Part III: The Czech fascists are not patriots

Not patriots

These fascists, losers, ultraconservatives and most of those who want “peace” in Ukraine claim to be patriots while spreading hatred toward anybody whom they do not consider to be patriots. Such people evidently do not love their nation, because they cannot stand anybody with a different opinion to theirs – which most of the rest of us do hold. What they associate with the term “patriotism” is just their own attempt to dictate to everybody else what they believe patriotism is and how it is meant to be shown. They don’t even love their own country, because they want to return it into the hands of the Mordor that made us bow down, humiliated us and occupied us before. Anybody who follows events in Russia, above all the imprisonment and murder of journalists, opposition politicians, or people from the nonprofit world, sees clearly that Putin has fully returned Mordor to the methods of Brezhnev and Stalin.

Not only are these people not patriots, they are giving the very word an aggressive tone that is inappropriate, because real patriotism feeds on kindliness towards one’s country and nation, not intolerance. Real patriots have no need of enemies, they feel no need to attack foreigners or other nations, they are not interested in defining themselves in opposition to anybody else; rather, they take care of their own. Hate feeds nationalism. We should therefore call these people chauvinist nationalists – or the milder term, nationalists.

The mentality of such persons was aptly described by the author Umberto Eco in his novel The Prague Cemetery, in which an agent of the Russian secret service says: “We pray that there will always be some kind of Jew here whom it is necessary to fear and hate. If we are to give people hope, there has to be an enemy here. Somebody said patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel: Whoever doesn’t have any moral principles usually veils themselves in a flag, and the bastards always invoke the purity of their race. National identity is the last weapon of the outcast. Their purpose is based on hate, on their hatred for those who are not the same as them. We have to cultivate hate as a civic passion. The enemy is the enemy of the nation. We always have to hate somebody to feel redeemed of our misery.”

Let’s take a closer look at some of these people here so we can learn what these “comrades” from the chateau in Příčovy are fine with, or rather, what bothers them much less than liberal democracy does.

Josef Skála is a Stalinist

Josef Skála is known to be a Stalinist. As an ideological collaborator with the Czechoslovak secret police before the democratic transition in 1989, he chose the cover name “Josif” (a reference to Stalin, one of the cruellest dictators in history, born Josif Vissarionovich Djugashvili.)

Skála is a convicted criminal. In June of 2020, he alleged that the massacre of 22,000 Polish prisoners of war by the Soviets in the Katyn forest was a “Nazi-constructed story” and that the exhumation of their bodies from the mass graves was a myth that never happened. In March 2024, the Czech Supreme Court sentenced him to eight months in prison, postponed for a year and a half. Mikhail Gorbachov, President of the USSR, apologized to the Poles in 1990 for the genocide perpetrated by the Soviet political police the NKVD (later called the KGB, today called the FSB). In October 1992, Boris Yeltsin, the President of Russia, handed over documents about this crime to Polish President Lech Wałęsa. Among the documents is the order for the execution of the Poles murdered in Katyn, signed by Stalin.

Skála has also authored strange thoughts about the industrial pig farm that once stood on the site of the former WWII-era concentration camp at Lety u Písku. He said that “there were many more camps which were frequently worse than the one in Lety”. It sounds as if he is responding to some claim that Lety was worse than Auschwitz, which nobody has ever said. The fact that some camps may have been even worse does not justify the atrocities at Lety, either. He also lamented that “pig cultivation is being destroyed” by the razing of the industrial pig farm to build the memorial at Lety, and alleged that “the owner of the pig farm is operating at a mammoth loss, he will be compensated from our taxes, and how much it will cost is being kept a secret from us.”

Communists love to discuss things with the aid of economic arguments because they have never had the slightest idea about what ethics are. Skála, therefore, failed to mention that it was the communists who built the industrial pig farm at Lety in 1973. The message to Skála, therefore, is this: If you had honored the Romani victims of the Holocaust when you were in charge, the state would not have had to buy out the industrial pig farm later.

Miroslav Ševčík is a Klausist

“I am supporting Associate Professor Miroslav Ševčík in his struggle…” Tomáš Vandas, chair of the Workers’ Social Justice Party (DSSS), has posted to Facebook. Beneath this message he published a photograph of the Klausist Ševčík, who before the democratic transition in 1989 was an advocate of a centrally planned economy and who, during the Velvet Revolution, was transformed in no time at all into an advocate of a free, absolutely unregulated market, as was being pushed for here by the ideological father of all those who “tunnelled” away the country’s resources, Václav Klaus, so that those assets could be privatized by all of the collaborators, the communists and the secret police, in other words, this new type of entrepreneur, the “comrades” of Klaus.

Before November 1989, Ševčík was chair of the founding organization of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) at the University of Economics (VŠE), and prior to that he had been a longtime member of the Socialist Youth Union (SSM). He joined the party in 1984. He claims to have been opposed to the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet army, but if that had been the case, they would not have accepted him into the KSČ. After the beginning of what would be more than 20 years of occupation, the communists purged the party of many members who disagreed with it. Věra Čáslavská said the following about Ševčík: “It seems sad to me that a person who impacted not just our own lives [in the dispute over the death of her husband, Odložil – Ševčík was his nephew] but who also harmed many students of the VŠE in Prague still gets a green light. That is likely because very few people know that Mr. Ševčík was, before the [Velvet] Revolution, an ardent communist who even taught Marxism-Leninism at the University of Economics! And he was strict! He also no longer boasts of the fact that he ran as a candidate during the extraordinary convention of the KSČ on the [Velvet] Revolution.“ He changed coats after 1989. “From being a communist he became a free marketeer overnight and even established an Institute for that. He is an intelligent, thinking person who consciously espoused the totalitarian, undemocratic doctrine and regime and took advantage of it for his personal benefit. He stuck with it until the last moment of the fall of communism. Such a person cannot be on the level…,” Čáslavská said.

The Seznam Zprávy website has reported on a publication by the communist General Staff-Intelligence Administration. From those records it can be seen that Ševčík, at the turn of 1987 and 1988, met with representatives of communist military counter-intelligence for several conspiratorial meetings, as they wanted to take advantage of sending him to the University of Vienna, where he was planning to take a sabbatical. The communist intelligence officers mention his willingness to collaborate and characterize him as “full of initiative, hard-working, principled and conscientious”. They ultimately stopped courting him because Ševčík kept it a secret from them that somebody in his family had emigrated to the West. Ševčík naturally denies having met with them, just as he has never mentioned his high position in the KSČ and his service to that violent regime.

Until recently, Ševčík was Dean of the Faculty of the National Economy at VŠE. He probably found the school boring, because in his free time he attended different public events held by losers where he was always glad to see his friends from the time when they had waged jihad together for the success of the communist five-year-plans and shockworkers. His most distinctive initiative was his attempt last year, together with a mob, to remove the flag of Ukraine that has been hanging from the building of the National Museum in Prague, an action through which these chauvinist nationalists wanted to deny others their right to express their opinion of Russia’s war against Ukraine. At the time, he excused himself by saying he had just “accidentally” passed by there. Ševčík also alleged that he has been representing himself alone at these events, despite having been introduced to the crowd on that particular occasion as Dean of the Faculty of the National Economy at VŠE and a department head, so he was not speaking as a mere citizen.

For example, he spoke at this demonstration in September 2022:

Ševčík has since been removed from his post as Dean on the basis of this activity as well. True, he was just removed because he lied about this activity, not for any other reason. The current Dean reportedly wants to return him to the Faculty leadership as her Vice-Dean. Some people simply have zero consciences and bullet-proof vests instead of human skin. They feel great when they are among their own at the annual meetings of fascists, losers, ultraconservatives and most of those who want “peace” in Ukraine, which are held at the chateau in Příčovy, Czech Republic.

Tomáš Vandas is a neo-Nazi

After November 1989, Tomáš Vandas was a functionary in the Republican Party (SPR-RSČ) under the infamous racist Sládek. He then established the Workers’ Party (Dělnická strana – DS). In February 2010, the Supreme Administrative Court dissolved that party, ruling that it was a neo-Nazi effort to continue Hitler’s National Socialism. “The Workers’ Party, during this proceeding, has alleged it has nothing to do with Nazism, but the evidence submitted has obviously refuted that claim. Given the fact that the court finds it is the intention of the DS to replace the current system of democracy and the rule of law with the ideology of National Socialism and totalitarianism, there can be no doubt that this is unconstitutional… The DS also does not declare it will refrain from using violence to achieve its aims, intentionally sparking such violence through its own activity while simultaneously celebrating the violence perpetrated by its members and sympathizers…,” says the verdict.

Vandas was ready for this verdict and just moved his party into an already-prepared shell that he called the Workers’ Social Justice Party (Dělnická strana sociální spravedlnosti – DSSS), where he continued his work, making pacts with German and Slovak fascists, including Marian Kotleba. He swept through every Romani ghetto he could find so that his adherents could chant “Gypsies to the gas chambers” while he heaped abuse on democracy, foreign nationals, humanism, liberalism, minorities, nonprofit organizations, refugees and Romani people. In 2011, he was convicted and sentenced for his remarks defaming minorities. He was spared by President Klaus – who else? – through the amnesty he announced for prisoners, which was in aid of all extremists and Klausists.

Vandas has had good luck – the time has come when the other extremists here now understand him to be their comrade, those who are not bothered by Nazis and who have become ideologically intertwined with them during their struggle against liberal democracy.

In the next article in this series, I will focus on the enemy we’ve been ignoring: Fanaticism.