It is becoming clearer and clearer that the Czech Republic is not moving towards a model reminiscent of the West Germany of the 1980s (for which we still use the nostalgic term “the West”), but rather towards a model reminiscent of Paraguay or Argentina in the 1970s. Huge social disparities, poverty, ignorance, underdevelopment, blatant abuse of power, terror, with an American ‘ally’ overseeing everything in the background. Some people manage to move out, the rest adapt. And after a while it even starts to be argued that racial inferiority or local culture is the cause of the problems. No one will believe anymore that the Czech Republic used to be a country that built nuclear power plants and produced the best engineers in the world. After all, Latin America used to be a rich region too.
It seems as if the US can’t produce anything else from its satellites.
As far as I know, Professor Budil was the first to bring this up, but others and others are taking notice. There was a nice article on a Czech alternative site a few days ago. It talks about “Brazilization”, but that’s a detail. It says, among other things:
“As Jan Keller brilliantly put it, ‘The market system always operates on the antithesis of center and periphery. If the conditions for doing business were the same everywhere in the world, if there were the same price of labor, the same level of social security, the same level of taxes, it would not pay anyone to invest anywhere else, to invest abroad.”
It seems that socialism – whether Marxist, Prussian, or nationalist – is actually a necessary self-defense of the periphery against the politics of the core, and the communist regime before 1989, whatever its faults, both successfully and unsuccessfully, consciously and unconsciously prevented the decline of Czechoslovakia to the level of the periphery.”
That defence need not be socialism. It may well be national capitalism or some other model altogether. But what is essential is that the nation state defends the national economy with all its strength. And that “national” is more important than “market”.