Populists tend to frame politics as a battle between the virtuous “ordinary” masses and a nefarious or corrupt elite–and insist that the general will of the people must always triumph. The Guardian is adopting the classic definition of populism proposed by political scientist Cas Mudde. Populism, he says, is often combined with a "host" ideology, which can either be on the left or right.

Populism is as old as democracy itself, but the last 10 years have proven particularly fertile: populist leaders now govern countries with a combined population of almost two billion people, while populist parties are gaining ground in more than a dozen other democracies, many of them in Europe.

The Open Society Foundations and a wide range of civil society organizations for the past three years have been targeted by disinformation campaigns across the world. These have often taken the form of large-scale attacks on the internet, carried out by players hostile to free expression, human rights, and democracy.

The latest revelations that Facebook hired a PR firm to discredit digital rights activists, George Soros, and the Open Society Foundations goes a step further: a major digital platform is not only hosting disinformation campaigns, but it is orchestrating and promoting them.

We urge Facebook to stop engaging in practices inspired by the enemies of democracy across the globe. Facebook should launch an independent investigation of what took place and to publish a full report disclosing the techniques that were used in their effort to compromise activists and George Soros.

Serbia-Kosovo Land Swap    7 November 2018

Serbia and Kosovo have been discussing a land swap that would give Serbia the territory in Kosovo that Serbs inhabit, while Kosovo would acquire Serbian territory with an Albanian majority.  As talks progress, under the auspices of the European Union, supporters and detractors of the arrangement make their cases.  In Serbia and Kosovo, the deal is controversial.  Serbia could lose buildings of cultural importance, and the prime minister of Kosovo does not like the idea, even though the country’s president does.  In September, crowds in Kosovo protested against the idea.  The US State Department favors the plan, as does the prime minister of Austria, whose country currently holds the Presidency of the Council of the European Union.  Some voices warn that the territory exchange might put other cases on the table, including Bosnia.  The negative repercussions of such deals is why the EU historically has maintained the sanctity of borders.

The map to the left is from https://www.dw.com/en/serbia-and-kosovo-moot-map-redraw-in-historic-land-swap/a-45389705.

See https://www.gazetaexpress.com/en/news/cold-meeting-of-austrian-chancellor-with-kosovo-s-pm-no-mentioning-of-land-swap-174557/; https://www.gazetaexpress.com/en/news/kurz-in-kosovo-promotes-serbian-russian-idea-on-land-swap-174555/; https://www.dw.com/en/serbia-and-kosovo-moot-map-redraw-in-historic-land-swap/a-45389705; and https://www.rferl.org/a/protest-in-kosovo-over-possible-land-swap-with-serbia/29516478.html.

In the end, it looks like Kemp won.  It’s impossible to know if his attempts to restrict the franchise are what pushed him over the line.  But if the Georgia race had taken place in another country–say, the Republic of Georgia–U.S. media and the U.S. State Department would not have hesitated to question its legitimacy, if for no other reason than Kemp’s dual roles as candidate and election overseer. Of course, there were other reasons.  As of this morning, he led by about 75,000 votes; more than 85,000 registrations were canceled through August 1 of this year alone.

The proposed laws and their protagonists assumed the ideologies of Marxism and Nazism.  They are the neo-Marxists, about whom one can speak, and neo-Nazis, about whom one must be quiet.  The proposed laws are, by their very bases, undemocratic. They are dictatorial.  Dictatorships have always needed to eliminate the family that, despite any measure of domestic authority, is a democratic unit, the bearer and source of democracy and, at the same time, a true bond of society.  We all know that bad families existed and exist.  That does not change anything in principle.

Your families will be torn apart and scattered. [For that to take place] it will be enough to tell the children that man and woman are not the same.

They will take your children and conceal where they are, where they sold them, where they imprisoned them.  A false accusation is enough.

Determining the sex of your newborn by looking into their laps will be eliminated.

The child will decide on its own sex, so you will have to raise them asexually, so you even will not be able to give the child a name.

For every disagreement, you will be deported to a corrective educational work camps that are of the extermination type.

Homosexuals will be declared the superior ruling class, and you will belong to the inferior assisting class and work under the direction of powerful elites who will determine what can and what cannot be said.

You will be placed under all the animals that reproduce sexually because those laws do not apply to cats, frogs, or insects.

What to say at the end.  From experience, the defense of vulnerable free people is easier and more effective than the rebellion of slaves and prisoners.  What St. Wenceslas would do, I do not have to say, but I must say that our hope is that we will stand with him and we will sing a more true and honest chorus of [the “Hymn to St. Václav”] “Do Not Let Us or Our Future Perish.”  Amen

The Czechoslovak Secret Police Files on Donald Trump    3 November 2018

The Guardian and the Czech periodical Respekt cooperated in a review of the material the Czechoslovak secret police gathered in the 1970s and 1980s on Donald Trump and his former wife, Ivana Trump, who was born in Czechoslovakia.  The result was a long article in Respekt and two articles in The Guardian.

The secret police of Communist-controlled Czechoslovakia, the State Security (Czech: Státní bezpečnost; Slovak: Štátna bezpečnosť; abbreviated StB in Czech and ŠtB in Slovak) operated internally and abroad.  Targeting the Trumps was not unusual because Trump was a foreigner married to someone who had been a Czechoslovak citizen.  The only thing unusual about it was the level of attention the StB paid to Trump as a result of his status in American society.

An archivist examines the Communist-era State Security (StB) files on Ivana Trump in Prague's Security Services Archive (ABS).  The photo is reproduced from The Guardian, 29 October 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/29/czechoslovakia-spied-on-trump-to-exploit-ties-to-highest-echelons-of-us-power.

The files also are not secret.  After the Communist party lost power, the Czech government placed the records of the StB in the newly established Security Services Archive (Archiv bezpečnostních složek, ABS), assisting researchers who wished to study the Communists’ abuse of power and enabling individuals to defend themselves against false accusation of collaboration with the former regime and to learn who might have been informing on them.  So that citizens and foreigners can get all the information the StB had about them, every individual has the right to see the files of others.  All one needs is a person’s name and date of birth.  

The files on the Trumps do not reveal anything unusual–nothing treasonous or salacious.  There is no evidence in their files of kompromat, that is, “compromising material” that the Soviet KGB sought to obtain in order to blackmail individuals.  There also is no indication that Donald or Ivana Trump cooperated directly with the StB.

The material on the Trumps that is available in the ABS in Prague may not be complete.  Most of it came from the city of Zlín, then called Gottwaldov, after the first Communist president of Czechoslovakia, because that is where Ivana Trump was born and raised.  The central offices of the StB in Prague also took an interest in the Trumps, and they may have destroyed documents as the regime collapsed.  Furthermore, the StB routinely forwarded information to the KGB (at times, documentation of the transfer is in an individual’s file).  Because Donald Trump visited the Soviet Union, with the expectation of building a luxury hotel on Red Square in Moscow, it is certain that the KGB files in Moscow contain additional information about the Trumps.  The details, however, are unknown since the Russian authorities never made them accessible to the public.  

One might be surprised that one of the principal informers on the Trumps was Ivana Trump’s father, Miloš Zelníček, who lived in Zlín.  Neither the files nor the articles reveal why Zelníček reported to the police, but his decision to do so may not have been entirely voluntary.  The StB could have threatened him or his family in some way, causing him to believe that he had no alternative but to cooperate.  In that case, he might have withheld information from the StB, provided disinformation, or informed the Trumps not to reveal to him anything that would be of particular interest to the StB.

The articles in The Guardian and Respekt include details about a visit to Trump Tower, in New York City, of three individuals from the Slušovice Collective Farm, located near Zlín.  This particular collective farm had a great deal of leeway to experiment with profit-making ventures, something that otherwise was anathema to the communist system.  The purpose of the visit was to explore business possibilities, but the fall of the Berlin Wall put an end to such discussions.  The chairman of Slušovice still is alive but would not meet with reporters.  Trump’s other two visitors from Slušovice are deceased–one died in a car bomb (the perpetrator is unknown), and the other died in a car accident.  Information about the meeting came to the StB not through Ivana Trump’s father but another source, a informer within the Slušovice collective farm.  This, too, is not surprising since that particular collective farm had many dealings with foreigners.

Those who follow Donald Trump’s political career will not find it surprising that the StB files reveal a bit about his opportunism.  Before becoming a Republican, Trump was not affiliated solidly with any political party.  The StB was aware that Trump supported the presidential campaigns of Democrats, including that of Jimmy Carter, and he simultaneously supported the presidential campaigns of George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis.  The StB also knew, well in advance, of Donald Trump’s presidential ambitions.

Czech historians have known about the StB files on Donald and Ivana Trump, and it is surprising that it took journalists so long to examine at the files.  The reports in The Guardian and Respekt are not conclusive, and historians in the future will have to tackle the material with greater attention to detail.  In private conversations long before The Guardian and Respekt released their articles, Czech historians wondered why Donald Trump was not more careful about what he revealed.  The StB routinely gathered information on any individual from the West visiting Czechoslovakia, and someone like Donald Trump, with so many financial and political connections in the United States, would be of special interest.  Surely, Donald Trump had to be aware of the police mechanisms of a totalitarian regime.

The original article in Respekt 44 (29 October-4 November): 14-23, is at https://www.respekt.cz/tydenik/2018/44/donald-trump-v-hledacku-stb.  The two separate articles in The Guardian, which appeared on 29 October 2018, are at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/29/trump-czechoslovakia-communism-spying; and

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/29/czechoslovakia-spied-on-trump-to-exploit-ties-to-highest-echelons-of-us-power.

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The Council of Economic Advisers Opposes Socialism    31 October 2018

Recently, the Council of Economic Advisers authored “The Opportunity Costs of Socialism,” a highly partisan document which the White House released just before the midterm elections.  From the executive summary, it is clear that the effort of the White House is to instill fear into the hearts of American voters who may be prompted to vote for some party other than the Republican party: “in assessing the effects of socialist policies, it is important to recognize that they provide little material incentive for production and innovation and, by distributing goods and services for ‘free,’ prevent prices from revealing economically important information about costs and consumer needs and wants” (1).  In reality, within the states that the CEA considers socialist (states which do not define themselves in such a way), capitalist incentives exist, goods and services are not free (no more than Social Security in the United States is a handout), and both costs and consumer demands are well known.

The report contains subtle and not-so-subtle biases that it presents in what only can be described as blatant cold-war rhetoric.  The first paragraph of the introduction notes the two-hundredth anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth, implying that those in America advancing social change are Marxists and ultimately communists.  In reality, those who define themselves as socialists, social democrats, and democratic socialists today do not adhere to Marx’s predictions, including those of class struggle, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and a utopian communist society.  Classical Marxists and communists are only fringes on the far left.  Few will read the seventy-page report, but those who might at least venture into its first pages will encounter a scathing assessment of the Soviet Union and its satellite states, China, and other surviving communist regimes.  This assessment covers more than 10 percent of the report (pages 14 to 21).  The authors compare the beliefs of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren with that of Mao Zedong (8).  The report implies that, like in communist societies, socialists in America wish to restrict the ownership and profits of individuals and to curb civil liberties, as did “historical socialists such as Lenin, Mao, and Castro” (9).  Typical of the rhetoric of the CEA is the paragraph below from p. 11:

In a socialist system, the state decides the amount to be spent, how it is spent, and when and where the services are received by the consumer.  A consumer who is unhappy with the state’s choices has little recourse, especially if private businesses are prohibited from competing with the state (as they are under “Medicare for All”).  It may be argued that “giant” private corporations also limit consumer choice, but this comparison ignores how corporations are subject to competition.  For example, a consumer can purchase goods from Walmart rather than Amazon, not to mention a whole host of other retailers.  Amazon is legally permitted to entice Walmart customers, and vice versa, with low prices, better products, free shipping, and so on.  Whereas retail customers are not forced to open their wallets, giant state enterprises are guaranteed revenue through taxation and are often legally protected from competition.  Those who maintain that Amazon and Walmart are too large might note that the single-payer revenues proposed in “Medicare for All” will be about eight times the revenue for either of these corporations.

The Centennial of the Czechoslovak Republic    28 October 2018

On 28 October 2018, in coordination with Tomáš G. Masaryk and his associates abroad who strove to create an independent Czechoslovak state, five politicians–four Czechs and one Slovak–proclaimed Czechoslovakia’s independence from Austria-Hungary.  In December, Masaryk returned home as president of the republic, and he remained in office until his resignation in 1935.  His former student and associate in exile, Edvard Beneš, assumed the presidency after Masaryk and remained in office until he resigned in the wake of the Munich Agreement of 29 September 1938 that awarded the Sudetenland and its predominantly German inhabitants to the Third Reich.

The Men of 28 October (Muži 28. října) who proclaimed the Czechoslovak Republic.  On the top row, from left to right, are František Soukup (1871-1940, from the Social Democratic party), Jiří Stříibrný (1880-1955, of the Czechoslovak Socialist party, later renamed the Czechoslovak National Socialist party, but there is no relationship with the Nazis of Germany), and Vavro Šrobár (1867-1950, representing Slovaks).  On the bottom row, left to right, are Alois Rašín (1867-1923, from the Czech State Rights Democratic party, later renamed the National Democratic party) and Antonín Švehla (1873-1933, of the Czech Agrarian party, later the Republican party).

Despite its many faults, Czechoslovakia remained a democracy throughout its existence, and for most of the interwar years, it was the only democratic state in East-Central Europe and the Balkans.  Many at the time criticized the republic for not doing more to advance the autonomy of the Germans, Slovaks, and Hungarians and to bring a greater number of individuals from these ethnic groups into the state administration.  These and other difficulties cause many historians to maintain that Czechoslovakia failed as a democratic state.  However, one must not base judgement about a political system of the 1920s and 1930s on the characteristics of present-day democracies.

In commemoration of Czechoslovak independence day, I published a short article in the History News Network that the editors released today.  It is available at https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/170307.  The article also appears on this website here.

Yet I am convinced that those who hope to benefit from a global free-for-all are deeply mistaken.  There will be no winner in a “war of all against all”—particularly if it ends in a nuclear war.  And that is a possibility that cannot be ruled out.  An unrelenting arms race, international tensions, hostility and universal mistrust will only increase the risk.

Faced with the Mueller investigation into Russian meddling in the US election and collusion with members of his campaign, Trump and his supporters’ first line of defense has been twofold—there was “no collusion” and the claim of Russian meddling is a “hoax.” The second line of defense is again twofold: “collusion is not a crime” and the now-proven Russian meddling had no effect. I suspect that if the Mueller report finds that the Trump campaign’s “collusion” with Russians does indeed meet the legal definition of “criminal conspiracy” and that the enormous extent of Russian meddling makes the claim that it had no effect totally implausible, many Republicans will retreat, either implicitly or explicitly, to the third line of defense: “Better Putin than Hillary.” There seems to be nothing for which the demonization of Hillary Clinton does not serve as sufficient justification, and the notion that a Trump presidency indebted to Putin is far preferable to the nightmare of a Clinton victory will signal the final Republican reorientation to illiberalism at home and subservience to an authoritarian abroad. 

Munich at 80    3 October 2018

On 30 September 1938, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Neville Chamberlain, and Édouard Daladier signed the Munich Agreement that gave Nazi Germany territories of Czechoslovakia, known collectively as the Sudetenland, where the population was 50 percent or more German.  Munich was a British and French betrayal of democratic Czechoslovakia, in an effort to satisfy Hitler’s demands and prevent another world war, which Germany started, just the same, 11 months later.

Edvard Beneš (left), Czechoslovakia’s president, with Milan Hodža (right), the prime minister, on 31 December 1937, nine months before the Munich Agreement.  Photo by ČKT.

There is much speculation about whether Czechoslovakia should have fought, even without the backing of France and Britain.  The French told the Czechoslovak government that Paris would not honor its mutual defense commitment to Prague if the latter did not accept the Munich Agreement.  The Soviet Union, also an ally of Czechoslovakia, hinged its military support of Czechoslovakia on French action, in accordance with the 1935 treaty that Moscow and Prague had arranged.  The Soviets also claimed that Poland and Romania would not let the Red Army cross through their territory to protect Czechoslovakia.  Many Czechs and Slovaks argue that Edvard Beneš, the Czechoslovak president, should have decided to fight Germany alone because Britain and France would have been embarrassed and would have entered the fight.  Others believe that it would have been better for the Czechoslovak psyche had the country struggled against German aggression.

Beneš viewed such possibilities as risky and hopeless.  The Czechoslovak spy network made him well aware of German military capability, including the fact that Prague may have been subject to intense aerial bombardment, in the event of a German-Czechoslovak conflict.  Beneš declined to fight, capitulated, resigned the presidency, and left the country.  In March 1939, Germany invaded the western portion of Czechoslovakia, annexing it as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.  The Germans backed Slovaks independence and gave the Hungarians what remained of Ruthenia (Hungary already had received portions of Ruthenia and Slovakia, where there were large concentrations of Hungarians, in the November 1938 First Vienna Award, which Hitler had brokered).  On 11 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland, beginning the Second World War.

Czechoslovakia’s decision not to fight in October 1938 supported the belief that the Czechs (not the Slovaks) were a nation of Švejks, a term originating from the unfinished novel The Fate of Good Soldier Švejk during the World War by Jaroslav Hašek.  Josef Švejk bungled his way through the First World War as a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army, and it is up to the reader to decide whether Švejk was merely dimwitted or intentionally lazy.  The decision of the Czechoslovak Communist party and government not to mount a large-scale resistance to the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion further fueled the Švekian interpretation of Czech character, which persisted until the Velvet Revolution of 1989 overthrew Communist-party rule.

Debates will continue to rage about whether Beneš made the right decision in 1938.  The British historian A. J. P. Taylor, in The Origins of the Second World War, recounted that, after the war, Beneš looked out from the Prague Castle and said, “Is it not beautiful?  The only central European city not destroyed.  And all my doing.”  Beneš recognized that Hitler’s appetite for territory would be his undoing.  His decision not to fight in 1938 perhaps spared Czech lives and prevented the destruction of Prague–historians never can know for certain–even though it was at the expense of national pride.

Beneš quotation is from A. J. P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1961), 185.  For a perspective on Munich from Yoav J. Tenembaum at Tel Aviv University, see https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/170122.