Proletarian writers
May 17, 2024
Finding itself increasingly dislodged by resistant populations in other parts of the globe, US imperialism is tightening its vice-like grip across virtually the European continent. The days of a so-called “iron curtain” dividing Europe squarely down the middle are long gone. Today, with the lone exception of Belarus, Europe is united in being completely and utterly dominated by and chained to the US regime and its interests.
The Czech Republic is no exception. President Petr Pavel is slavishly pro-USA even by European Union standards, aligning with Washington on pretty much everything. He is currently busy giving away his country’s entire stock of artillery shells to his fellow US puppets in Kiev, supposedly need to “push back the Russian military” (but far more likely to be used to shell the civilian suburbs of Donetsk city).
It seems highly improbable that ordinary Czechs would support such a wasteful and criminal policy were they to be given any say in the matter. So why are they not consulted? Isn’t the western democratic model supposed to be all about giving the people a voice? Unless Czechia is not really a democracy at all ..?
This reality, blindingly obvious to anyone with a degree of class-consciousness, is now starting to dawn even on some passionate (delusional) believers in the wonders of so-called ‘free-market democracy’ (ie, bourgeois dictatorship).
Totalitarian practices in ‘free’ Czechia
Cecílie Jílkova is a Czech investigative journalist and the daughter of a famous ‘dissident’ (a euphemism for pro-US agitators in the former USSR and eastern European socialist countries). Under the knee-jerk anticommunist title of My country is returning to totalitarianism, she recently described in considerable detail various acts of journalistic and political repression being carried out by the current (‘liberal’) Czech regime, in league with the EU, the USA, Britain, various NGOs linked to notorious imperialist financier George Soros and sundry other capitalist mafia.
One example she gave was the treatment of schoolteacher Martina Bednářová, who was secretly recorded by a pupil during a lesson in which she dared to question the hysterical pro-Ukraine narrative in the Czech media and to point out evidence of Ukrainian war crimes against ethnic Russian civilians. Not only was she immediately sacked by the school, but she was even arrested and put on trial for the Orwellian crime of “genocide denial”, which carries a prison sentence of between six months and three years.
It doesn’t take a genius to see the similarities between the above case and the various apocryphal accounts of dubious authenticity that used to circulate during the cold war concerning children in the “totalitarian” eastern bloc being trained to report their parents and teachers for wrongthink. Except this has really happened – and in a country we’re told is a ‘free democracy’ rather than a ‘totalitarian dictatorship’.
Jílkova also revealed a network of NGOs (so-called ‘non-governmental’ organisations, which are in reality the exact opposite), flush with EU and US (via Soros) money, that are entirely dedicated to stamping out “disinformation” in the digital sphere. In other words, wholesale political censorship of the kind we used to be told was only practised by ‘totalitarian’ (communist) regimes.
In her article, Jílkova highlighted the role of Vera Jourová, now the vice-president of the European Commission for ‘values and transparency’ (!) Hailing from the same anticommunist, ‘dissident’ circles as the author, she simply cannot understand why her former fellow in the fight for liberal freedoms should now be advocating a self-defeating ‘totalitarian’ censorship that Jílkova despairingly described as “fighting Putin with his own methods”.
The blind alley of anticommunism
Cecílie Jílkova’s views are not at all uncommon: she joins a growing group of honest investigative journalists who are aware of the crimes of western imperialist regimes and do their best to hold governments and institutions to account, but yet still unquestioningly believe all the lies that those same criminal regimes have told them about the former Soviet Union and the east European people’s democracies (and also about modern Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba etc). Examples more familiar to our readers include commentators like Chris Hedges in the USA and Jonathan Cook in Britain, both of whom hold similar positions, and who combine sincere and brilliant journalism with a total lack of class-conscious understanding.
Indeed, the so-called Prague Spring of 1968, hallowed and glorified by bourgeois historians and media for the past half-century, was essentially a movement of exactly these kind of naïve idealists – bankrolled all the way by the CIA, of course – who believed they could somehow obtain the luxuries they were convinced the workers of the west were enjoying whilst still retaining all the benefits of actually-existing socialism (jobs, housing, healthcare, education, pensions, culture and more).
Whatever one thinks of the Warsaw Pact intervention, it is undeniable that it allowed Czech workers to benefit from another two decades of socialist security, rather than succumbing to the inevitable ‘free-market’ hell and dramatic collapse in living standards that Dubcek’s so-called “socialism with a human face” would inevitably have led to – as indeed did happen after 1989 throughout eastern Europe.
Jílkova asks: “Are we now going to jail communists as they did our parents? What, then, makes us different from them?” The answer is that communists suppressed pro-US liberal ideologues in the interests of the mass of the workers and toilers, in order to protect a system that enshrined meaningful employment as a human right for every worker in its national constitution; a system where homelessness, poverty, mass hunger and unemployment were things unknown; where a cradle-to-grave health system, education system and welfare system was available to every worker, regardless of race, religion, gender or any other discriminator other than his/her desire to work earnestly for the betterment of society.
The stooge regimes in power in eastern Europe today, on the other hand, jail and persecute any progressive and independent-minded thinker for the sake of the megaprofits of the western bankers and financiers who bankroll their sordid careers, in order to protect a system that systematically crushes and impoverishes the vast masses of the people, depriving them of all their real rights (the right to work, to eat, to have a roof, to healthcare, etc) whilst propagandising them to cherish such amazing ‘liberties’ as the ‘right’ to declare oneself whatever gender one pleases, the right to hold pornographic ‘Pride’ parades, or the ‘right’ to starve in a ditch if no capitalist exploiter can find a way to make money from your labour-power.