taken absolute power, they've murdered, jailed, tortured, and stolen.

Nothing of the sort can be expected of today's KSČM (except for the thievery it would represent if it were to adapt itself to today's system and support corruption and the theft of public funds the way the rest of the "democratic" parties do).

It's true that the KSČM has the word "communist" in its name and it is a particular successor of our country's repellent past of normalization. ["Normalization" was the reimposition of more repressive measures after the increasing openness of the 1960s, culminating in the Prague Spring of 1968.] Nonetheless, it bears no responsibility for the real wrongdoing and horror of the present day.

Today, the tradition of normalization thievery and lawlessness continues along the line of "right-wing" policy, from coupon privatization (whose founding father sits today in the Castle), light heating oil, the methanol affair, the unregulated system of usury and debt collection, and the general unobtainability of justice. [Coupon privatization was part of how state property was privatized after the fall of the communist government. There were complaints about the corruption involved. One of the intellectual fathers of the program was Václav Klaus, who is now the president and thus has an office in Prague Castle. A couple of months ago there was a scandal where methanol found its way into bootleg liquor, killing several people and blinding others. I don't know what the deal is with the light heating oil.]

If you're truly troubled by human suffering and by injustice, then you must demonstrate against today's government, you must concern yourselves with the situation of the Roma from around the railway station in Ostrava or with the tragedies of families destroyed by usurers.

If you demonstrate against the KSČM today, you would be like students in 1989 demonstrating against the Nazis, thereby providing cover for the communist regime of that time and for its crimes.

You too would serve the pro-regime media who want to draw attention away from serious contemporary problems.

The growing support for the communists was and is related to the fact that people have been pushed into misery, that democracy hasn't been working, that the ruling stratum of rich people has been decimating the society.

So if you really were opposed to the KSČM and wanted to take the wind from the communists' sails, you would push for our thieving and fraudulent democracy, built on normalization principles, to become a real democracy, where the law functions and where people can live decently and securely and without fear of criminal mafias.

Return of the Wild Wild East

Back in the early 1990s, just after the fall of communism in the Soviet bloc, there was a minor stampede of young people from English-speaking countries into the former communist states--including me.

Motivations differed. Some wanted a cool place to hang out. I was interested in learning Czech as part of my bizarre path from music school to economics. Pretty much all of us were drawn by the relatively cheap cost of living and the easy ability for a native speaker of English with a college degree to get a job teaching English.

And we were drawn by a sense of adventure.

from http://www.overthinkingit.com/2009/02/05/cowboys-communists-and-capitalists-in-stolis-wild-wild-east/,
though the commentary there suggests a lack of awareness of the background

"Why I'll vote communist"

For background on this article, see here.

I thought this piece was of interest because it struck me as representative--not in the sense that this is necessarily the "average" voter of the communist party in the Czech Republic, but because, along the way, he touches on many of the reasons that different people might make that choice.

As usual, my explanatory comments are in italics, surrounded by square brackets.

Why I’m going to vote for the communists, or, Why this is no country for old people
by Radek Tůma

I’m now unemployed for the second time, and only because it’s possible here to tunnel without being punished. [“Tunneling” is Czech slang for extracting the value from a company for yourself, and leaving behind a worthless shell.] I’ve had five different jobs: the first two were in the state sector, the others in the private sector. Two of the three private firms fell victim to tunneling out—so symptomatic for our times. I and many others lost our jobs so that some bastards could buy more cars, villas, and yachts. They buy up the shares of a firm, eat the meat, spit out the bones, and move on to the next house on the street. Once again I’m going through this degrading merry-go-round of looking for work—when you get an answer at all, it’s something along the lines of, “We’ll call you” (meaning: stop bothering us) or, “We truly value your experience quite highly, but we regret to inform you that we gave preference to other applicants (meaning: You’re old).


The logo of the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia,
from http://tema.novinky.cz/kscm



All dressed in white?

I've written elsewhere about the particular brand of corruption in the Czech Republic. This may not be a unique way of going about it, but the Czech approach seems to be centered in the prosecutorial function. That is, make sure the "right" people hold the position of prosecutor, and you can sleep soundly knowing that, however much your corrupt behavior in office gets written about in the press, you'll never see the inside of a jail cell, or even a courtroom for that matter.

The current Czech government was put together after elections in late May, 2010. The coalition parties were sort of an odd ménage à trois, but one of the things holding them together was their stated commitment to deal with corruption, and one of the great hopes in that effort was Jiří Pospíšil, the minister of justice.

Pospíšil was a young guy who'd earned a law degree from the law school of the University of West Bohemia (and unlike some of his fellow alums, he actually earned it--the law school was caught up in scandal when it turned out that there were mayors and others scattered across the political landscape who held law degrees from West Bohemia, but whose transcripts included passing grades for exams they'd evidently never taken).