Petr Pithart: Government of the Czech Republic, you have a scandal on your hands

This scandal has been underway for 20 years and everybody, all our administrations, have always known and still know today how it works. When I left politics, I and others urged the government of the day (it doesn’t matter which it was) to finally adopt a comprehensive law on social housing.

No government has ever done anything useful about this, at the most they’ve just given more resources to the welfare system which – amazingly, who could have predicted it? – in some mysterious way ended up in the landlords’ pockets.

How to cash in on poverty

By doing this, we are continuing the historical devastation and the displacement of those living in the Sudetenland. First we rid that region, or basically those “border areas”, of Germans, both the guilty and the innocent, and we still have a bad conscience about that, which is to say, our conscience is not clear, and so we make mistake after mistake there.

That’s how it is: I have sinned, and if I don’t fully admit it, and if I don’t regret it enough, if I don’t repent, then in a kind of secondary frenzy I pile sin upon sin to try and drown out the first one.

And so, we frequently displace the people in these already-displaced regions even further: There will be neither Germans there, nor Gypsies! We drive the latter from bad situations to even worse ones.

Specifically, this is the industrial production of misery on the one hand and wealth on the other. All within the letter of the law. Even laws can be trash, and for some, such trash is both convenient and lucrative.

This has gone so far that even the president is cautiously asking whether it can’t be resolved surgically by expropriating the owners of housing units that are unfit for human habitation. One could already sense what would follow such a question: The terrified howls of those who judge that such an expropriation would probably be the end of freedom and democracy.

Let’s remind ourselves, though, that it is possible to expropriate property in this country. Yes, only as the law allows, i.e., just with the consent of both chambers of Parliament, and yes, only in exchange for some compensation. In other words, not like under Beneš (a big part of the estates that were privately held, without compensation) or under Gottwald (a smaller part, but for all that in an exceptionally inhumane way -, let’s recall, for example, the displacement of “kulaks” in Czechoslovakia).

I am also anticipating an outcry, probably from somewhere on the right, that we would be heading into socialism (or perhaps communism in the North Korean style of totalitarianism) with this idea.

However, the developed world as a whole, during the centuries in which it created its wealth, has alternated between expropriation and privatization without falling into extremes.

Yes, sometimes this method of trial and error is a poor one, but it is rarely about the fight between capitalism and socialism. The developed world as a whole tries both. In that world, such expropriation does not lead to the Great October Revolution, but to the corresponding compensation for the expropriated property.

Surgery for the Sudetenland

In the north of our country, in the Sudetenland (and not just there), any possible expropriation requires the precision of a surgeon. The tissue has already died in some places, but in those places our fellow citizens are living, or rather, stagnating. Of course, the rest of us don’t care about them, for the most part.

The tissue has died in those places, the residents of the Sudetenland first keep being displaced and then, today, the heartless traffickers in poverty inhabit the zone. We watch this on our television screens on an all but daily basis. We feel this doesn’t concern us, because “it’s just the Sudetenland”, or “it’s only the gypsies!” I am ashamed of this.

To be clear: I’m not calling for expropriation, I’m just admitting that all the attempts of all the administrations so far over the last 20 years have failed.

Now it rather looks like the current “fiscally responsible” government will scrape something out of the strained budget and pour it into more benefits, just so we don’t turn the Czech Republic into “North Korea”. This is called the rule of ideology over common sense.