Healing Illnesses and Repaying Debts : KSČM and the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes in the Czech Anti-Communist Discourse
Abstract
The study makes use of Pierre Nora's concept lieux de memoire with the aim of analyzing contemporary Czech anti-communism. It focuses on characteristics, which are in this discourse attributed to the Communist Party (the abolition of which the anti-communists strive for) and to the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (the creation of which they successfully pushed through).
Close reading of anti-communist statements, the book of Adam Drda and Petr Dudek, Who in the Shadow is Waiting for Power, the founding act of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes and the debates about this law in the Parliament enabled us to identify three main lines of anti-communist argumentation: (1) Anti-communist memory of communism is based on an idea of a long distance between the object of memory and the present situation; it is the role of political action to make this distance even longer. (2) Memory is also viewed as the objective truth and base both for political order and scientific knowledge. (3) And, finally, memory is the source of a debt towards the witnesses (who have the right for satisfaction) and to descendants (who need to know the truth about the communist Past).