Executed “For Being Jews and Nothing Else”

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Fifty years ago, in the summer of 1975, Milan Kundera left Czechoslovakia for France, never to return. The author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being would go on record that “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” That invites a review of events in Kundera’s native land.

In 1948, three years after the end of WWII, Czechoslovakia fell to a Communist coup. Initially an enthusiast of the regime, Kundera was expelled from the Party in 1950 for “anti-Communist activities,” which could mean anything less than worshipful of Stalin. By the time of the Czech coup, Stalin had swung the USSR and its captive territories back to their traditional anti-Semitism, branding Jews “rootless cosmopolitans.” This should not have been a surprise.

“Bolshevism and National Socialism were the same thing, except that one was a Slav version and the other Teutonic,” noted Malcolm Muggeridge, Moscow correspondent of the Guardian, who broke the story of Stalin’s forced famine in Ukraine. During the Stalin-Hitler Pact, at the Brest-Litovsk bridge, the Soviets handed German-Jewish Communists to the Gestapo “with Soviet and Nazi officers jointly checking the lists.” See Margarete Buber-Neumann’s, Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler.

By the early 1950s, anti-Semitism was surging in Czechoslovakia. In 1952, the regime staged a show-trial with charges of “Trotskyite-Titoist-Zionist activities in the service of American imperialism,” and hanged 11 high-ranking politicians, including Rudolf Slansky, general secretary of the Communist Party. The executions caught the attention of  Robert Rossen, son of Russian-Jewish immigrants and director of the Oscar-winning All the King’s Men.

According to Rossen, a former Communist Party USA member, the eleven were executed, “for being Jews and nothing else. I don’t think they were traitors to the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union knew that by using the word ‘Jew’ and raising the word ‘traitor’ it was specifically inciting the people of these various countries, which had been hotbeds of anti-Semitism for hundreds of years.”

Stalin died the following year but that brought little if any change to the Czech regime. Kundera reflected on the repressions in novels such as The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Joke, about a young man expelled from the Party for a sarcastic remark to a girlfriend. The poet Louis Aragon, a member of France’s Communist Party, called The Joke “one of the greatest novels of the century.”

By the mid-1960s Czechs were pushing back but the Soviet invasion of August, 1968, shut down the “Prague Spring.” Kundera increasingly came under fire and in 1975 bolted for France, where he took up a teaching post. In 1979 the Czech regime stripped Kundera’s citizenship, so he remained in France for the rest of his life, writing novels in French. Czechoslovakia remained a Communist dictatorship until 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down. In 2019 the Czech Republic restored Kundera’s citizenship but he never returned to the land of his birth.

Milan Kundera passed away on July 11, 2023 at the age of 94. Two years after his death, memories of Soviet anti-Semitism and the Slansky trial have faded, even as current events magnify their significance. Whatever their self-image, there is something Zohran Mamdani and the Ivy League keffiyeh klans need to understand.

They are the ideological heirs of German National Socialism and its Teutonic variant in the Soviet Union. Trouble is, prestige universities do not emphasize writers such as Malcolm Muggeridge, Milan Kundera and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, snubbed even by President Gerald Ford, who claimed there was “no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.” It was like saying there was no Islamic domination of the Ottoman Empire.

When David Horowitz wrote Student and Free World Colossus, his books were all the rage on campus. That was not the case with Radical Son, in which David discovers that anti-Semitism is a major force on the American left. With David Horowitz and Milan Kundera now departed, the struggle of memory against forgetting becomes more urgent. To paraphrase George Santayana, those who don’t known history are the only ones destined to repeat it.

The nation now faces a jihad by those who know full well what happened to Jews in National Socialist Germany and the Soviet Bloc, and are determined to see it repeated. They mask their hatred with slogans about “settler colonialism,” “from the river to the sea” and so forth. This must not stand.

Meanwhile, the Minnesota branch of the Democratic Party, the Democrat Farm-Labor Party (DFL), has endorsed far-left Minnesota State Sen. Omar Fateh for mayor of Minneapolis. As Minnesota attorney Scott Johnson explains, Fateh, “is like New York City’s Zohran Mamdani. He owns Mamdani’s odious views, but without the personal charisma.” Fateh is “the man Minneapolis needs — to keep it in the course of decline and make the decline irreversible.”

As Trump says, we’ll have to see what happens.