Adam Daniel Mezei

11. 01.

New Year's Address -- Czech Immigrants' Party (CIP)

Adam Daniel Mezei Přečteno 4453 krát

The following is a brief extract of a speech I gave this past evening at the 2009 New Year's Inaugural Address for the Czech Immigrants Party (CIP) held at the Movenpick Hotel in Prague.

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I say to you, good friends, that multiculturalism -- with its brutally battered reputation in lands further to the west -- will not take root through conventional means in the Czech lands.

A nationally-mandated policy must at some stage, I personally feel, be imposed upon the Czech nation for immigration to have any degree of success here. This would benefit the society by strengthening it in various ways that I've mentioned in so many other places before, yet which I can summarize as follows:

1) The Gene Pool: expect the Czech gene pool to undergo significant diversification and strengthening via the addition of new chromosomal bonds to the societal pool. This is a potentially incendiary statement in a region where blood feuds have played such a monumental and murderous role in the very recent past. But with the sheer rate of national seasonal illness, not to mention the incidence of various diseases endemic to the Czech gene pool, strains finding their origins from the outside might make the national pool more robust as a result. It has been demonstrated in other places. It can indeed work here.

2) Land of Several Languages: Czechs living beyond of their capital aren't well known for their linguistic prowess. While English may be widely spoken amongst scholastic circles, outside of Prague it's not as common a phenomenon and is a severe economic deficiency for this nation. Newcomers hailing from nations with globally-valuable languages -- namely, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, English -- will enhance the market-value of this country and serve to promote it as a nation open for business. Its citizens will then be highly-sought after across the globe. Within two decades -- as has already been seen in this country over the short twenty years since the Velvet Revolution -- "Czech" will be synonymous with power, prestige, and savvy.

3) A Courageous Land of Competitive Battlers: Sadly, the reputation of Czechs across Europe (especially amongst our post-Communist former eastern "brothers") is viewed mostly as a clutch of whimps, also-rans, and bumbling Svejks. The Czech word most often used for this tawdry phenomenon is susenky, or cookies/soda crackers. In some circles, Czechs are even known as collaborators. The addition of a more randy assortment of new arrivals from more assertive/aggressive lands will go a long way to jacking up the power quotient in a nation chock-a-block with gentle beasts. It will give the nation the respect it ultimately deserves and which has been eluding us for nearly 20 years. It will grant us a healthy respect, not the sort of crooked respect Mr. Scrunchy Face (author's note: President Vaclav Klaus) seeks for us through his continued recalcitrance and defiance of Europe.

4) An Entrepreneurial Land: It's no secret, but if you drop a Mexican or a Guatemalan or a Nigerian anywhere on the globe, they'll rub two eurocents together to produce a small stash of green. It's something inherent to these peoples' genes; something they were born with -- very much like how Cubans can dance salsa or merengue, or cook a mean bowl of arroz y frijoles -- rice 'n beans -- without without much tutelage. Call it what you want, but it's squarely the sort of thing we need here in the Czech lands. We need to rid ourselves of the self-defeating habit of constantly asking "who's the boss?" We must begin telling people "I'm the boss, yes I am, and how can I help you?"

Young Czechs need to emerge from the protective four-year wombs of our state-funded institutions of higher learning and seek to make their bold mark on the planet, one which doesn't follow in lockstep with the staid patterns of the Czech yesteryear.

I'm talking about the staid "tell me what to do...please!" habits that cause young Czechs to look like the proverbial bunny in the spotlight when Westerners come here announcing: "you can do it, you really really can!"

Examining our political track record, we're still cursed with crony capitalism, the old boy networks, and buy-one-get-three-free business deals. These combined put a damper on our national striving for excellence, especially amongst our Generation "Cs." Not to be the Pied Piper on this one, Friends, but we could use a dose of Latin-fuelled, patent-leather shoe-d, wetback "watch this, mang!" inside our morning bowl of Czech bits.

5) A Politically-Active Land: Latinos and Africans, for example, know how to demonstrate! They don't fear public gatherings. They don't wait until the show's over to rumble. They don't raise cobblestones from the pavement and toss them from atop high buildings once the aggressors have already left the building. Moreover, they certainly know a thing or two about timing!

Politics, I believe, in the Czech Republic has likely been shafted for at least another 3 to 5 years because we must, first, wait until President Klaus divests himself of his benevolent dictatorship. Then, we must then hope and pray that Bobosikova (clowny name, by the way, if you ask me...I'd have had it officially changed at birth) doesn't get slotted into the presidency as a carpetbagging female token candidate. Then, we must sever all ties between the new president and the pre-existing political parties by formally selecting a head of state entirely disconnected from this group of machinating parliamentarians who spend our money into oblivion. The confidence young people once had in the Greens -- what with their revolutionary, fresh, and swashbuckling ways -- must be quickly restored.

I believe we'll be hard-pressed to do so with a purely Czech young stock. They're too jaded by the present band of mostly mountebanks in Parliament and too heavily negatively influenced by normalization-era parents, or cynical grandparents, to make much of a dent in the national political fabric.

In time, these Latinos and Africans will intermarry with the local population.

They'll interbreed and raise creamy tawny Czech tots -- speaking fluent cestina -- who will then be eligible for Czech higher office and it's these young new comers who shall reinvigorate an interest in Czech national politics amongst youth. They'll be at the vanguard of a watershed in new Czech politics, obliterating the painful memories of Benes, Gottwald, Zapotocky, Novotny, Svoboda, Hacha, and Elias forevermore.

These, my dear Friends, are just some of the benefits which can be achieved in a relatively short period of time through a policy of forced immigration in the Czech Republic.

Indeed, there are further extensive benefits the longer we pursue these very noble multicultural goals, which we have already seen in places like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and most importantly, the United States. It is my hope we shall stridently pursue them.

08. 01.

That "Other" Post-Communist EU Council Presidency

Adam Daniel Mezei Přečteno 3859 krát

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels 1 -- Czech EU Council Presidency Honchos 0 (nil)

UPDATE: Dirty Rotten Scoundrels 3 -- Czech EU Council Presidency Honchos 0 (nil), 6.2 (07.01) and 6.3 (08.01) have yet to arrive in my mailbox either.

So here we stand, mile pratele: two full days -- count 'em -- into our glorious Council Presidency (the promise of a new generation of Czechs) and something has already gone awry.

To summarize, on January 7, 2009, a detailed forensic check of my Inbox revealed I received two dispatches from Council Presidency Ground Zero:

At 09:10am, the inaugural "Czech Presidency Newsletter 6.1" arrives. Within its pixellated folds is the usual slew of link puffery which accompanies any of the various EU nations' Council Presidency dispatches. (I read them all, knowing full well what this might be saying about Yours Truly). Of course, the maiden voyage of 6.1 regrettably doesn't have any clickable links! Punch, cajole, massage, and depress as hard as I'd like, none of them lead me to a reliable website destination!

Whereupon...

At 10:04am, I receive the ceremoniously entitled "UPDATE - Czech Presidency Newsletter 6.1" which indeed has the previously-desired clickable links, though only almost an hour later when I've likely moved onto other writing tasks and assorted other morning responsibilities.

Let's think of the timings here, mily pratele (if you're Prague, we say it like this)...

I'm a journalist covering the new Czech Presidency.

I work for some French rag and I'm entrusted with the job of reporting back to my nation about the bona fides of our European post-Communist confreres, and their ability to competently helm of one of the most vital managerial responsibilities of the EU braintrust.

I notice the e-out is of shoddy quality, and this is only the first one, I might add, in what I trust will be many. What do you think I'm going to write?

Does this not make our job all the harder to convince our French and other naysaying friends that we know what we're doing? Mr. Scrunchy Face, any ideas?

Sure, sure, it's only a newsletter, calm down and knock back a few Becherovkas, pane Mezei. All of this will be worked out in due time.

But as I hammer back my second shot of the evening, tovarish, I'm left to think about Slovenia.

Two-tenths the population size of sweet Cesko, but boy did those pesky Slovenes have their stuff together! Email archives reveal that the office of the Council Presidency for Slovenia already had three copies of their inaugural newsletter -- in English, French, and the little-used Slovenian -- in my box by January 4, 2008.

Fancy that, eh...

05. 01.

Don't forget your French lessons!

Adam Daniel Mezei Přečteno 3019 krát

On this penultimate eve of the handover of the EU's reins of power, I find myself meditating about our French EU confreres.

It's hardly a national secret that the French are up to their gills in immigrant absorption problems. We're talking about those frequent cries for human rights which their resident minorities in les banlieues always seem to be clamouring for. Ever ask yourself why?

A good Paris-based French friend recently explained the rudiments of the dilemma in a highly-detailed and voluminous email (one which I must reply to!): when the French were obligated to extend the hand of friendship during the mid-1960s to the various newcomers from its former colonial possessions in Africa and the Maghbreb-- made concrete in the form of French citizenship -- they did not. With the French authorities' rejection of newcomers to their shores, they signed their own fate and sealed their own doom.

This violent rejection of Arabs and Africans in France has lead to upheaval after upheaval in the Gallic nation.

That riots burst out (or threaten to burst out) every several years is a pickle of the French's own making, and they haven't anyone else to blame for their poor judgement. While they've dragged their heels on this issue for decades, the inevitable fallout threatens to tear about their societal fabric -- hardly the model that Czechs should be shooting for in their dealings with their own waves of immigration.

For a long time during the turn of the 20th-century, nationalist Czechs swooned in admiration of the French Republique.

They fell deeply in passionate love with the concepts of "liberte, egalite, fraternite" and desired similarly for themselves under the aegis of the Austrians. The famous send-off (dare I say, "f-you") to their Austrian overlords was the construction of the Parizska (Paris) thoroughfare, the tree lined boulevard spilling down towards Prague's Old Town Square commencing at the Bohemia Bridge that spans the Vltava river. This was at the height of the Czech love-in with all things French, the height of disgruntlement with the Austrians for their continued suppression of the Czech national ideal despite decades of demanding it for all subjects of Franz-Josef's realm.

To this day, there remains something of a silent pact with the French. An abiding love of all things French. Talk to any young Czech person and you'll see exactly what I mean. They can't precisely explain why they feel the way they do. They just somehow know that they must.

I find this humourous especially in light of the economic mismanagement of the French state as Members of the EU (they are chronic violators of the ERM = Exchange Rate Mechanism of the eurodollar). We're not even talking about the previously-mentioned internal societal problems with its newcomers (which I pray the scrappy Czech nation is not taking as its model).

France might have been a fine goal to shoot for in an era of repressive imperialist hegemony, that longing to shatter the heavy shackles of imperial servitude under the yoke of inflexible Austria. But it's hardly is a shining example to follow in our modern era. Any Czech decision-maker who continues to gaze fondly upon what's happening further West is not only misinformed, but also terribly deluded.

We are a small nation here.

As far as "Europe" is concerned -- a continental behemoth which can eventually deluge our nation with its Kafkaesque volumes of economic policy claptrap and apparently other obscure pieces of legislation, cultural and political -- Czechs have a right to demand more recognition for all things Czech.

In this respect, Czechs must indeed go their own way, setting the tempo for the nation in the way they uniquely see fit. "Joining" Europe in '04 was not the equivalent to handing over a blank cheque. There are provisos to the Membership, and I hope to G.od that Prague higher-ups haven't relinquished all the nation's sovereignty at the heart of Europe. Czechs do have a duty to make specific from the very general. If the EU's constituent Member States are unable to tweak the law as they see fit for their own national purposes, I cannot see the ultimate purpose of Union.

And, finally, a word about French immigration policy.

Let's hope the Czech Republic doesn't adopt the French model, because immigrants are good for this country for a number of reasons.

One, the Czech people are a rapidly declining population. By mid-century, Cesko needs to drastically inject some much-needed high-octane into the Czech census for the country not to suffer economically or lose its competitive technical edge.

Two, for reasons that I have long since held to be self-evident, shuffling up the gene pool in this country can hardly be a bad thing.

Whether intentionally or non-, it's been done countless times over the course of this resilient nation's existence. Whether it was as part of the "Come to Bohemia" invitations extended by the Premyslid monarch Premysl Otakar II ("The Fair") to German burghers during the mid- to late-13th century, or the infiltration of varying German and Bourbon stock from the vast swaths of Catholic Europe following the Hussite defeat at Bila Hora/White Mountain in the late 17th-century, or the arrival of newcomers from Eastern Europe following the Velvet Revolution and the fall of the Wall, we are -- in our own idiosyncratic way -- a Central European "Rainbow Nation."

Lastly, we must continue to bring in newcomers for our 2009 slogan -- "Europe Without Borders" -- not to sound like the dry, meaningless pronouncements of the former Communist authority. Like Mr. Havel once said from atop the Melantrich balcony: "I suppose you did not nominate me to this position only to lie to you as well."

Here's the thought of the day: doesn't colour do a great job of sprucing up the dullest of living spaces?

04. 01.

Multi-Culti Dreaming...

Adam Daniel Mezei Přečteno 3227 krát

It's hardly a state secret that certain Czechs -- and a sizable minority of foreigners -- tend to glorify the achievements and reputation of the Czechoslovak First Republic. What is popularly known about the period from books and other relevant materials only show the glittering goodness of Masaryk, Benes, and M.R. Stefanik's glorious experiment, never its rampant, festering problems.

A while ago, folks, I'd come across a website administered by a prominent Toronto-based "Rusyn" activist (a Ruthenian from the region formerly known as the Czechoslovak Subcarpathian Rus).

Buried in the reams of copy about his Ruthenian origins, his peoples' habits, religion, mannerisms, and overall traditions were a series of incendiary lines about the political discrimination Rusyns suffered at the hands of TGM's fledgling Czechoslovak parliamentary science experiment. It's a little-known fact that as part of a "minority of minorities" in the former Czechoslovakia, Rusyns had the most to gain and lose in the First Republic's political makeup.

It's the opinion of Czech historians that the existence of Rusyns, Slovaks, Sudeten Germans, Jews, and Czechs in the Czechoslovak melting pot -- that seminal societal experiment which came to an ignominious and tragic end twenty years after its founding -- added a salty flavour to the capital city which the reconstituted Czech Republic has only had a taste of.

I, for one, am enamoured with this development. But more must come. And quickly.

In the past, I've written about this burgeoning phenomenon in various Aktualne posts. My not-so-brilliant opinions and views have been laid bare for all to read, and the caustic commentary has been indicative. Fine. I deserve it because I am an outsider. Outsiders always deserve to be discriminated against. Last time I checked, this was Europe, right?

In any event, I consider myself a part of the Renaissance. A comeback still ongoing and one which will continue to bring about the decisive redefinition of the Czech Collective in our uncertain post-Communist times.

Today I was thinking about several developments I'd like to soon see.

I'm curious to know where our respective opinions converge/diverge on the following dynamics. I'll list them below as three points, and you may be inclined to comment, which I'll gladly welcome, as always:

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1) African Immigration to Prague: It's been steadfastly demonstrated that nations permitting the entry of new genes to the societal pool are more capable of withstanding disease and illness through the injection of "fresh blood." Given the high incidence of certain strains of chronic diseases (egs. cancer, tumors, growths) and seasonal illnesses in Czech society (not to mention certain physiognomies which aren't aesthetically-pleasing, pervasive female anorexic thinness, small female cup size (not augmented), and certain other male physical/intimate shortcomings which I've been told through the grapevine), I'd like to know your opinion about the forced introduction of stronger chromosomal units as a by-product of the Czech Republic's immigration and asylum obligations as members of the European Union? "We mustn't only take from the EU. We must also give something back," the saying might go.

2) Official "Trilingualism:" It's also been shown in the Czech past that when the Czech people feel imperiled by the swirl of uncertain events threatening it from beyond the precincts of its safe borders, that the naiton it bores into its rich ancient store of Czech/Hussite lore, its resistance to Austrian oversight during the June 1848 student riots, the annual carp-genocide on city squares before Jezisek, its Prague Uprising, the Prague Spring, its Student (Velvet) Revolution of '89, etc. This manifests itself in strong posturing for acts like "Czech culture only," "Czech language only," and jingoistic statements by populist Czech politicians (read: Mr. Scrunchy Face). If the country adopts what I'm going to call an Official Trilingualism Policy -- Czech, Slovak, English -- this will duly benefit the coming generations who do not deserve to be saddled with the burdensome baggage of the past. Genetics mustn't be a condemnation! Czechs do not take in xenophobia with their mother's milk. I refuse to believe this, ever.

3) An Official Rescinding of the Rotten Benes Decrees: Once and for all! The time has long-since passed for the elected representatives of our sometimes-democratic republic -- including Mr. Scrunchy Face -- to put a resounding punctuation mark/exclamation point on the festering, suppurating, chartreuse-coloured pus-filled open gash which is the poisonous (Edvard) Benes Decrees. Not all Sudeten Germans/Czechoslovak citizens supported the Evil German Regime. "How many exactly?" my critics might demand. "Don't know," I'll respond. Maybe 457,000 out of nearly 2 million? That number work for you? But let's put the analogy thusly: the pageantry and well-wishing most Czechoslovak/Sudeten Germans demonstrated during the arrival of the Nazis during the occupation post-March 15, 1939 was equivalent to what several Czechoslovak citizens did following August 1968's rude invasion. It was better for some to show solidarity with the Soviets so they could pluck the plum jobs.

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These are merely three ways all of us can get beyond the past and move into the glorious multiethnic future. I add that we are legally obligated to supply this as Members of the EU.

Throughout the coming six months of our Presidency of the Council, I shall continue stressing these points. I just know you will look forward to reading more of me here.

02. 01.

Zoubek's Loyal Lieutenant

Adam Daniel Mezei Přečteno 2886 krát

Olbram forgot to add one...

Zoubek's Loyal Lieutenants

Zoubek's Loyal Lieutenants

Archiv článků: leden 2009

New Year's Address -- Czech Immigrants' Party (CIP)

That "Other" Post-Communist EU Council Presidency

Don't forget your French lessons!

Multi-Culti Dreaming...

Zoubek's Loyal Lieutenant

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