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Yellow Star, Red Star By Clara Weiss 20 June 2020

Jelena Subotic, Yellow Star, Red Star. Holocaust Remembrance after Communism, Cornell University Press 2019.

All over the world, the coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated the drive by the bourgeoisie toward authoritarian forms of rule and far-right policies. Under these conditions, the struggle against the resurgence of fascism that the ICFI has taken up in the past six years is assuming ever greater political significance.

A new book by political scientist Jelena Subotic (Georgia State University) examines the relation between the criminalization of communism in Croatia, Serbia and Lithuania and the legitimization of fascism after the fall of the Stalinist regimes in 1989. Though fatally flawed by its equation of Stalinism with communism, and the authors reluctance to discuss the social character of the restoration of capitalism, the book provides valuable material that demonstrates the close relationship between capitalist counterrevolution and the rise of fascist forces.

Subotic focuses her account on developments in the former Yugoslavia and Lithuania, which was formerly part of the Soviet Union. In both the former Yugoslavia and the Eastern Europe, the Nazis were able to mobilize and count on the support of local fascist forces above all in their war on the Soviet Union and the communist partisan movement, as well as their persecution of Jews, Roma and other minorities. In Croatia and Serbia, the establishment of nation states on the basis of the restoration of capitalism and the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, was accompanied by a systematic promotion of the very fascist forces that had collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.

The Nazis invaded Yugoslavia on April 1, 1941, a few months before the beginning of the war of annihilation against the Soviet Union, on June 21, 1941. In Serbia, the nationalist Chetnik army (Yugoslav Army), though formally aligned with the Allies until 1943, began collaborating with the Wehrmacht already in the fall of 1941. It played a critical role in the fight against the partisan movement against the fascist occupation, and helped run the Semlin camp, where thousands of Jews were murdered in gas vans. Serbia thus became the second country in Europe, after Estonia, to be declared judenfrei and free of gypsies by August 1942. Less than 5,000 Serbian Jews survived the war.

The collaborating Serbian government of Milan Nedi endorsed the genocide of the Jewish population. In 1942, Nedi stated: Owing to the occupier, we have freed ourselves of Jews, and it is now up to us to rid ourselves of other immoral elements standing in the way of Serbias spiritual and national unity. (quoted pp. 523)

After 1989, the Serbian state criminalized the communist resistance movement against the Nazis and the Chetniks while rehabilitating Nedi. History textbooks now describe the Chetniks as national patriots and an antifascist movement from the right.

In Croatia, the promotion of the fascist Ustaa has assumed even more staggering dimensions. The Ustaa movement set up the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) in 1941 and established an expansive camp system which included 26 concentration and death camps. Among these was the Sisak camp, the only camp for unaccompanied children in Europe during World War II, where an estimated 1,600 children died. The most notorious Ustaa-run camp was Jasenovac, also called the Auschwitz of the Balkans.

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Ustaa regime murdered between 77,000 and 99,000 people at Jasenovac, among them between 45,000 and 52,000 Serbs, up to 20,000 Jews, 20,000 Roma and up to 12,000 political and religious opponents of the NDH. The Ustaa and the Nazis were defeated by the partisan movement that was headed by Tito.

Almost immediately after the break-up of Yugoslavia, the newly created Croatian state moved toward criminalizing the partisan movement against the Ustaa. Streets, schools and public buildings were renamed almost overnight to carry the names of famous Croatian figures of the NDH, instead of those of famous partisans and communist leaders. Monuments for Jewish victims and the partisan movement were destroyed and vandalized. This included a bombing attack on the monument at Jadovno in 1991. History textbooks in schools are openly glorifying the Ustaa.

Subotic acknowledges that the accession of these states to the EU served above all to further these practices and provided the basis for their expansion. In particular, she draws attention to the equation of the crimes of communism and fascism in the 2008 EU Prague Declaration, which catered to and encouraged far-right tendencies.

In southeastern Europe, the Jasenovac death camp has been at the center of this revisionism. In a state-backed campaign, Jasenovac has been depicted as a camp which was entirely harmless under the Ustaa but then allegedly turned into a death factory under Tito. The former Croatian prime minister Zlatko Hasanbegovi, himself a former member of the pro-Ustaa Croatian Pure Party of Rights, has denied that it was a death camp and called the partisan antifascist victory in WWII the biggest loss in Croatias history. (137)

Similar developments occurred in Lithuania, which had earlier formed part of the Soviet Union. During World War II, 95 percent of Lithuanian Jewish community was murdered, the highest rate in all of Europe. This was not least of all due to the mass participation of Lithuanian nationalists and fascists who were virulently anti-Semitic. For them, the Nazi occupation was a welcome opportunity to murder both the Jewish population and fight against the threat of social revolution. In a pre-war manifesto, the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF) stated that by restoring the new Lithuania, [the LAF] is determined to carry out an immediate and fundamental purging of the Lithuanian nation and its land of Jews, parasites and monsters. (quoted p. 155)

Much like the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) in Ukraine, the LAF began massacres of the Jews before the German Wehrmacht arrived. Later, many of its units were reorganized by the Germans into police battalions which were tasked with the extermination of Lithuanian Jews. SS Einsatzgruppen, which perpetrated mass shootings of Jews and communists, also worked with the Lithuanian Security Police. At the Ponary forest, at least 72,000 Jews were murdered. Already in December 1941, the commander of the Einsatzkommando 3, Karl Jger, reported that, the objective of clearing Lithuania of Jews was virtually completed thanks to the cooperation of the Lithuanian Partisans and Civil Authority. (158)

Immediately after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the new Lithuanian ruling class that had emerged from the Stalinist bureaucracy made the rehabilitation and glorification of these forces a priority of state policy. One of the very first actions of the new parliament consisted in rehabilitating Lithuanians convicted of collaborating with the Nazis by the Soviets. Jonas Noreika, who had signed deportation orders for Jews, was declared a national hero. The Lithuanian government championed the double genocide narrative, which justifies Lithuanian collaboration in the Holocaust as an understandable response to the alleged genocide perpetrated against Lithuanians by communist Jews in 194041.

This anti-Semitic trope of Judeo-Communism, which was also central to Nazi ideology, is now dominating official commemorations of the war in Lithuania. The Lithuanian government has also initiated several trials against survivors of the Holocaust who joined the Soviet partisan movement. In 2007, the Lithuanian state prosecutor initiated an investigation against the famous historian of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, Yitzhak Arad for war crimes that he allegedly perpetrated as a member of the Soviet partisans against Lithuanian nationalist troops. Leading Lithuanian newspapers slandered him as an NKVD storm trooper. Similar proceedings were initiated against Rachel Margolis and Fania Brantsovskaya who had likewise fled the Nazi genocide by joining the Soviet partisans.

The material that Subotic provides is a damning indictment of the outcome of the restoration of capitalism after 19891991 and the state of European politics more generally. However, she herself clearly does not want this conclusion to be drawn and avoids, throughout the entire book, to even use terms like capitalism and imperialism.

There is no attempt at any coherent reckoning with the social and political character of both the Stalinist regimes and the restoration of capitalism in 19891991. Although Subotic correctly emphasizes the right-wing implications of the criminalization of communism, she herself makes no distinction between Stalinism and communism. This renders her vulnerable to the very right-wing narratives that she takes issue with as they, too, rest above all upon the false equation of Stalinism and communism. Indeed, her discussion of Lithuania includes multiple formulations that can hardly be described other than apologetic. Thus, she writes that the double genocide narrative was for Lithuanians the only way to make sense of their twentieth-century experience. This both relativizes and obscures what has taken place.

What happened in the USSR and the deformed workers states in Eastern Europe and Yugoslavia in the late 1980s and early 1990s was not, as Subotic suggests, a flawed development toward democracy, but rather the completion of the Stalinist counterrevolution against October 1917. Historical revisionism and the rehabilitation of the fascist traditions of the Eastern European bourgeoisie have been an intrinsic component of this process.

The restoration of capitalism had its origins in the nationalist betrayal of the October revolution on the basis of socialism in one country, a direct repudiation of the internationalist and Marxist program of world socialist revolution that had formed the basis of 1917. In the inter-war period, the Stalinist betrayals of the workers movement and promotion of national opportunism had devastating consequences for the socialist revolution in Europe, facilitating the rise of Hitler to power and the outbreak of the Second World War.

In the 1930s, the Great Terror under Stalin saw the most far-reaching mass murder of revolutionaries and socialists that history has ever seen. Among its victims were thousands of Soviet Trotskyists, almost the entire leadership and cadre of the Bolshevik Party of October 1917, as well as much of the leadership and rank-and-file of the Communist parties of Yugoslavia, Poland, Lithuania and other countries in Eastern Europe. Leon Trotsky, the leader of the Marxist opposition to Stalinism and founder of the Fourth International, was assassinated in 1940. These crimes created enormous confusion within the international working class and played a central role in beheading the working class in the revolutionary struggles of the mid-1940s.

The Red Army and the partisans in Yugoslavia were able to drive out the Nazis and local fascists by 194344 not because of the Stalinist regime, but in spite of it. Mass struggles of the working class in opposition to fascism and capitalism erupted starting in 1942, with mass factory occupations taking place in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. All of Greece was engulfed in a bitter civil war. However, the lack of a revolutionary leadership allowed the Stalinists to stifle these movements, creating the conditions for the re-stabilization of capitalism on a world scale.

The Stalinist bureaucracy moved to nationalize private property in Eastern Europe only by 19471948, facing enormous pressure from imperialism. However, its main priority remained the strangling of an independent revolutionary mass movement of the working class against capitalism that would also threaten a political revolution against the bureaucracys rule in the USSR by the Soviet working class. The regimes that were set up on this basis were deformed workers states. In Yugoslavia, Titos Communist Party, which had come to power as a result of a mass social revolutionary movement, established a deformed workers state. Like the bureaucracy in the USSR and Eastern Europe, it remained dedicated to the program of socialism in one country while trying to balance between the Soviet bureaucracy and imperialism.

By the late 1980s, these regimes were facing collapse, and the bureaucracies, fearing a political revolution from the working class, moved toward fully integrating themselves into the world capitalist system. As Trotsky had predicted in his Revolution Betrayed, this process entailed the transformation of the bureaucracies into a new ruling class and the destruction of all social conquests that had been bound up with the 1917 revolution. Politically and ideologically, the restoration involved a return of the bourgeoisies in South Eastern and Eastern Europe to their historical traditions of extreme nationalism and fascism, and a close collaboration with imperialism.

Yugoslavia was a particularly stark example of this process. In its drive toward restoration, the bureaucracy systematically promoted ethnic nationalism and appealed to imperialism. The result was a decade of ethnic massacres, civil wars, and NATO bombings that cost the lives of tens of thousands of people. It is in on this historical and social basis that the falsification of history and promotion of fascist ideology became central to the politics of these new bourgeois states.

None of this is mentioned in the book. Moreover, Subotic leaves out the massive involvement of the German state and bourgeoisie in this process of the rehabilitation of fascism and historical revisionism. However, German right-wing intellectuals and politicians have anticipated, encouraged and then used the far-right developments in Eastern Europe to further the rehabilitation of Nazism.

It was the German historian Ernst Nolte, who in the 1980s, before 19891991, advanced the argument that the crimes of the Nazis were a legitimate response to the processes of violence of the Russian revolution. Noltes argument that Auschwitz was nothing but a response to the violence allegedly unleashed by the Russian Revolution was but a variation of the fascist argument, analyzed at length by Subotic, that Nazism and fascism more broadly were legitimate and necessary responses to communism.

Although Noltes falsifications were rejected by historians at the time, the destruction of the GDR and reunification of Germany in 1990 provided a major impetus for the return of German militarism. The break-up of Yugoslavia provided the pretext for the first German military intervention since the end of World War II, first in Croatia and then in Kosovo. In 1998, the well-known German writer Martin Walser declared in a widely publicized speech that there should be an end to using Auschwitz as a moral cudgel against Germany and opposed the erection of a Holocaust monument in Berlin. Shortly thereafter, a major exhibition on the crimes of the Wehrmacht during World War in the late 1990s was shut down. In 2000, Nolte was awarded the Adenauer Price of the Deutschland-Stiftung (Germany Foundation), which had close ties to the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

The Prague Declaration of 2008, which called for Europe-wide condemnation of, and education about, the crimes of communism was a major step toward officially legitimizing the views of Nolte. Subotic mentions it as a legitimization of the far-right policies of the governments in Lithuania, Hungary, Croatia and Serbia. However, she does not discuss its contents or the fact that its co-initiator was the former head of the Stasi Records Agency Joachim Gauck who would soon thereafter become the president of Germany and play a major role in the resurgence of German militarism.

The Declaration called for a recognition that many crimes committed in the name of Communism should be assessed as crimes against humanity serving as a warning for future generations, in the same way Nazi crimes were assessed by the Nuremberg Tribunal, and proposed adjustment and overhaul of European history textbooks so that children could learn and be warned about Communism and its crimes in the same way as they have been taught to assess the Nazi crimes. Statements of support for this declaration were issued by Nicolas Sarkozy, then president of France, the former UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher, and the then US national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Since 2014, the German bourgeoisie has ever more aggressively pursued a policy of remilitarization. This has gone hand in hand with systematic historical revisionism of the crimes of the Nazi regime. At the Munich Security Conference in January 2014, Joachim Gauck declared that there had to be an end to German military restraint. Just a few weeks later, a pro-Western government was installed in Kiev through a fascist-led coup that was supported by both Germany and the US. At the same time, the right-wing extremist professor Jrg Baberowski from Berlins Humboldt University declared in Der Spiegel that Nolte had been done an injustice, that he had been historically right, and that Hitler was not vicious.

These developments have been accompanied by a combination of complicity, silence and complacency by academics in the US and Germany, moods and tendencies to which Subotic ultimately adapts. There is no other way to explain why Subotic avoids acknowledging the extent to which the same far-right historical revisionism she criticizes in Eastern Europe have been legitimized and accepted in American and German academia. At several points in her book, she favorably quotes the American Professor Timothy Snyder (Yale University), who was one of the most prominent academic supporters of the 2014 coup in Ukraine. His book Bloodlands (2010) resurrected and legitimized the very narrative equating communism and fascism that Subotic criticizes in Croatia or Lithuaniaa fact that can hardly have been lost on her.

Thus, although Yellow Star, Red Star provides valuable material on the resurgence of fascist forces, those interested in truly understanding and fighting these developments will have to turn to studying the extensive record of the ICFIs struggle against the Stalinist counterrevolution and historical revisionism.

Read Christoph Vandreier, Why Are They Back, Historical Falsification, Political Conspiracy, and the Return of Fascism in Germany, available from Mehring Books.

The author also recommends:

Marxism, Opportunism and the Balkan Crisis [7 May 1994]

How the revival of German militarism was prepared [10 May 2014]

Jrg Baberowskis falsification of history [5 December 2016]

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Capitalist counterrevolution and the rise of fascism in southeastern Europe since 1989 - World Socialist Web Site

In an interview with G. Edward Griffin in 1984, former KGB informant Yuri Bezmenov had exposed the insidious operations of the Soviet Union and how the Communist apparatus viciously overtakes the conscience of a country.

He began his interview by revealing that people who towed the Soviet foreign policy, in their home country, were elevated to positions of power through media and manipulation of public opinion. However, those who refused to do so were either subjected to character assassination or killed. Bezmenov cited the example of the city of Hue in Vietnam where 1000s of people were executed in one night for being sympathetic to the United States. The city was under the seize of a mass political organization named Viet Cong for about 2 days when the mass killings took place. Even though the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) could never understand how the operation was carried out, Bezmenov pointed out the extensive network of local informants set up by the Soviet Union to execute those who didnt tow its line.

Recounting his time in India, the KGB informant revealed how he was shocked to discover the list of known pro-soviet journalists in India who were doomed to die. He said that even though those journalists were idealistically leftists, yet the KGB wanted them dead as they knew too much. Benzmenov emphasised, Once the useful idiots (leftists), who idealistically believe in the beauty of Soviet socialism or Communism, get disillusioned, they become the worst enemies.

The former KGB informant reiterated there are no grassroots revolutions but one engineered by a professional, organised group. He revealed that the Awami League party leaders were trained in Moscow, Crimea, and Tashkent. He also added that the Indian Government chose to unsee the movement of 1000s of students from India to East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). His colleague at the Soviet Consulate in Kolkata had discovered guns and ammunition in his basement in a box titled Printed material scheduled for Dhaka University. It indicated the role of the Soviet Union in arming the Mukti Bahini during the war.

He was instructed by the KGB to not bother the political prostitutes but instead surround himself with large conservative media persons, rich filmmakers, academicians, and cynical egocentric people. According to Benzmenov, the potential recruits and reputable people in the eyes of the KGB were narcissistic, greedy, morally devoid individuals who can help destabilise their country of origin. Citing the example of the United States, he stated that the KGB recruited professors and civil rights defenders to subvert and destabilise the country. When their job is completed, they are not needed anymore. They know too much. Some (recruits) get offended when Marxists-Leninists come to power because they hoped they would come to power. That will never happen. They will be lined up against the wall and shot, he remarked.

The KGB informant reiterated that when the useful idiots serve their purpose, they are either executed or exiled or held up in prisons. We are a bunch of murders. There is nothing to do with friendship and understanding between the nations We behave like a bunch of thugs in a country that is hospitable to us. I did not defect but I tried to get my message across. Nobody wanted even to listen, least of all to believe me, he sighed recounting the inner turmoil he faced on learning about the scheduled execution of pro-Soviet Indian journalists known to him.

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His decision to defect and switch sides came during the Bangladesh Liberation War which was described by an American correspondent as the Islamic grassroots revolution. Under the patronage of the KGB, Yuri Bezmenov lived a lavish lifestyle. He was, however, in love with India so much so that he did not want the country to be irreparably damaged under the Soviet influence. Despite an affluent career and labels of treason against the nation, he finally defected from the KGB.

And he disappeared as many had done in the past. The only possible difference was that he lived to tell the story. Interestingly, Indian newspapers carried ads citing a reward of 2000 for information on him. But, the informant had by then impersonated an American hippie and flew from Mumbai airport to Greece where he met with CIA officials. All of this happened under the nose of the KGB.

Yuri Bezmenov explained that KGB was more concerned about the psychological warfare against the American government through ideological subversion rather than espionage activities, which constituted only 15% of their work. He highlighted how brainwashing techniques were used on the American population to infuse an ideology, distinct from Americanism. He further emphasised how manipulation of public opinion can make people reject obvious facts to cater to the existing perceptions and interests.

The former KGB informant stated that the Soviet Intelligence Agency used four methods to alter the mindset and behaviour of people in foreign countries. The first step is that of demoralisation which according to him took 15-20 years. During the phase, young people are influenced to question the integrity of a country and raise suspicions through media propaganda and academia. Perception takes the centre stage and facts become meaningless. He attributes it to the lack of moral standards in society.

For a population self-absorbed in a world of propaganda, and theories of Marxism and Leninism, truth loses its grip on the society. The older generation also loses control over the population due to consistent attacks on their moral fabric. Yuri Bezmenov revealed that the demoralisation phase was completed before the interview and the Soviet Union was surprised at the ease of its execution. He also explained how those from the 60s were occupying high positions in the government, mass media, and civil services at the time of the interview. Yuri Bezmenov further claimed that another 20 years would take to create a new generation of patriotic American citizens.

As per the former KGB informant, destabilisation of a country also referred to as the second step, meant altering the nations foreign relations, economy, defence systems. He said that the process takes 2-5 years to execute. He stated that the Marxist-Leninist hold over the American defence and economic sector was fantastic. Bezmenov said that he never thought that the process would be so easy to execute in the US when he landed there in 1971. He highlighted that a country could be brought to a state of crisis, the third step, in a short time as six weeks and cited the example of Central America to make his point.

Coupled with a violent change in power structure and economy, the fourth phase of normalisation is kicked in that can last indefinitely. The word normalisation is derived from Soviet propaganda that seeks to downplay a drastic change in a country as a normal phenomenon. This will happen in America if you allow the Schumuks to bring the country to crisis, promise people all kinds of goodies and paradise on Earth, destabilise your economy, eliminate the principle of free-market competition, put a Big Brother government in Washington DC with benevolent things, he remarked.

Yuri Bezmenov reiterated that the US was in a state of undeclared war, against the principles on which it was founded, under the Communist conspiracy. You dont have to be paranoid Unless the United States wakes up! The time bomb is ticking every second and the disaster is coming closer and closer. Unlike myself, you will have nowhere to defect, he emphasised.

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Former KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov exposes the four stages of a Communist takeover of a country in rare 1984 interview - OpIndia

Panaji, Jun 20 (IANS): Nationalism is the soul of the BJPs ideology and the very oxygen which fuels India, Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari said on Saturday in a virtual rally to address party workers in Goa.

Gadkari also said that the party was not against the minorities, alleging that repeated attempts were being made to project the BJP as an anti-minority party.

"We are not against minorities, but we are nationalists. Nationalism is our soul and the oxygen of our country, that is our belief," Gadkari said, as he blamed Pakistan for creating rifts between the Hindu and Muslim communities in the country.

"We have fought wars with Pakistan on three occasions. In all three wars, we defeated Pakistan. Pakistan realised that they cannot defeat India in a war. So they started exporting terrorists," Gadkari said.

"They executed bomb blasts in India, in which innocent persons were killed. The effort was to create a rift and struggle between Hindus and Muslims, which would destroy India," he also said.

The Union Minister also said Communism as an ideology is finished in China and Russia and Kerala's Left Democratic Front government may go down in history as the last Communist government.

Gadkari further said that BJP's pursuit of the 'Antodaya' principle laid down by the party's founder Deen Dayal Upadhyay could prove to be the economic model which the world needs with the decline in Communist, Socialist and Capitalist economic models.

"Importantly, Communists are finished in Russia and China. What they have adopted is actually a capitalist and a liberal economic model, on the lines of the US economic model," Gadkari said.

The Chinese city of Shanghai, he said, was in fact developed by wealthy industrialists of Mongolian descent, who invested in China after the economy was liberalised.

"China developed Shanghai by utilising that investment," Gadkari said.

Communism, Gadkari said, was of no use to the world because there could be no economic development based on the ideology.

"Today Communist ideology is finished... Tripura had a Communist regime. We did not have a single MLA there. But in the last state Assembly elections, we won full majority and ousted the Lefist hegemony in Tripura," Gadkari said.

"Although there is a Communist government in place in Kerala now, the state will be known to have the last Communist government in the history of Communism," the Union Minister said.

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Nationalism is the soul of BJP's ideology: Gadkari - Daijiworld.com

Playwright and president, Vclav Havel was widely regarded as the moral compass of modern Czechia. The recipient of numerous peace awards and accolades, his career as first a dissident, then politician and statesman spans Czechoslavakias communist regime, the Velvet Revolution that brought about that regimes demise, and the creation of Czechia.Yet his contribution to political theory is often overlooked, despite the pertinence of his work, even today.

Born in Prague in 1936, Havel spent much of his early years in a Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, only to then witness the communist take over in 1948. Dictatorship therefore set the background to his thinking, and the absurdities of one-party rule was a frequent narrative in his work.

His plays were central to his political involvement, but he was initially careful. Though works such as The Garden Party and The Memorandum, poked fun at the paradoxes of the communist regime, he avoided the dangers of making explicit attacks on Marxist thought.

However, the Czechoslovak Communist party could not tolerate Havel forever. After the Prague Spring of 1968 and the subsequent Soviet invasion and repression, much of the Czechoslovak dissident community channeled their criticism into art indirectly, holding up a fogged mirror to the regime at a time where too much clarity could harm. Here, Havel increasingly pushed his luck. His famous 1975 letter to Dr Gustv Husk, then general secretary of the Czechoslovak party, led to tighter secret polices surveillance, making it almost inevitable he would one day find himself in prison.

The letter is seen as one of the first expressly political works of Havel, which are often overlooked for his plays. However, Havels perspectives as a political philosopher and theorist, particularly from the Eastern bloc, is a significant contribution to the canon of political theory.

The letter to Dr Gustv Husk came after almost half a decade of normalisation, acting as a direct address to the general secretary and highlighting the various repressions of the system and the indignities of communism. However, its tone is not a letter of protest or despair, rather a declaration of war that betrays genius in its subtleties.

He begins by addressing Husk as Dear Doctor, implicitly denying the legitimacy of Husks leadership of the Communist party, as well as the partys very existence. He then delves into the nature of dictatorship, Why are people in fact behaving in the way they do? he writes, Why do they do all these things that taken together form the impressive image of a totally united society, giving total support to its government?

For any unprejudiced observer, the answer I think is self-evident, they are driven to it by fear, he answers his own question, for fear of losing his job the school teacher teaches things he does not believe, fearing for his future the pupil repeats these things.

This fear, he contests, is not necessarily a mortal fear, but covert and insidious which is paradoxically worse. It waxes and wanes as people find ways to cope with the regime to the best of their ability, yet this coping renders them complicit, and the whole cycle begins again.

What is the effect on man of a system based on fear and apathy? A system driving man into a fox hole of purely material existence and offers him deceit as the main form of communication with society?, he postulates, as the only aim of this system is superficial order and general obedience, regardless of the price.

Here, Havel places emphasis on the individual, seeking to understand the perpetuation of communism through discordant apathy. In fact, the way Havel sees it, the system in which he lives under can barely be labeled as communism, but rather a parasitic order that has been established in which an idea is sold as the veil to complicity.

Havel does not just critique, but offers an alternative. He believes that culture is the main instrument of self-knowledge, and is capable of enlarging liberty and leads towards truth, albeit indirectly. While this sycophantic elevation of culture is hardly surprising for a playwright, he touches on an element of hope. His work gives the sense that culture will shine through and fight back against entropy, and the aesthetics of banality. This optimism is especially remarkable considering the seemingly concrete position of the Soviet Union and its satellite states in the 1970s. Yet perhaps it was this optimism that enabled Havel to manifest his vision without restriction.

Shortly after the letter was returned to him, supposedly unopened, but with a stern warning, the situation for political dissidents became grave. When the music group The Plastic People of the Universe were arrested in 1976 by the Czech authorities, things become too much for Havel. He became one of the leading artistic figures to protest against their arrest and vocalised his condemnation of the regimes human rights abuses in the famous Charter 77.

This led him to write his most famous political work, The Power of the Powerless. In a lot of ways, this can be seen as a progression of his original ideas, albeit on a more powerful trajectory. Yet, it certainly lacked the subtleties of his letter, and has been labeled as a manifesto of dissent, beginning with a spectre is haunting eastern Europe, the spectre of what in the West is called dissent, a boldy ironic take on Marx.

He then explores what dissidents are, and their power within a seemingly powerless situation. He illustrates this with analysis of the actions of his greengrocer. His greengrocer puts a communist slogan in his window, just as he does carrots and parsley. He has been doing it for years unquestioningly out of routine apathy. He does it, according to Havel, because everyone does it, its a fact of life, and allows the greengrocer to be in harmony with society. In his typical absurdist fashion, Havel illustrates that this sign effectively says: I know what I must do and behave in the manner expected, Im obedient and dependable, and have the right to be left alone. It is an admission that the greengrocer has accepted the rules of the game.

Yet this same greengrocer would not put a sign in the window saying: I am afraid and unquestioningly obedient, although, according to Havel its meaning is synonymous. For this would break the facade of ideology. An ideology that offers human beings an illusion of identity, dignity and morality, while making it easier to part with them.

This system of illusion works in harmony, as everyone in the society operates under this currency of ideology, a sub-current power structure that is rooted in reflecting vital interests, establishing a bridge between individuals and the components of the system.

Here, Havel views the communist regime as a form of self-regulation. Borrowing from Foucault, he establishes that with ideology, there is no need for show trials and rulers can be anonymised, as it is a dictatorship of ritual where power regularly passes through oneself, and through the mechanism of the system. This kind of self-regulation is covert and hence much more powerful than any third party repression. The signaling of the greengrocer to the state is his own self-regulation.

Yet what if this bridge was burnt?, Havel asks. What if the greengrocer stops, and revolts, stepping out of the lie and rejecting the ritual? What if he breaks the rules of the game and discovers his repressed identity, allowing him to live in the truth? Of course, he will be ostracised, sacked, but only through others playing by these same rules. It is here that Havel reveals his untamed optimism. He believes that one day this general panorama of signalling and ritual will cease and the emperor will be denounced as naked. Once the genie of truth has been let out of the bottle, it will not go back.

While this manifesto got Havel locked up, the same hope for truth led to his, and his countrys eventual step into the light. After rising to be a prominent dissident figure in the late 1980s, Havel was at the head of the Czechoslovak Velvet Revolution and his place as a figure of unity led him to become the first president of post-communist Czechoslovakia.

Although it may be easy to place Havels ideas within the context of communism and resign them there, this would be restrictive. This ritual of signalling and self regulation can be paralleled even today, almost a decade after his death, perhaps with social media, or even more subtle uses of communication such as language and body language. Havel implores us to not play by these rules that self regulate and restrict, to not worry about being harmonious within society, but instead to live within our truth.

While this idea, when stretched, may seem unrealistic and idealist, so too was his idea of ending the regime.

The real question is this: Is the brighter future really so distant?, he writes. What if it has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us.

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Why the untamed optimism of Vclav Havel still resonates strongly - Emerging Europe

These movements have deep roots in America, and they are seeking to destroy the nation.

The Black Lives Matter (blm) movement and Antifa have never been more powerful. Around the world, politicians, celebrities, businessmen and crowds are pledging allegiance to blm. But what are these movements and what do they really represent?

Black Lives Matter sounds good; very few, if any, believe that black lives dont matter. But this group is about a lot more than anti-racism.

The group was founded in 2013 after the acquittal of George Zimmerman over the killing of Trayvon Martin. Each time a black person dies at the hands of a white man or a police officer, specifically, the blm movement grows stronger.

blm was founded by three black lesbiansAlicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi. As Medium wrote, the movement, with roots all the way back to the mid-20th century, is unapologetically feminist, womanist and queer.

Alicia Garza has said that she is influenced by Assata Shakur, an African-American activist of the Black Panther party and the Black Liberation Army. Shakur sought asylum in Communist Cuba after killing a New Jersey state trooper and is on the Federal Bureau of Investigations most wanted list.

The group is about much more than freedom and justice for black people, as its own website brings out. Here are a few objectives from its website:

But the words of its leaders are even more telling (emphasis added throughout):

Furthermore, Blake Simons, a blm activist, summed up the movements real agenda in a Nov. 4, 2015, article:

Our Black Lives Matter protests have stormed the country, yet cops continue to kill us daily, and the judicial system continues to justify our deaths with acquittals, non-indictments and light sentencesall in the name of upholding the Constitution. I have come to realize that the Constitution is the root of virtually all our problems in America. In order to understand the injustices against black folks in the United States, we must look back to its foundation. The U.S. is a country that was founded on slavery, genocide, rape and white male patriarchy. The colonizers that we condemn for enslaving Afrikans [sic] and murdering indigenous peoples are the same people that produced and upheld the document we use to govern our nation to this day. Our bloodshed is rooted in this nations founding document, the Constitution. A body cannot be separated from its head and remain living. The Constitution and all the evil that it allows to be perpetuated are the head of White America, or more so corrupt America. Racist America. If you separate the head, the racism will die. A constitution written by only white men will never serve the interests of black people. The Constitution was written for the ruling class of white men, which constructed whiteness to be more valuable than any other race. When we discuss institutional racism, it is essential that we realize the Constitution created it.

Clearly, Black Lives Matter is not about protecting or enhancing black lives. It is an attempt to tear down the United States of America and its founding documents.

Meanwhile, another force is also at work among the protesters: Antifa. The group is responsible for pre-planning violent clashes, including raising bail money before protests began and sending in medics in anticipation of violent clashes.

Antifa stands for anti-fascism. While this sounds goodmost people would agree that they are against fascismit does not tell the whole story.

To learn about the origins of Antifa, dating back to the same period as the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany, watch our video What You Need to Know About Antifa.

As the video points out, Antifa seeks to destroy four main pillars of American societythe same pillars that blm is attacking: capitalism, the police, the government, the U.S. Constitution.

Antifa has been described as having a combination of anarchist and Communist views. With no formal leadership or hierarchy, the group commonly combines the red flag of the Russian Revolution and the black flag of the anarchists to represent its group.

In Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, Mark Bray calls for militant anti-fascism to replace the austerity and incompetence of the governing parties of the right and left. He admits its roots in communism, anarchism, socialism and anti-racism. It is a movement founded on destroying capitalism.

As the Anti-Defamation League (adl) points out, The current political climate increases the chances of violent confrontations at protests and rallies. Antifa have expanded their definition of fascist/fascism to include not just white supremacists and other extremists, but also many conservatives and supporters of President Trump.

Another major area where the name Antifa comes up is the emerging autonomous zones in the U.S. Take for example Seattles Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or chaz. The area was set up by Antifa members, as well as others, after the East Precinct Police Department surrendered. The group seized the region because the police department and democratic lawmakers allowed them to take it. When law enforcement and officials move out, it leaves a power vacuum that blm and Antifa members are quick to take hold of. As Fox Newss Sara Carter wrote, This is what happens when you dont have law and order.

Antifa is a dangerous and violent group. When its members turn up at protests, it often turns ugly. And you can be sure they are militarizing chaz too. Seattle Antifa tweeted last week, We need more people with guns at the chaz. Antifa members with guns are patrolling the zone. Sources report that as the Antifa mob took over, police officers were nowhere to be seen.

Both blm and Antifa are rooted in similar ideologies aimed at taking down America. At the root of both of these parties is communism, which has infiltrated America at the highest levels, primarily seen in the left-wing Democratic Party.

With these developments, Herbert W. Armstrongs forecasts during much of the 20th century take on new meaning. In 1944, he wrote, From official Communist literature anyone can learn, if he wishes to know the truth, that communism is a plan, in action, for the violent overthrow of capitalism and the capitalistic governments. And capitalism means democracy, since it is the democracies who control more than two thirds of the worlds capital.

He wrote in 1956:

What we fail to grasp, in the struggle with Russia, is this: We are not fighting a single nation in a military war, but a gigantic worldwide, plain-clothes army, masquerading as a political party, seeking to conquer the world with an entirely new kind of warfare. Its a kind of warfare we dont understand, or know how to cope with. It uses every diabolical means to weaken us from within, sapping our strength, perverting our morals, sabotaging our educational system, wrecking our social structure, destroying our spiritual and religious life, weakening our industrial and economic power, demoralizing our armed forces, and finally, after such infiltration, overthrowing our government by force and violence! All this, cleverly disguised as a harmless political party! Communism is worldwide psychological warfare!

This is exactly what we are seeing today. Black Lives Matter and Antifa are, in all actuality, political movements. And there is one very powerful political party, as Mr. Armstrong said there would be, allowing and even pushing for these Communist agendasthe Democratic Party.

These ideologies are bringing to pass prophecies such as those found in Isaiah 1:7: Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire: your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers.

Antifa and Black Lives Matter will not bring about a better world; they are only hastening the destruction of America. And you can see it in their ideologies and in the war zones they are leaving in their wake.

What is happening in America today is a planned attack by Communists. To learn how purposeful this attack has been at so many levels, read The Communist Infiltration of America Was Prophesied.

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Communist Infiltration: BLM and Antifa - theTrumpet.com