Is the U.S.’s National Endowment for Democracy behind the 'red card' campaign against Milos Zeman?



Young Czechs protesting against their president, Milos Zeman, on November 17th, 2014, in Prague. [Surely some mistake??? Ed.]


Erik Best wrote this week that the “U.S. has probably already tasked its ‘regime-change’ tsar, Carl Gershman, with undermining Czech democracy”. (See Fleet Sheet Final Word December 2, 2014, How to Maidanise Zeman)

Best is joking, of course. Or is he? The septuagenarian Carl Gershman grabbed Prague’s attention last week, with his distinctly uncivil assessment of the elected government of the Czech Republic in The Washington Post on the 17th November, the 25th anniversary of the Czechoslovak liberation from forty years of Soviet tyranny.

Given the importance of the day for Czechs and Slovaks, perhaps it would have been politer for those of us who are neither, to listen rather than lecture?

Instead, Gershman used the occasion to give the Czech government, which is representative, a dressing down. He took it upon himself to teach Czechs what Vaclav Havel stands for, and dressed up a requirement to fall into line behind U.S. foreign policy as the promotion of human rights.

Gershman's article was meant as a true American Neo-Conservative 'Welcome to Washington'.

On the same day as his article appeared, the Czech prime minister was on an airplane to the U.S., to unveil a bust of Havel, in the Freedom Foyer of the U.S. Congress.

Gershman is an ideologue of the old, Cold War school, the kind of man that Vaclav Havel resisted intellectually. He is a hard bitten anti-Communist, once an old-fashioned Marxist, who still divides the world into two unlovely slices: those who love America and those who hate it. Havel dared to think, naively perhaps, that there was a place in between, in Central Europe.

The problem with Gershman was described to perfection by the English historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper, in 1950, when Carl was just seven years old: "I am confirmed in my view that a more satisfactory solution will be offered by those who have never swallowed, and therefore never needed to re-vomit, that obscurantist doctrinal rubbish whose residue can never be fully discharged from the system".

Gershman started out as that rarest of species, an ‘American Socialist’, serving as chairman of the Youth People’s Socialist League, the youth wing of the Socialist Party of America. He has been president of the U.S. government funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED) since its foundation in...well, in 1984, that Orwellian year. The only regime-change that Carl cannot abide, it seems, is a change of regime at NED. Thirty years later, this old Socialist is still hard at it.

But is he at it in Prague? Best suggests that he is. So does the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity (my goodness, what a name!). In an article to coincide with Carl's piece in The Washington Post, Paul’s people wrote this:

“Perpetually flush with cash and ever on the lookout for a regime to change, when one catches the eye of Carl Gershman, trouble is sure to follow….Gershman is clearly upset with the Czech Republic. And when Gershman gets upset, destabilization begins and soon gives way to full-out regime change operations.

Prague had better watch out. If Czech President Milos Zeman had any sense, he would expel any operatives from the National Endowment for Democracy or its various US government-funded sub-organizations like the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute. These organizations are no doubt planning to undermine Czech democracy as we speak.”

The Ron Paul Institute is the National Endowment for Democracy in reverse. It is so fiercely ideological that one should treat its conclusions with the same caution as Gershman’s utterances. And yet, its warning about Gershman in Prague is not altogether unbelievable.

As the elected prime minister of the Czech Republic was rehearsing his Havel speech 35,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean, his popularly elected president was being pelted with eggs at Albertov in Prague.

Never mind the eggs, or even the thousands upon thousands of impeccably orchestrated red cards, held up on the command of a spoof Communist state security officer: it was those banners of Ronald Reagan, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Daniel Ortega and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that gave Gershman’s Cold War game away.

These sepia-tinted icons of the First Cold War are Gershman’s icons, the meaning of his ideological life. But the relevance of such figures to the young men clutching them, in multiple copies, in Prague last week, is much harder to fathom. They do not even appear to be young Czechs (see the picture above).

To be sure, there were thousands of Czechs eager to express their disgust of their president that day at Albertov. And among them, there were a handful of Carl Gershman’s cadres as well.