American Hypocrisy

The U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic, and friend of lame-duck President Barack Obama, Andrew H. Shapiro, has an abidingly compulsive predilection for meddling in the internal affairs of our country, without a single one of our responsible politicians, including Foreign Minister Lubomir Zaoralek, saying anything to set him straight.

Several months ago, I had to lobby that very Zaoralek in parliament, when the American ambassador, in spite of his diplomatic status, joined in with his South Korean colleague and several additional foreign diplomats on a six-day social media campaign in support of transparency and the fight against corruption in the Czech Republic. I won’t deny, in this context, that this negative phenomenon is fairly widespread in our country, thanks especially to the mafia-style clientelism of previous right-wing administrations. But, at least according to Transparency International, our standing on the Corruption Perceptions Index has improved by 16 places in relation to other countries in the past year, whereas the aforementioned South Korea, very close vassal state of the United States, is behind us! But I daresay that such anti-corruption activity won’t be necessary; South Korea obviously won’t resist American expansionism.

Unacceptable interference in Czech internal affairs has also manifested itself in the form of pressure and a media confrontation with President Zeman. The foreign minister, once again, has nothing to say but a couple hackneyed phrases. American citizen Jiri Dienstbier Jr. — son of the socialist-era dissident and later Czechoslovak foreign minister, dual citizen thanks to his U.S. birth when his father worked there as a news correspondent, the “minister without work”* as he’s been titled by TOP 09** — isn’t helping either, to say nothing of Cabinet Vice-Chair Belohradek! Lately, the latter has, in my opinion at least, devoted himself more to supporting the Sudeten German Landsmanschaft than to defending the justified interests of our country — for which, by the way, he is regally paid.

While nighttime curfews are starting to become the norm in the U.S. — like the year before last in Missouri, last year in Maryland, and this year in Milwaukee — most often because of the proliferation of racist clashes between the police and citizens, Shapiro has nothing better to do than to preach on the Jan Kraus Show and march in the recent LGBT Prague Pride parade.

In his home country, people shoot at each other, stores are looted, buildings and cars are set on fire, and states of emergency are declared, and all this for the past several years. Still, in the opinion of the American executive, I suppose, it is the Czech Republic that’s in need of assistance. That is where it’s necessary to duly sow, even without the local compliance of the population, the American “cuckoo method” of democracy.

But Shapiro’s non-diplomatic activities don’t contribute to cementing the partnership between the two countries, which should be his top priority.

The question arises of whether our trans-Atlantic ally isn’t trying instead to contribute to the gradual, if demonstrably ongoing, transformation of our society into a codified dictate of minorities, and thus to the process of affirmative action. In other words, what they’ve suffered from for the last several decades across the ocean, and which has very little in common with true justice and democracy. It must be clear to every thinking person that one can use this method to erode any country whatsoever from within, relatively easily and with minimal resources! Even outside our country, we have been noticing the efforts at politically and economically tinged destabilization of European space, of which we are a part. It suffices to look at the operation of engineered migration, at the roots of which are, once again, the aggressive, war-like, great power politics of the United States.

Jiri Valenta, parliamentary deputy for the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia.

*Editor’s note: A Czech pun on “minister without a portfolio.”

**Editor’s note: The conservative party — “Tradition, Responsibility, Prosperity” — founded in 2009.