Czech's have long memory of the evils of communism

NY Times:

For many Czechs, it is a historical reckoning that is 20 years too late.

Two decades after the Velvet Revolution overthrew Communist rule here in 1989, a group of Czech senators is pressing to ban the Communist Party, the only surviving one in the former Soviet bloc in Europe and, to its many critics, a national embarrassment and aberration.

“The Communists ruined this country and oppressed freedom and yet here they are 20 years later in our Parliament,” said David Cerny, the iconoclastic Czech artist, who in 1991 painted a Soviet tank pink, transforming a memorial to the liberation of Czechoslovakia by the Red Army in 1945 into the equivalent of a large toy. “It is a national disgrace. The Communists are endangering the country. The Czechs need to wake up.”

This month senators took the first step, petitioning the government to file a legal complaint with the Supreme Administrative Court, the country’s highest electoral authority, for suspension of the Communist Party’s activities.

While there is an incongruity here — the anti-Communist campaigners say they are acting to defend democracy while working to ban a party that is still doing well in elections — the senators insist that there is a real danger. They say the Communist Party, the third strongest force in the Czech Parliament, remains loyal to undemocratic revolution. And they are calling for it either to disband or to abandon its Marxist call to arms, which they say flouts the Czech Constitution’s insistence that political parties renounce violence.

Under Czech law, the court has the power to outlaw a party — but only on an initiative from the government or the president. So the senators are pinning their hopes on Prime Minister Jan Fischer, an economist and a former member of the Statistics Office during the Communist era, who has described his nine-year membership in the Communist Party as one of his “biggest mistakes.”

The senator leading the campaign, Jaromir Stetina, 66, may seem an unlikely anti-Communist firebrand: his grandmother was one of the founding members of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. But Mr. Stetina, a former war correspondent, argued that the unreconstructed party was a dangerous relic.

...

While a majority of Czechs have no desire to return to the Communist era, Mr. Dobrovsky, the former dissident, said he hoped that the current attempt to ban the party would expose it for what it is, while helping the country come to terms with history.

“The proposal forces the Communists to react and by doing so they will show their true nature,” he said. “When people listen to the Communists’ arguments, they will realize that the party does not belong in a democratic party system.”

It is unfortunate that people can't come to this conclusion without an outright ban. The Communist command economy required an evil apparatus to stay in power and the apparatus of secret police and suppression of the people is what should be banned forever. For, without that apparatus the Communist could never impose Marxism. Communist intolerance of freedom was its downfall.