Part IV: Romani voters of fascists and ultra-conservatives in the Czech Republic are asking for the dogs to be set on them

A petite girl told the rest of her classmates that Roma should “go back where they came from”. I told her that they were born here and are citizens of the Czech Republic. The first Roma came here at some time in the 14th or early 15th century. She replied that they had come from somewhere else before that. I asked her what she would do if the Celts or Germans were to ask us Czechs to leave our country because they were here before us. “I certainly would not leave,” she retorted. “So why do you want that of others? Are you going to chase everybody who bothers you out of here? You’ll be all alone here in no time,” I said. Her reaction: “Bullshit…”

A boy sitting next to her took up her line of reasoning: “We should renew the concentration camps and the gas chambers and push them in there.” The four teachers present stayed silent and pretended their pupil had just solved a mathematical equation. I didn’t have any answer that the boy would have taken note of, to say nothing of recognizing as an argument, so my response was: “So yeah, but you will have to take all the corpses out and transport them to the crematorium to burn them.” “Sure,” was his reply. Some of his classmates nodded their heads in agreement.

We can look at this in various ways: A poor upbringing at home, a poor school system, bad teachers, the wrong crowd where he lives…. However, all of this comes from the atmosphere in society, from what WE OURSELVES are still willing to tolerate – or not. It depends on the degree to which a society is willing to defend its own stability and values. Some people will not understand how important stability is until the moment when the repercussions of the wrong atmosphere in society turn against them and their loved ones. This could happen as murderous shoot-ups of schools, or attacks on people whose opinions differ.

The mirror of powerlessness

Violent campaigns against Romani people (and foreign nationals) have been underway almost since the early 1990s here, including about 30 racist murders. A series of arson attacks culminated in the attempted murder of a eight-member family in Vítkov, and now the courts are granting the perpetrators of that arson early release from prison. Many attacks, conflicts and demonstrations have also happened on the basis of lies alleging that Romani people have done something wrong in Litvínov, Varnsdorf, Rumburk, Ostrava, Havířov, Opava, Břeclav, Ústí nad Labem, Děčín, Duchcov, Česká Budějovice….

Non-Romani locals living at the Janov housing estate in Litvínov hid weapons in their homes for the pogromists, in other places the neighbors of the Roma, together with neo-Nazis, marched through the ghettos shouting “Gypsies to the gas chambers”, etc., including in Vítkov. Extremists and fanaticized ordinary people did the same thing the Nazi militants did in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. Frequently the police merely looked on, more concerned for the rights of the racists than for the civil and human rights of their innocent fellow-citizens whose complexions are darker.

I did not actually comprehend why some police officers are racist and xenophobic until I visited that school, which was either unable or unwilling to explain to those children what a calamity Nazism and communism were for humanity. Instead they invited two activists to comment and then “enjoy” the reflection of their own powerlessness.

Change the algorithm, change people’s minds

The longer the atmosphere in society grows tense, the more people’s minds transform to adapt to the circumstances. The instruments of our minds stop working when the environment to which they were necessary no longer exists. The scale of values according to which we operated in the past transforms, sometimes radically. We have intimate knowledge of examples of this: While in the 1990s it was impolite even just to joke about racism in society, the atmosphere in society today is inclined towards racism and plays into its hands.

Social media has been and still is of significant aid to the extremists, as through the algorithms which have been intentionally set up to promote negative emotions, starting with hate, into the center of the spectrum in society, the environment has entirely transformed itself, both offline and online. For that reason, racism is no longer widely perceived as a crime, but as a legitimate opinion. The owners of the social media platforms set up the algorithms this way because the anger of their users makes them stay longer on the platforms and visit more web pages, which means they see more advertisements and there is more profit. A few oligarchs are influencing the whole world to the detriment of democracy for even higher profits.

While in the 1990s an anonymous correspondent would have been mocked as a coward, the culture of the Internet has turned anonymity into a preference. Few people are willing to stand behind their radical opinions with their real names. Instead, this rising number of cowards deceptively claim that they remain anonymous because they are not “allowed to say anything” here. That’s where their main assault begins. After the racism, which has been elevated to part of the mainstream by those espousing it, come the lies, the disinformation, the conspiracy theories, the attacks on people of a different opinion, in short, all that is “good” for transforming the environment further and shifting thinking as a consequence.

The enemies of liberal democracy

The main interest in transforming our scale of values is held by those who hate liberal democracy and want to eliminate it everywhere they can: First place goes to Russia and China, but this is also about Iran, Afghanistan’s Taliban, and other Islamist fundamentalists. We know for a fact that Russia and China have factories for “chaos production” which are spreading conspiracy theories and disinformation in the Czech Republic and legitimizing extremist ideas – they want to make the population feel insecure by creating an atmosphere in which nobody knows what is and is not true anymore. Then it could even “become true”, for instance, that two of the most repugnant mass murders in history, Hitler and Stalin, were actually “excellent” statesmen.

We also know that the enemies of liberal democracy are greatly aided by the domestic fifth column, the “useful idiots”. These are the fanatics, the fundamentalists, the ideologically confused, the people whose values are very weakly anchored, those who are bitter and hateful and the opportunists who feed off of them. We have different names for them: fascists, “losers”, ultra-conservatives… and we can add to their numbers some of those who want an instant “peace” between Russia and Ukraine, although not all of them, because some are sincere about wanting that conflict to end.

The politicians who are pushing the atmosphere in the wrong direction with the aid of hatred toward minorities (LGBT+ people, refugees, Roma, etc.) have been scoring electoral successes in recent decades. Their nationalist populism can be categorized as extremist. A fundamental step in that direction was also recently taken by the Association of Dissatisfied Citizens (ANO) movement of Andrej Babiš when, after the EP elections, he created a new group with the xenophobic parties there, parties which, up until then, had only been courted by Tomio Okamura and his fascists from the “Freedom and Direct Democracy” (SPD) party when it came to the Czech Republic.

That same new group has also been joined by Motorists Unite and the Oath (Přísaha) party from the Czech Republic, while the Okamurites have ended up in a new group with Germany’s AfD and the other ultra-right parties. This is also connected with the nationalist left, which in the Czech Republic is now represented by the ENOUGH! (STAČILO!) group, led by the communists. Under the leadership of Jana Maláčová, the Czech Social Democrats (Socdem) are heading that way as well.

Fanatics, idiots, narcissists and opportunists

To have an opinion that is different from everybody else’s is probably the most natural thing in the world. However, the fascists, “losers” and ultraconservatives are not interested in a discussion that might lead to correcting the errors of the current system. They want to return our civilization to the worst moments of the 20th century for which Nazism and communism are to blame. They call this the “change to the world order” and their efforts are meant to culminate in the establishment of an authoritarian or totalitarian regime here.

Maybe some of these politicians and their supporters are so mentally deficient that they do not realize how far they are going. Some are fanaticized and nothing will destroy their conviction that they are the saviors of this new age. Others represent a new type of politician for whom their own personal gain is more important than our democracy and its values, and that includes protecting minorities, including Romani people.

America’s demi-god, Donald Trump, is actually a narcissistic madman who literally despises liberal democracy. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán started as a liberal and is an ultra-conservative today for whom liberalism and plurality just get in the way. Slovakia’s Robert Fico & Co. evidently do not care about anything but their own advantage and power. Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu prefers to sacrifice his own nation and those of his neighbors than to give up power and the hope that he can evade trial for his corruption and fraud.

Babiš is making the same judgment call. He wants to run the Czech Republic like a company – in a firm, of course, there is no voting, the boss decides and everybody else has to follow his orders. Okamura doesn’t know how to make a living except by preaching hate, and he is earning enough “thanks” to the idiots who vote for him. The rising ultra-right parties led by Turek & Co. are mentally not much better than he is. As for the communists, there is no point in discussing them, as they were painstakingly practicing hatred of human beings during their many years of government before November 1989.

If some Romani people are now voting for any of these guys, they are voting against themselves. It’s as if they were telling them: “Please, turn us into third-class citizens as soon as possible. Set the dogs on us!”