Prague Spring, U.S. Summer, The Fight to Totally Eradicate Western Civilization.
Posted by Ed Folsom, June 26, 2026.
On a recent stay in Prague, our Viator guide on the Communism History and Nuclear Bunker tour pointed out something that’s seldom mentioned in these heady days of the mainstreaming of socialism in America. None of the governments that operated behind the iron curtain under Communist Party rule ever claimed to achieve communism. They were all socialist, “building socialism.”
Our guide knows this because he was there. He was age 29 in November of 1989, during the Velvet Revolution that ended the 41-year nightmare of Communist Party rule and Czechoslovakian socialism.
He was just 7 or 8 years old during “Prague Spring,” 1968, when Alexander Dubček, First Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, briefly loosened many of the existing socialist police-state repressions. This caused the leadership of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics to respond by sending thousands of Warsaw Pact tanks and hundreds of thousands of its troops into Czechoslovakia to impose a renewed crackdown that the Soviet socialists called “normalization.”
Vaclav Havel, who died in 2011, was considerably older than our tour guide. Havel was born into a prominent Prague family in 1936, two years before the Nazis seized the Czech Sudentenland with the blessing of the British and the French, and about 2 ½ years before the Nazis took over the rest of Czechoslovakia in March of 1939. By the time Havel turned 9 years old, in 1945, the Nazis had been routed from Czechoslovakia and everywhere else. But not those other totalitarians, the socialists of the Communist Party.
In 1948, Havel turned 12. That’s the year the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, sensing that it was about to get trounced in the upcoming 1948 election, staged a coup, seizing single-party rule and establishing a so-called “people’s democratic state” that they named the Socialist Republic of Czechoslovakia. That eliminated any election in 1948, leaving 1946 as the last year any free election occurred in Czechoslovakia until 1990.
You might note the counter-intuitive use of the term “democratic” in the term “people’s democratic state” here, similarly reflected in the name of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), and currently reflected in the name of the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea (North Korea). When leftists talk about “democracy” and about saving it, defending it, promoting it, etc., it’s a mistake to assume that they mean what you think they mean. But, back to Havel.
Because of Havel’s bourgeois class background, the Communist Party limited his educational opportunities. He never earned a degree. After working for a while as a stage hand in the theater, he eventually found success as a playwright, writing absurdist criticisms of the ruling regime.
But the authorities later banned Havel from the theater in 1968’s “normalization” crackdown. Havel took a job as a brewery laborer at one point out of economic necessity. He also increasingly involved himself in anti-regime politics, earning the label of “dissident” and drawing multiple stints in prison, the longest of which stretched from 1979 to 1983.
In his “samizdat” underground writings, Havel called on his fellow Czechs to live in truth, outside the web of lies spun by the Communist Party. As Havel explained in his 1978 essay, The Power of the Powerless, small, individual acts of living in truth tended to expose the regime’s ideological lies and tear at the false world of appearances that sustained it. Of course, harsh consequences could be expected. The person could expect to fall under suspicion and be shunned by fellow citizens. The official organs of the state would “spew the [person] from its mouth,” Havel wrote, demoting the person at work, curtailing educational opportunities for the person’s children, etc. Havel explained:
“By breaking the rules of the game, [the person] has disrupted the game as such. He has exposed it as a mere game. He has shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system. He has upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together. He has demonstrated that living a lie is living a lie. He has exposed the real, base foundations of power. He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, [he] has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth. Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate everything. There are no terms whatsoever on which it can co-exist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety.”
This is why leftists to this day favor censorship and control over speech. It’s why they create conditions that ensure everyone must publicly pledge fealty to the correct positions to avoid suspicion. And it’s why they cancel anyone who fails to toe the line. It’s an attempt to hermetically seal their lies off from the truth, which is necessary for their lies to thrive. Think pregnant men, for example.
No free elections were held in the “people’s democratic state” of the Socialist Republic of Czechoslovakia during its entire existence. Finally, in late 1989, the web of lies disintegrated and the Velvet Revolution prevailed. In 1990, Czechoslovakia held its first free elections since 1946. That’s 44 years without one. Havel, who had just finished his last prison term for dissident activities in May of 1989, was elected president, vindicating his persistent refusal to live in the lie regardless of the heavy costs.
Now Havel is dead. My tour guide who was only 29-years-old during the Velvet Revolution is 66. The people who personally witnessed the construction of Eastern European socialist terror states under the Marxist lies of “building socialism,” and “people’s democracy,” are dying off. The world is ripe for another run at it.
For those who don’t know, the general idea in Marxism is that capitalism is an inevitable stage in history’s development that must precede socialism. Socialism requires the historically inevitable awakening of the working class (proletariat) to their exploitation by the capitalist bourgeoisie. In this awakening, the proletariat will inevitably overthrow capitalism and build socialism.
The building of socialism will involve rooting out all vestiges of the capitalist system and its systemic inequities. The means of production must be seized by or on behalf of the proletariat and be placed in public hands. The bourgeois exploiter class must be crushed, and all institutions, customs, and tendencies that systemically enable capitalist exploitation and oppression must be eradicated. When this is accomplished and socialism is built, society will be classless.
There will be no exploitation. The means of production will be held communally and everyone will get along so wonderfully and cooperatively that there will no longer be a need for the state to exist. The state will simply wither away and die. The process of History will be at its end, and all will live happily ever after in communist bliss.
The Soviets in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics mockingly referred to the type of person who was in fact produced by the regime’s historically inevitable efforts to build socialism as Homo Sovieticus, Soviet Man: a passive, conformist, mistrustful, double-thinking dependent of the state; a state that has never come close to withering away and dying in any place where socialism has ever been under construction. Instead, it appears that the only historical inevitability in any of this is that every project to “build socialism” inevitably requires totalitarian state control.
And yet, here I am, back in the U.S., where “democratic” socialists are busy selling envy and resentment toward a slate of alleged exploiters and oppressors, to a crowd just begging to hear how exploited and victimized they are (and/or how much power they can seize and how much punishment they will be able to inflict on groups they personally hate while posing as champions of the exploited and the victimized). Once again, its: “Your difficulties come from being exploited and oppressed! Take back what your oppressors have stolen from you! Socialism!”
They tell us that the billionaires are exploiting us. Bernie used to tell us it’s the “millionaires and billionaires,” but now that Bernie has undeniably accumulated millions as a socialist politician, he leaves out the millionaires part. And it’s not the left’s billionaires who are exploiting and oppressing the exploited and oppressed, anyway. There’s no need to point the finger at George Soros, Neville Roy Singham, or Hansjörg Wyss. It’s those other white colonizer guys, those other capitalists who are exploiting and oppressing you, hindering you on the path to inevitable socialist justice. Kulaks! Capitalist Roaders! The Four Olds! Colonizers! All the ists and isms!
Just this week, the Democrats of New York’s 13th District picked as their party’s candidate for U.S. Congressional Representative, third-worldist, socialist, Marxist, Darializa Avila Chevalier. Chevalier is a co-founder of “Columbia University Apartheid Divest,” an organization on record stating that it is “fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization.” That’s who she is. That’s what she is fighting for: Darializa Avila Chevalier, Total Eradicator of Western Civilization, Democrat for Congress!
Chevalier had the endorsement, going in, of New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, a so-called “Democratic” Socialist who, in 2021, told his Democratic Socialists of America comrades how important it is to keep their eye on “the end goal of seizing the means of production.” Mamdani isn’t confused about what socialism is.
Some of us are fully aware of who and what these socialists are. As it has been forever, hatred (of only the right people, of course), lust for power, envy, and resentment are their driving forces. There’s nothing benign or cuddly about this bunch. And they can’t even run their own lives, I’ll be damned if they’ll run mine, sunshine.*
That’s the truth. Embrace it. Live outside their lies.
*Credit to Jonathan Edwards.
