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How to typologize Czech anti‑communism: A reflection on three decades of memory conflicts

Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2021

Abstract

The paper is based on an analysis of Czech anti‑communism. It starts with a brief definition of anti‑communism.

Then it presents six possible typologies of anti‑communism based on various questions: type of political mission, political background, actual political function, proposed cure, and spatial scope. There then follows a presentation of various phenomena that are framed in an anti‑communist way: the Communist Party, Social Democrats, liberals, the young generation, but also the contemporary West with its “progressivist” tendencies.

In the two final sections the paper focuses on comparison in the Central European context. It shows that in the Czech context the transfer of German experience was (in)adequate for different reasons than in the Polish and Hungarian cases, namely because of the dynamics connected with the different trajectories of post‑communist political subjects.