Slovakia held elections recently, and Robert Fico has now returned to head a new government. The new president of parliament is Ľuboš Blaha, a socialist politician whose political philosophy is hard to pigeonhole. Although he opposed the vax and mandatory asylum quotas, he also put up a picture of Che Guevara in his office to replace one of President Zuzana Caputová — who, I might add, is far easier on the eyes than the sainted communist whose portrait replaced hers (see the embedded video in this Gab post).
Many thanks to Hellequin GB for translating this article from the Austrian news portal Der Status. The translator’s comments are in square brackets:
EU flag out, national poet in: Slovak politician redecorates office
The Slovaks no longer speak well of the EU. This applies all the more to the new Prime Minister Robert Fico, who, as a patriotic social democrat, thinks little of the announcements from Brussels and also has little use for the “Slawa Ukrajini” craze of Western values. This also applies to those around him: the new President of Parliament is the political philosopher Ľuboš Blaha. The SMER politician sees himself as a left-wing anti-globalist and decorates his office accordingly.
EU has no place in his office
Anyone who accepts a new job also wants to feel comfortable there: This is even more true when you have the task of leading the fortunes of the parliament of a politically divided country. And so Ľuboš Blaha redecorates: the EU flag flies out, and in its place is a bust of Ľudovít Štúr and a copy of his most important work “Slavism and the World of the Future”. Štúr is considered the national poet of the Slovaks. As a philologist, politician and writer, he stood up for the needs of his people and laid the foundation for today’s Slovak written language.
Blaha doesn’t want to have to “admire” even the EU-affiliated liberal President Zuzana Caputová every day. Instead of her portrait, he prefers to hang that of Che Guevara there. The choice of the Cuban revolutionary from Argentina — and highly controversial due to his nefarious political measures — may seem strange. But for a politically “old left” anti-capitalist, anti-globalist and left-wing nationalist who, as a young adult, witnessed his transformation from failed ideologue to pop culture icon, it seems consistent. [Why not a picture of Hitler or Stalin or Mao; why not a copy of the Quran? They’re all leftist mass-murderers or give instructions for mass-murder on a global scale.]
Left-wing anti-globalist and vaccination critic
Blaha is considered one of the harshest EU critics from the Fico network. When it comes to foreign policy, he sees himself as a realist, and is a strong critic of US hegemony and Western value imperialism. His position on the Ukraine war is that it is a geopolitical clash between the West and Russia. He believes that one-sided criticism of Russia is inappropriate. He feels more indebted to the country as a whole because it liberated Slovakia from fascism in 1945.
Blaha has already shown in recent years that he likes to take on the powerful and the dominant narrative: During the migration crisis, he opposed mandatory asylum quotas and mass migration. During the Corona period he was one of the harshest critics of the vaccination experiment. His critical attitude ultimately got him banned from Facebook. He has little use for the “woke” Left that dominates most Western European countries.
Afterword from the translator:
And here we have a patriot, even though he’s an oxymoron in my eyes. “What then is a patriot?” someone might ask. The woke globalist crowd will irrationally scream that a patriot is a racist, white supremacist, Islamophobe and misogynist, but even the ultra-woke Wikipedia states: “Patriotism is an emotional connection to one’s own homeland or fatherland…”
A patriot wears the national flag with pride. It is an expression of his love, a declaration of his homeland.
What message does a person — such as Angela Merkel — send when they throw their national flag off the stage? What does that say about a group/party watching their own national flag being removed from the stage or from their own town halls, police stations and monuments and replaced with others?
It tells me that those people are locally employed self-serving puppeticians, mercenaries and minions that have no connection to the country or the people they claim to serve.
Anyone who knows how to distinguish one from the other knows who or what to choose come the next “election” in their own country. But I’m not really holding my breath in anticipation, because I’ve seen over and over again that the vast majority does not know how to make that distinction out of fear of being called meaningless names. They prefer to take the sticks and stones that will break their bones any time over words that can’t hurt them.
The Czechs and Slovaks are pinin’ away for the fjords… er, the totalitarian good ol days when the borders were secure, food and apartments were cheap, and the crazies in the ruling clique fairly predictable.
The fall of communism, instead of a boon, has been a rude awakening for many.
When looking into former Czechoslovakia’s political culture, it is important to understand that the “velvet revolution” was not a “revolution”, but a staged coup perpetrated by the Communists themselves – it was their escape from the economic dead end their own policies had created. But the communists never lost power. They just changed coats.
Funny thing is, though, that since it is easier to judge others than to judge one self, these communists, though they often quote Marx and still use the old rhetoric, they do have a rather sober view of the “Capitalistic West”. They are not fooled by the Big Corporations, and they do understand how the “Western Civilisation” works, probably better then the Western puppeticians even begin to imagine.
“The Killers from the Wall Street” are – after all – their “enemy”. And the communists are not as stupid as not to study their enemies thoroughly.