"Democracy corrupts morals greatly. It habituates the public to blabbering,
namely, to boastfulness and slander."
Jean Dutourd
***
Two or three years ago, I was firmly convinced that this time the Czech nation, for the first time in modern history, would cross its shadow and be able to maintain one and the same regime for more than twenty to twenty-five years, a feat that has not been accomplished even once since the founding of Czechoslovakia.
After the media hysteria surrounding the arrest of David Rath, I am no longer sure.
Democracy, at least on paper, has the capacity for self-cleaning: like any other system of government, it is prone to crises, but it can resolve them through its own internal strength, through its own regulatory mechanisms. Corrupt and weak politicians are removed by the people in elections and replaced by other, decent ones, and the political parties themselves can clean themselves up. Which is a significant advantage over a dictatorship, because it is entirely dependent on the quality of the dictator, and it crumbles under a bad dictator.
But self-cleaning mechanisms have certain preconditions and limits, and I am beginning to feel that the Czech ones are no longer capable of preventing change that will be systemic, revolutionary, populist and potentially violent. That is to say, the stain on the reputation of the political representation of this country can no longer be cleaned without violating the substance.
There are several reasons why I believe this:
The Czech media has not, in more than twenty years of democratic development, become a truly independent and critical mirror of reality, but has remained crouched, venal, and partial to power over reason and justice. The cults of Klaus, Havel, public servility and commercial superficiality have together contributed to the fact that we have no quality independent analytical media sources, only slanderers and cheerleaders.
The state and state structures were not built according to a solid plan and in deference to a democratic value system. The police are fatally corrupt, the justice system is dysfunctional, the country is ruled by a mafia of extortionists, loan sharks and crooks against whom a decent person can find no defence and therefore has no reason to identify with and defend the state when he himself is confronted daily with the state's indifference to him.
Politics has slowly degenerated into a state of enforced dishonesty: a party that fails to secure corrupt sources of funding fails to run an effective election campaign and ends up in the dustbin of disinterest. The media, led by the mainstream media, has made a habit of mocking the extra-parliamentary parties and using their representatives as free buffoonish extras for its talk shows. As a result, these parties are now powerless, have no tradition or credible personalities, and so bizarre associations like Věci veřejné are infiltrating politics instead.
The emptiness of the values of the communist period also had a very bad effect on the post-Soviet development. The new regime was not seen as an opportunity to change the paradigms of political behaviour, but rather as a continuation of what had gone before: the new conditions were loved as insincerely as Hitler had been loved before, followed by Stalin and then Brezhnev. Brussels and Washington, this was our new, dual Moscow.
For twenty years there has been no reflection that communism was bad not because bananas were not available, but because it took away the nation's elites and made the rest into moral wrecks, slaves who, as a poet once recognized, love their master unconditionally for a bowl of rice: the people nowadays mostly agree with the expulsion of the Germans, with the nationalization of industry, with the confiscation of property from the nobility and the church, and in the end it is only the lack of bananas that they find bad about the communists, or rather the lack of bananas. It is only the shortage of bananas and consumer goods that is the problem. Take away some of the harshness of political repression (only those who are really very different from the rest of us should be prosecuted), add a bit of freedom, and we have a new Czech paradise.
For all these reasons, I fear that the democratic regime in this country is effectively over. The contours of what will replace it are emerging in the form of the Holešov Challenge and the actions in support of the tycoon vandal Smetana, and the speed of change depends only on when a sufficiently capable and charismatic politician emerges to lead it.
https://paragraphos.pecina.cz/all/uvahy-a-komentare/prozivame-posledni-mesice-ceske-demokracie
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