Texts here are first translated with the help of GoogleTranslate and DeepL, then proofread bit by bit. In case of doubt, please consult original text in detail or contact me.
(R 10. 7. ’22) Don’t have money for a holiday? Discover the Czech Republic!
The author of the following lines was once blocked on Facebook by an undoubtedly respectable lawyer when he asked her in a polemic about the so-called “social rights” (the observance of which our state professes according to international conventions): “And what is the Czech Republic?”. Since the author remained without verbal reply, he himself will try to answer at length below – in connection with the beginning of summer holiday time, during which Czech society will certainly not disappear, like the natural beauties that have remained with us so far.
The Czech Republic is a state whose citizenship and territory bind to loyalty to itself a certain group of representatives of the species homo sapiens, the “Czech” part of human society, which is a relatively small part of the planetary population.
An examination of this Czech society will lead us to the realization that it possesses – like any human group – a certain amount of wealth for consumption and thus for ensuring physical survival and more or less comfortable living, which wealth is used in some parts to create more wealth.
Wealth in Czech society is dynamically vanishing, is being consumed and at the same time created, produced and traded. Further research will show that wealth (we are not talking about the abilities of individual representatives of the genus homo sapiens forming human society) is extremely unevenly distributed in the sense that the vast majority of Czech society – if we stay with the current way of acquiring wealth, i.e: work for a wage or small business – would have to work for a period of time exceeding sometimes ten times, sometimes a hundred times, sometimes a thousand times or more the average human life expectancy, in order to equal in wealth the group of, for example, 5% of the richest members of Czech society. (For example, the value of the estate left by Petr Kellner is three-quarters of the budget for old-age pensions for 2021. The value of the estate of the oligarch Křetínský is roughly equal to the budget of the Ministry of Transport for last year, the value of the estate of the oligarch Bakala is equal to the budget of the Ministry of Culture. The median, or “middle”, annual income of a Czech employee last year was roughly CZK 420 000.)
If we then begin to examine the disproportionately unequal Czech society from its most affluent peak, the vast majority of people find themselves in the role of objects. People are simply used to create wealth, of which a decisive part – made up of surplus value from individual employees – is retained by the owner, who pays wages that never add up to the amount of wealth produced by long-term owners (and usually not just an extra “managerial” salary for the owner or group of owners). Thus, out of the entire “productive” population, owners select people to work in order to increase their profits.
Czech employees – who make up the majority of the Czech “productive” population – create wealth for Czech and foreign owners with varying levels of wealth. The employees themselves are graded by their “wealth”, consuming significant portions of their wealth each month to provide physical survival, a roof over their heads, and varying degrees of comfort and entertainment. Half of Czech society has little or no financial savings. As of this year, half of all employees were earning a salary between roughly 360,000 and 600,000 a year. In total, 30% of employees received more than CZK 600 thousand a year. A million CZK or more per year was received by about 8% of the total number of employees. On the other hand, 25% of employees received an annual salary of CZK 195 – 360 thousand. The average annual rent (for an apartment 2 + kk) in Prague is CZK 185,000, while the average for the rest of the country is about half that. With the current inflation rate, it seems likely that the annual expenditure on food for a family of three or four will exceed CZK 100 000 in most cases.
As mentioned above, half of the Czech population has almost no savings, lives “from hand to mouth” and an unexpected expense related to a crisis or health problems may be impossible for them, or possible only at the cost of hard-to-manage debt. At the same time, there are probably a little over 30,000 so-called “dollar millionaires” in the Czech Republic, i.e. people whose assets, or easily exchangeable assets, are worth at least one million dollars (according to a different methodology that includes owner-occupied houses, etc., the number could be twice as high). These dollar millionaires therefore make up 0.3-0.5% of the Czech population, while according to Capgemini there are 300-400 people with assets of 30 million and above in the Czech Republic. According to the combined data, there are then about 150 people in the Czech population with assets exceeding CZK 1 billion. The twenty richest oligarchs own assets worth 1.2 trillion, the equivalent of less than three million annual median salaries or two-thirds of last year’s budget.
If our previous (and following) descriptions are correct and the numbers are at least roughly adequate to reality, Czech society corresponds to the definitions of many authors as a capitalist society. This means that there are general objective mechanisms, constantly confirmed by the behaviour of people, regardless of their specific individuality, which: a) are demonstrable even by relatively short-term observations, ideally of a scientific nature and relating to the whole of society (i.e. the whole “Czech Republic”), but also at least partly by the personal, subjective experience of the vast majority of members of Czech society, b) form the boundaries for a possible transformation of the state of society within capitalism.
In addition to the classic employees and owners of companies and the determining capital, there are formally about a million “entrepreneurs”, i.e. “self-employed persons” in the Czech Republic, but almost half of them have “business” as a secondary activity and the number must also be viewed with the knowledge that the Czech Republic has a very large so-called “shvarcsystem”, where formal business masks an employment relationship – with tax cuts and job insecurity. The group of “entrepreneurs” is in fact very broad socially, but in the ideology of the current regime, in which it plays a significant role, it is often conceived of in a homogeneous way. (Whether the idea of “entrepreneurship” plays a similar role in the ideological mechanisms of Czech society as the proverbial “pyramid scheme” would be another matter for consideration.) The vast majority of these “entrepreneurs” run small businesses with no more than five employees, many of whom are in fact “sole traders” and, according to older data from 2015, together with their employees accounted for 22% of the economically active population, or roughly one million people.
The three largest employers, each with more than 30,000 employees, are Škoda Auto, Agrofert and ČEZ. The top 30 also includes virtually all supermarket chains, as well as state and semi-state enterprises such as Česká pošta, České dráhy and Dopravní podnik hl. Prague. The state then pays the salaries of about half a million employees directly from the budget, and according to some calculations, it contributes to the salaries of another half a million people in various ways. The companies with the highest profits include CEZ (where the state is the majority owner), Agrofert, Škoda Auto, Energetický a průmyslový holding, O2, Foxconn, etc. The entities with constantly and significantly growing profits include, almost without exception, the ten largest banks. The total gross domestic product for 2021 was CZK 5.7 trillion, which puts the Czech Republic at the average EU position, at the end of the top 30 of about 170 countries (excluding microstates) in the world, while in terms of population it is ranked 87th.
A planetary comparison shows that the Czech Republic is in many of its principles of functioning the same or similar to any other state within the population of homo sapiens on planet Earth. There is no substantially human-populated territory, or anywhere in human society beyond perhaps a few prehistoric tribes, for which the term “capitalist society” is not adjacent. (Of course, there is North Korea. However, it is apt to describe it as state-monopoly capitalism, where tyrannical leaders treat the rest of the population as lawless employees of a single large state corporation, with a tiered hierarchy of petty rewards and oppression, with the military playing a key role.)
This brings us to the Czech Republic as both a state and a territory that has undergone a historical transformation from one type of society to another. The regime to which the population of the present-day Czech Republic, formerly part of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, was subject can also be described as state monopoly capitalism with an almost complete absence of real self-management by the people, the workers – a defining feature of “socialism” as it was established in theory by the beginning of the 20th century and remained so defined in conditions outside the state censorship of the Soviet bloc.
The re-creation of the private capitalist class after 1989 was a process that took place in all the countries of the former Eastern bloc using different techniques, and a comparison with the countries of the East and the West provides an answer to the question of whether this was a specific “mafia capitalism” or a completely normal capitalism. Only the occasionally expressed key aspect of “approaching the West”, i.e. copying the economic and social structure of capitalist society, makes the Czech Republic a country well comparable in terms of social situation and tendencies of development with other capitalist countries of a similar category.
If the wealth of the bottom half of the human population, i.e. nearly four billion people, is equal in size to 150, perhaps only 100 or less, if the social gulf between the richest and the poorest has been growing since the relatively significant capitalist break in the 1970s. In the USA the richest 10% own 70% of the wealth (in 1990 it was 60%) and the bottom half of the population 2-3%, while in Germany the share of the non-wealthy half is even lower with 1.3%, while there is a slightly richer “middle class”, and the richest 10% own “only” 56% of the wealth, the Czech Republic is certainly not exempt from these tendencies.
As for answering the central question, “What is the Czech Republic?”, the answer is perhaps harder to give here than in some other countries. The Czech situation stands out because, unlike many comparable European countries, there have not been properly conducted or published surveys on its social stratification for a long time, which would be related to economic indicators of the real social situation of individual classes and strata in terms of social power, quality of life, etc. Yes, there are partial researches and bright exceptions, but for example, even the data brought down above are obtained from a considerable number of fragmented sources (with an attempt to relate them to official state figures) and some facts are conjectured by the method of extrapolation and analogy.
This means that the Czech reality is not mapped accurately and clearly enough. For example, the Czech Statistical Office does not provide nearly as much data as it could (and its budget has been cut by 30% for this year). A recent work by Daniel Prokop, Paulina Tabera et al. purporting to be a survey mapping Czech society, called “Divided by Freedom”, obscures more than it reveals. The various forms of “capital” are used here, with a kind of caricaturing reference to Pierre Bourdieu, to dilute property stratification, without clarifying their relationship and weight in relation to it, and the “research” is also characterized by the fact that it completely (! ) the dominant affluent class is absent, with the stratum of heavily above-average earning employees described here, along with several other “classes” (in fact, strata or relatively arbitrarily defined groups of people), as the “middle” class (it is like saying that we also put an earring in our middle ear). As a special ideological consolation for a society that has clearly been “divided by freedom”, there is then conjured up an “emerging cosmopolitan class” (12% of the population), which, although it is admitted that it does not possess as many resources as other parts of the “middle” class, there is a kind of vague promise thanks to its “social capital” (to which very great importance is apparently attached).
For the citizens of the Czech Republic, the establishment of an institute for research on Czech society, which would provide comprehensive data on the state of Czech society, would be very helpful. The foggy haze around Czech reality acts as a large projection screen for various superficially moralistic sentences or demagogic lies. Since 1989, a certain not very large circle of ideological motives that embellish or obscure reality (although some of them express real aspirations) has been more or less repeated, some of which temporarily gain more weight according to the needs of propagandists and the situation. A key role is played by the media, which a simple survey reveals to be overwhelmingly owned by disproportionately wealthy oligarchs and employing journalists, many of whom are probably paid above average salaries compared to the rest of society. In such a situation, it is not surprising that the content of the media reflects the views and interests of the wealthy ruling class (and service layers), although the Czech media are probably still in a state of oligarchic “stabilisation”, with some partly living off the past “democratic-founding” conditions of a period of high hopes placed on (unconditionally understood) “freedom of speech”.
However, the Czech media, for example, mostly reproduce the image of the world according to which something like an “oligarchy” exists, perhaps especially in Russia. In another version, it seems as if the only “oligarch” in the Czech Republic is Andrej Babiš. The existence of such a class is not at all clear from the aforementioned work entitled “Divided by Freedom”. But such a picture of reality is false, and the fact that it was published and promoted by Czech Radio shows that the public media (however crucial their existence and truthfulness) are not free from the tendencies described above – which is well illustrated, for example, by the selection of various “experts” who can be found to have a private financial interest in promoting this or that policy or “opinion”. We can also see this quite well in the example of representatives of the banking and financial sector (which, as a “virtual” sector, nevertheless constitutes probably a quarter of the planetary economy), who have a clear private interest, yet are invited as quasi-“impartial experts”. Another expression of the banks’ determining power is, for example, their cooperation with some oligarchic media, where, for example, through the “Poor Czech Republic” campaign, the image of the banks as “socially responsible” fixers of society is created.
Marketing propaganda, for example, has also to a large extent taken over political competition, where in the media space the situation can be described primarily as a competition between various oligarchs and their factions, where the themes of this propaganda or the formulation of the same (empty) message differ (e.g. “it will be better” competes with “we will give you back your future” and “hope”), but the essence of the relationship of the rich owners to the promotion of policies that primarily suit them or their class and associated service layers is identical. From this perspective, it seems completely unsustainable to want to single out one oligarch, Babiš, as an example of “conflict of interest”, “oligarchization of politics”, “bending the rules”, etc., This can be substantiated by a structural-systemic description (as I am trying to do in this text) and a summary of individual data (in this context, for example, the data on sponsorship of political parties on the HlídačStátu.cz website taken from the Ministry of Finance is quite telling).
If we consider the content of the media, most of which is oligarchized, the analysis of election campaigns, political rhetoric, etc., on the one hand, and the real political actions and the real socio-economic situation on the other, we arrive at some fundamental contradictions between claims and reality, as we have indicated above. At the same time, however, we can note differences and similarities in both spheres. For example, the current ideology seems to be that the current Fial government is in the oligarchic media (some of which are owned by oligarchs who also sponsor political parties, as can be evidenced by the aforementioned “state watchdog”), described by ideologically-forming tribal journalists and “guest writers” as a government of “democrats” against the more or less undemocratic and decadent Babiš, whose governments are described as having “trampled on the interests of the people of the Czech Republic”, whereas the current government is allegedly acting in their interests, etc.
On the level of reality, for example, the ruling party ODS, which has a prime minister and a finance minister, voted together with its supposedly irreconcilable rivals from ANO and SPD to abolish the so-called “super gross wage”, which means a de facto tax cut for the rich – and a loss of state budget funds. In the parties of the governing coalition, there are also parties that share some conservative to fascist “views” with the alleged pariahs in the SPD; in the ODS or KDU-ČSL, there are party wings attracted by the authoritarian-capitalist model of Orbán in Hungary or the fascist Polish ruling party PiS (it was the “road to Hungary or Poland” that Babiš was accused of). Anyone who looks at the blog of the current Prime Minister (who otherwise appears from the media to be non-existent), Petr Fiala, will see that this “democrat” has much to appreciate about Donald Trump’s “conservative agenda” – although Fiala would like to see more “rationality” and less “populism”. The Pirates and STAN, for their part, are in many ways adopting the ideological platitudes about “data-based expert policy” that came from TOP09 earlier.
The current government of the Czech Republic is therefore, among other aspects, a kind of ideological laboratory, and certain political differences (rarely truly contradictory) or nuances can be traced in various political statements and supporting oligarchic media (for example, the “threat” of environmental measures obviously plays a significant role for the oligarch Křetínský, because he is the owner of a business that would be affected). However much the content of these terms has been diluted and distorted, it is nevertheless possible to outline a kind of “conservative” and “liberal” current (which, however, sometimes even swap positions in a situation of fuzziness!). However, it turns out – as in the case of the current Czech government, but by no means only here – that differences in “values” or ideology actually accompany identical policies. So instead of some “values” that ideally guide and differentiate the behaviour of different people, we should rather talk only about marketing-propaganda tactics designed to reach different “target groups”. For example, “conservative” business voters of local importance in a particular social situation will be receptive to nationalist rhetoric, some better-off people with a semi-transnational operating radio will in turn be inclined to “liberal” rhetoric, etc. The most successful method seems to be the marketing-propaganda method of “likening”, i.e. a combination of both principles, where the aim is usually to satisfy primarily the interests of the rich ruling class with a certain “grafting” of support from the lower classes or the proletariat (which is the case, for example, with the aforementioned Trump, but we see this effort in the direction of right-wing social demagoguery in our country as well).
And yes: sometimes there is a more or less “left-wing” voice in this oligarch-determined and oligarch- and wealthy-class-skewed media-political terrain, but the Czech media’s tuning against (formally) left-wing parties and (formally) left-wing politics can be well documented; furthermore, examples and analogies from comparable countries will also help. In France, Emmanuel Macron is now aligning his “centrist” neoliberal project with the conservative right against the rising “danger” from the left; social-democratic Chancellor Scholz, ruling with the Greens, is vilified by the right-wing mainstream (including the third coalition partner from the neoliberal FDP) as a “friend of Putin”, blocked on ecological measures, etc. One can point to the treatment of social democratic Senator Bernie Sanders by the oligarchic media in the US and the Democratic Party itself, and a similar story can be traced in relation to the smears, including the false accusations of anti-Semitism against Jeremy Corbyn and the “re-blairisation” (that is, right-wing-neoliberal neutralisation) of the Labour Party.
Of course, there is much to be added to the data collected and the trends outlined, and a newspaper or internet article cannot substitute for actual extensive scientific research. Nevertheless, I am convinced that it will be possible to confirm the roughly described facts and make them a little more precise. However, they can ultimately be very well verified by practical activity, for example by engaging in left-wing politics, trade union activity, etc., in which I am convinced one will have to deal with the facts described above.
And finally, briefly to the beginning. What the whole text was trying to say is that the legal view of reality and other ways of looking at it, using rigid, non-dynamic, or non-dialectical concepts, and not examining society-wide relations between people in their realism, but through journalistic or marketing phrases, will always end up serving the politics of oppression, the domination of the “stronger” or more ruthless, and the creation of infantile myths and superstitions about the nature of our society. These myths and distortions of reality cannot be overcome by emotionally based good intentions and the simple templates of the mainstream media and departmental-scientific traffic, but can only be moved by genuine humanists and egalitarians with an honest and wide-ranging study of reality that conditions the effectiveness of further steps.
(S 14. 8. ’23) Nothing is going to be simply okay. The world is going under. Death of mankind is near
Climate crisis, arms race, oligarchic concentration of wealth. If current trends continue, we are without exaggeration approaching the final catastrophes. Which, of course, will kill us gradually.
The climate crisis, the accumulation of military conflicts with the increased threat of nuclear war, the oligarchic concentration of wealth at the expense of others and the resulting conflicts and the tendency to defend oligarchic wealth at all costs.
It is difficult to talk about these things at all. And not only for psychological reasons, but crucially because of the deliberate neglect of these growing crises by the powerful. If you look at who owns the media, the various “think tanks”, runs political parties and pseudo activist movements, and think about what the power interests of these people are, you get an explanation of why some of the most important issues – and extensive truthful data – are so difficult to get into the public domain here and elsewhere.
In this text, we will honestly discuss all the fatal crises mentioned, support them with the most relevant data – and try to formulate a way out, if any can still be found.
Just not tell the whole truth
The Czech media space is overwhelmingly owned by oligarchs, a large number of whom have had or continue to have fortunes linked to industries that significantly pollute the environment and contribute to global climate change (many of these oligarchs also combine “dirty” and “clean” resources, and of course flaunt the “clean” ones).
Recently we find a half-hour “podcast”, a report and interview in the magazine Respekt owned by the oligarch Bakala, whose property and media play a significant power role in our state, which I strongly recommend listening to.
For it demonstrates in a nutshell the “best” one can get from the oligarchically owned media and their obedient journalists. If other oligarchic media like Echo24, built with money from the arms oligarch Ovčaří and now owned by the oligarch Španěl, don’t hesitate to publish an article claiming that climate change is a fabrication without checking facts and context, Reflex and other media of oligarch Křetínský publish, for example, a publicity interview with Alexander Vondra of ODS on the cover warningly titled “Green misery”, the media of oligarch Lukačovič continue to let the ultra right-wing Alexandr Tomský spout his demagoguery, the media of oligarch Babiš always have conservative propagandists of the type I. Léko ready, then, finally, the media of the oligarch Bakala are characterized by a little more “openness”. In addition to tactical decisions on how to capitalise on the youth concerned about the climate crisis, Bakala’s transformation of the structure of his wealth may play a role here, as he has divested some of his acquisitions in the fossil fuel industry and his subordinates can therefore write more openly about the impact of human activity on climate change. (As with other representatives of the owning class, longer-term considerations may also play a role, rather than those of a Křetínský or Babiš, as business may be at risk on a burnt or flooded planet in a society-wide crisis.)
So what will we learn from Štěpán Sedláček – who used to be in the so-called public media and now works under the oligarch Bakala – and his guests? The podcast is related to a recent Respekt cover story with the headline, “Is it going to be livable here, Mum?”. It was written by one of Bakala’s Respekt editors, Petr Horký, who is also the podcast’s main guest.
It’s all about the children. So, the first half of the half-hour show is filled with Sedláček’s and Horký’s conclusions (which no one would have thought of) that it is not good to scare the hell out of underage children and on the contrary it is advisable to outline some solutions and ways out. So we hear about waste sorting, shorter showers, not eating meat. The “climatopsychologists” are quoted (in the English original) and the Czech ones are also questioned, who, in line with fashionable trends, talk about “creating a story”. Around the middle of the podcast, the main protagonists finally talk a little more openly about the real situation, as adults without children present might.
Horký tells Sedláček that the topic of potentially fatal climate disasters “doesn’t bring points” and both of them, when considering what their future answers will be to the critical question of posterity about what they did to avert these disasters, agree that, for example, “they could have quit their jobs and become activists.” Horký goes on to admit the obvious – which, incidentally, sharply contradicts his recommendations to “the children”. He mentions that “30 big companies play a crucial role in pollution and climate change” and that “rather than limiting meat consumption, it would help to pressure politicians” and thus to get to the root of the matter. He also mentions that despite its small size, the Czech Republic is “one of the biggest polluters per capita” (which is true: cf. here).
Plenty of essential data instead of journalistic spin
We can leave the various Sedláčeks, Horkýs, etc., to sort out their awkward role in the oligarchic media. Meanwhile, let us gather the genuine data and documents that comprehensively describe the real situation.
At the end of July – though not in the Czech media – people could read about the appeal by nearly a hundred scientists, mainly from Italy, to the Italian media to better explain climate change. Short-term and topical events such as extreme heat, fires, new weather phenomena are certainly a good opportunity to do so. But what is crucial, and what the authors of the scientific challenge also stress, is to try to understand the systemic context and longer-term trends.
There is now a very large amount of verified data on the continuing rise in average annual temperatures, which closely tracks the expansion of polluting industrial production over the last 200 years. For comparison, one can point to the data collected by the World Resources Institute, UN reports or the data and forecasts of the World Meteorological Organisation.
Despite the gross lack of information in the Czech Republic, for example, the Czech-language Wikipedia provides well-documented descriptions of the scientific data and power struggles associated with climate change. Let us quote the whole longer passage, for which readers can also read the associated links on the Wikipedia page:
„As was previously the case with the tobacco industry, the main strategy of these groups is to manufacture doubt about scientific data and results.361][362] Many of those who deny, dismiss, or have unfounded doubts about the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change are labeled “climate change skeptics,” a misnomer that other scientists say is a misnomer. [361][363] There are variations of climate change denial: some deny that warming is occurring at all, some admit warming but attribute it to natural influences, and some minimize the negative impacts of climate change. [The manufacture of uncertainty about the scientific findings later evolved into a manufactured controversy: creating the belief that there is considerable uncertainty about climate change in the scientific community in order to delay policy changes.364 Strategies to support these ideas include criticizing scientific institutions[365] and questioning the motives of individual scientists.361 The so-called echo chamber of climate-denying blogs and media outlets has further fueled an environment of misunderstanding about climate change.“
Along with measured data and educated guesses on developments, information is published on current and estimated future impacts: the uninhabitability of more and more parts of the globe due to rising ocean levels, droughts, various changes in the biosphere, etc. – in the context of rising average temperatures and other factors – will of course have, and already has, significant societal impacts. Here, even scientifically unsophisticated people can imagine the consequences as wars over dwindling sources of fresh water, land, and more habitable parts of the Earth. Unrest due to famine, massive migratory movements, ultra-conservative and fascist turn of the world’s elites to the pressures of subordinate populations for change, etc.
I think enough sources and signposts of knowledge reflecting the reality of climate change have been provided above, now let’s move on to other areas of crisis, and we will touch on climate issues in our final recap.
How will the owning class defend its accumulated wealth
This is already hinted at above. The way the real situation is reported is conditioned by oligarchic ownership and influence in our media. In addition to the above-mentioned owners, I discuss in other texts, for example, the ownership of the “media of the democrats”, Forum24, the power context of the owners of Deník N, then of Parlamentní listy, etc.
It is always a good idea to look up the owners in question in databases such as the State Watchdog, to get basic information about their assets and the companies they own, for example, on Forbes, and to look up more detailed information from various sources (which I repeatedly try to do in my articles). And to track down, even through various front companies and names, the actual ownership and power connections – which can be a cumbersome task, but there are some critical tools.
When you consider the astronomical differences in the wealth of this owning class here and elsewhere – where, for example, the richest 1% own the vast majority of the world’s wealth, and the concentration has been growing since the 1970s – you can not only understand the current power and behaviour of these owners with their “service” groups among politicians, journalists, bankers, lawyers, etc., but it is also possible to use historical parallels to estimate the evolution of the policies preferred by these decisive rulers of our societies.
Extensive data in English and other languages tell of a widening gap between the poor and the rich, stagnation of incomes of large parts of the population and a steady increase in the wealth of the capitalist-rentier class and the auxiliary classes (for an explanation of the concepts and historical context, e.g. here).
Such concentration of wealth leads – again, quite justifiably – to the degradation of formal democratic elements and the domination of the political, but also legal, educational, cultural, etc. spheres by an influential oligarchy and its obedient executors. It is well documented that in the past the movements of Italian fascism and German Nazism were used to consolidate the dominance of the propertied class, to suppress dissent from the democratic and non-democratic left, trade unions, socialisation and egalitarian efforts. If we look to the US today (or yesterday and tomorrow), we see the crudest demagoguery from the Republican Party and total corporate corruption from the Democratic Party as well. In Italy, we see a party in government that claims a (neo)fascist legacy. We read, after all, about the ‘dangers of climate alarmism’ and the ‘successes of Trump’s conservative agenda’ in our own Prime Minister of the ‘democrats’’ government, Peter Fiala.
War with nuclear icing on the cake
This is another significant source of the fatal crises we mention just below the headline. Since 1947, the editors of the Bulletin of the Nuclear Scientists have also been publishing their assessment of the world’s risks, as referenced above. In this case titled The Doomsday Clock, the metaphor with the clock hands and midnight as the fatal world catastrophe describes the level of risk of global nuclear war and the complete or near-complete annihilation of humanity and the destruction of conditions for survival. The clock is now closest to midnight in history.
Again, this situation does not fall from the sky. Arms manufacturers are a very powerful group of influence in this country and in other countries (as described in this very well produced documentary in English). Certain people make very fat money from arms sales and war conflicts. The continuation of various war conflicts, negotiations on gradual disarmament, regulation of military technology, the interest of powerful owners and executors of their interests among politicians, journalists, media “experts” etc., all come into play.
Already the history of the so-called Cold War is full of accidents that separated mankind literally to seconds from nuclear war and whose recurrence is almost lawful with a massive weapons arsenal. In the Czech Republic, since the criminal Russian invasion of Ukraine, there has been a fatal tendency to denigrate any efforts to stop the war and even to glorify the arms industry as an economic driver. The planning centres of the nuclear powers may have better brains than Czech politicians and journalists, but there is the aforementioned and very real risk of accidents (described here in the Bulletin of the Nuclear Scientists) and the frighteningly low probability of deliberately starting a nuclear conflict.
What to do with all this
If we do not want to fold completely under the weight of realistic forecasts and current trends, we undoubtedly need to choose a strategy of action.
Some starting points are at least outlined above; the crisis spheres are partly distinct and separate and therefore require a specific approach, but partly they have some common denominators.
The above-mentioned subordinates of Mr. Bakala propose a small part of the solution: to “pressure politicians, go to demonstrations”. But we can also document how the participants in various protests are vilified by the propaganda apparatus and how the ruling class and its underlings resist the “pressure” and, on the contrary, successfully apply it against the subject population. Let us first outline a more effective solution in general and abstract terms: people must be put in a position of sufficient power and influence to act purposefully and decisively against the fatal tendencies mentioned. Sufficient checks must also be made to ensure that these people are doing what they have committed themselves to, which cannot be done without pressure for transparency and realistic reporting of the whole truth, so to speak.
Related to this is the danger of “contamination” of these managed efforts by the most ordinary profit-making interests. Already today, we are assured by those in power who do not, for example, directly deny global climate change that the market will solve the various “green transformations”, emission reductions, etc. We have no substantial evidence for this. It is simply the profit interest of the owners, and this interest is being advanced by a number of conservative or ‘centrist’ ideologues – such as the author of ‘Climate is an Opportunity’, Petr Daniš, who is invited by the aforementioned underlings of the oligarch Bakala.
It is now clear from the descriptions that it is necessary to stop relying on the goodness and “wisdom” of the current conservative power, but to attack its positions of power and develop a new system of control over local and world events. Here, of course, there are a thousand and one disputes and the need for compromise, but tentatively it can be said that the strongest possible peace and ecological movement is definitely needed. And at the same time redistributive and egalitarian tendencies of politics, culture, law.
State action in a country as small as the Czech Republic can play a not insignificant role: in addition to the surprisingly strong “danger of good example” in implementing truly effective and beneficial measures, the state has a kind of “reinforcing role” – so that if significant environmental, peace and social efforts are supported by one of the less than 200 countries in the world, it is no longer such a “spit in the ocean”.
Needless to say, this would be a 180° turn from the current miserable state of affairs in some respects. Various middle-ranking aides of fatally harmful power, such as the aforementioned Sedlacek and Horký, may also play a role. It is also up to them how they decide.
Adam Bartoš 