Workers' Social Justice Party has quietly shut down, but racism continues in the Czech Republic

It means the exact opposite. The DSSS has shut down because there are more right-wing extremists than ever before today, and not just in the Czech Republic, and that means the DSSS has had even less of a chance to influence political affairs here than it has in previous decades.

Today the DSSS would no longer be worth mentioning, as it directly influences politics just in a few local assemblies in small towns, if it didn’t have the “heroic era” of Czech racist violence and xenophobia under its belt. Its main representatives have not withdrawn from public life completely, but have joined a party called “Bezpečné ulice” [Safe Streets].

In that party, the former chair of the DSSS, Tomáš Vandas, fulfills the role of a charismatic frontrunning candidate (I’m being ironic, he has all the charisma of a police truncheon) and his former DSSS vice-chair, Jiří Štěpánek, is now the head of Safe Streets, probably because he has not had as much exposure as Vandas and is thus more acceptable to the Motorists Unite party and the other fascisizing fighters who want to wear a candidate’s uniform together with Vandas ahead of elections to parliament this fall.

The 2010 court-ordered dissolution of the Workers’ Party (Dělnická strana)

In 2010, the Supreme Administrative Court dissolved the Workers’ Party (Dělnická strana – DS) for being a neo-Nazi, racist, unconstitutional, xenophobic party that behaved like Hitler’s NSDAP, seeking to change the democratic order of the Czech Republic into a totalitarian one. “In its program and speeches, the Workers’ Party is continuing the ideology of German National Socialism, albeit partially in its ‘more modern’, neo-Nazi version… The Workers’ Party claimed, during the proceeding, to have nothing in common with Nazism, but the course of the proceeding and the evidence presented refuted that claim absolutely obviously. Given that the Court has discovered that the intention of the Workers’ Party is to replace the current ‘System’ of the democratic rule of law with National Socialism, an ideology that is totalitarian, it is impossible to doubt that this presumes the violation… of the Constitution… In the context of the proven collaboration of the DS with the neo-Nazi movement, the Court has also concluded that the DS also is not renouncing the use of violence to push through its aims, but that it is intentionally sparking violence through its actions, and that it also publicly praises and celebrates the violence committed by its members and sympathizers,” the Court’s judgment said.

In 2011, a court convicted Vandas of defaming minorities. He was saved from prison by the amnesty of Czech President Václav Klaus, which aided many convicted extremists and tunnelers.

After the DS was dissolved, these neo-Nazis filled the already-prepared shell of the DSSS. They continued to harm society through that party.

The era of pogroms

The Workers’ Party sent out self-appointed “patrols” of its members and skinheads from the ultra-right part of the political spectrum to Romani ghettos during the 2000s and 2010s. Those patrols played at being police officers, tried to tell people what they could and could not do, and provoked the locals.

Incidents arose from those provocations which were then exploited by the DS for its anti-Romani media propaganda and subsequent demonstrations, which were joined by the non-Romani neighbors of the Roma who had been targeted. These actions were associated with attempted pogroms, and the worst were probably the violence in Litvínov, Rumburk, Varnsdorf, Šluknov, Duchcov, Nový Bydžov, Krupka, České Budějovice, Ostrav and Havířov.

In addition to the DS and its youth organization (Dělnická mládež – Workers’ Youth) such violence was alternately organized by other extremist initiatives and parties, such as the National Party or National Resistance. However, in Rumburk it was the Czech Social Democratic Party (ČSSD) who made it possible, led by their lawmaker Foldyna, who would later join Tomio Okamura’s fascist “Freedom and Direct Democracy” (SPD) party.

At that Social Democratic demonstration, locals shouted the very worst racist insults and calls for violence, such as “Get your shovels and your pitchforks and let’s go get’em”, “We’ll bury them alive”, “We’ll burn them out”, and “Send them to gas chambers”. At the Janov housing estate in Litvínov, local non-Roma residents hid weapons in their own homes for those undertaking the attempted pogroms.

The non-Romani neighbors of the local Roma even marched together with neo-Nazis and shouted racist abuse at them in Vítkov, where the worst arson attack on Romani people in the Czech Republic had just been committed in 2009. The extremists and the fanaticized “ordinary” people in the Czech Republic undertook the same thing that the fighters for Nazism did in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s.

This frequently transpired while police just watched, or while they took more care to protect the rights of the racists than the civil and human rights of their innocent fellow citizens of a darker skin color. On the other hand, the police did manage to prevent the worst violence that could have resulted from these attempted pogroms.

Many innocent people bore the brunt of this and the atmosphere became oppressive. The main media outlets started reporting on any ordinary brawl in a pub between non-Roma and Roma as “Romani racism”, while antigypsyist disinformation and embellishments were used without fear of reprisal by media outlets, including mainstream ones, and by politicians.

That persists to this day. Intolerance of Romani people is obvious from many politicians and can be inferred from many media outlets even today: When reporting on the most banal of incidents, they immediately, joyfully announce that a Romani person was the perpetratorof it (or at least a Black person – see the election campaign of Tomio Okamura), but as was recently the case with the schoolgirl assaulted in Hodonín, the journalists did not even bother to mention that she was a Romani girl.

We call that selective justice: It only exists for whites here.

False accusations

In at least 15 locations throughout the Czech Republic, for instance, in Litvínov, Varnsdorf, Rumburk, Ostrava, Havířov, Opava, Břeclav, Ústí nad Labem, Děčín, Duchcov and České Budějovice, such protests were held against Romani people on the basis of fabricated allegations of assault in which Romani people were falsely accused. For instance, in Břeclav, a 15-year-old boy lied that three Romani men had allegedly brutally beaten him.

The boy invented the story to keep the real cause of his serious injuries from his mother. He had caused himself the injuries by falling while trying to show off a gymnastics trick to his friends – and failing.

The boy tried his trick on the eighth-floor railing of a building in the center of Břeclav. He fell one floor below, seriously injuring himself.

Lies that raise people’s passions and spark racist violence are being cultivated today, too. Recently two 17-year-olds in Litovel made up false allegations that Romani men had assaulted them.

From 2005 to 2015, there were many assaults on and beatings of Romani people by neo-Nazis and non-Romani locals, many attacks with Molotov cocktails on Romani dwellings. The most famous became the above-mentioned attempted murder of an eight-member Romani family in Vítkov, where the person to suffer the greatest injury was little Natálka.

It was not until that case that a court sentenced such perpetrators to adequate punishments – prior to that they were given repeated conditional sentences even for arson and other violent crimes. The Czech neo-Nazi scene has all of this on its conscience, and its political expression was exactly through the Workers’ Party and then the DSSS.

The era of pogroms did not stop because the neo-Nazis turned away from antigypsyism or racism, but because right-wing extremists reoriented themselves away from Roma and focused on refugees. The famous era of the migrant-beaters came, people who had the bad luck not to actually have any of their imaginary enemies (the Muslims) around.

The DSSS was fully involved in inciting people here against their fellow human beings who were frequently fleeing totalitarian regimes and wars.

The attempt to legitimize racism

Štěpánek and Vandas then changed tactics – they began an effort to legitimize their opinions and positions. In that regard, their biggest successes were during the meetings in Příčovy, where these enthusiasts of Putin annually show off under the cover name of “patriots” so their admiration for totalitarian regimes and their practices won’t be so obvious.

We’ve written about these people many times: The more they speak of freedom, the more they deny it to others and appropriate freedom of speech for themselves alone. The famous Islamophobe Hampl invites Vandas to the Příčovy meetings, and he got himself a few photo “scalps” with famous figures there, such as the Jewish author and anti-Muslim activist Benjamin Kuras, Ladislav Jakl (a former minion of Klaus), the Czech Television board member and Czech Radio moderator Luboš Xaver Veselý, the economist Ševčík, and the actor Vyskočil.

Vandas has made many friends there who hold the same or similar opinions of democracy and human rights, which they all hate so much together, such as the Stalinist (conservative communist) Skála. Štěpánek and Vandas, the erstwhile leaders of the neo-Nazis, have therefore joined the long line of revolutionaries who want to destroy democracy and liberalism.

One might say these neo-Nazis have now blended in with the crowd. After all, who wouldn’t want “safe streets”, who would reject “patriotism” – few people recognize that in the case of these guys, such ideas are as fake as a wooden nickel, and that is because few people take any interest in what’s really going on here anymore.

Many people in the Czech Republic are saying they will vote for Babiš, who has joined the fascisizing parties in the European Parliament, some are saying they will vote for Okamura and his fascists, and Motorists United is gaining favor, led by Turek. The Bolsheviks are back in fashion again also, hiding under the name of Stačilo! [Enough!] – yes, we’ve had enough, there seriously has already been enough of the communists and their methods here.

To add insult to injury, even part of the Civic Democratic Party (ODS) is heading in the extremist direction now. If we don’t come to terms with this soon, genuinely hard times will await us in which racism will not just not be a crime, but will also be an overt component of state policy.