Just your standard billionaire populist having a massive public sulk after suffering political rejection, it would seem, and he certainly deserved to be rejected. It was a dirty, bad-tempered campaign in which a fake website and emails hosted by Russia's Yandex server falsely declared that Babiš’s opponent, retired army general Petr Pavel, had died.
Babiš denied any involvement in that deceit, but his campaign tried to drum up
fear of war between NATO and Russia and stressed that he was not aligned with
the ‘reckless’ West.
Not only did he oppose NATO sending weapons to Ukraine to resist the Russian
invasion, he said. Even if Russia invaded fellow NATO member Poland, he would
not send Czech troops to help defend it (although it has a treaty obligation to
do so under the NATO Charter).
“I am not going to drag the Czechs into war,” read the posters that Babiš
plastered all over the country. “I’m a diplomat, not a soldier.” But he’s
actually neither of those things, and most Czech citizens saw right through
him.
Of course, they did. Czechs lived under Communist rule for more than forty
years, and when they tried to throw it off in 1968 Moscow sent troops in to
crush the peaceful revolt by force. That hasn’t been forgotten, and they can
clearly see the analogy with Russia is doing in Ukraine today.
So 57.3% of the voters cast their ballots for the pro-NATO candidate, Petr
Pavel. He will replace the current, rather pro-Russian president, Milos Zeman,
in March, and the Czech Republic’s loyalty to its NATO alliance is assured. But
what were the other 42.7% of Czech voters thinking?
They were not thinking: “Poor old Russians, under attack again by the evil
forces of NATO. No wonder they had to invade Ukraine to overthrow the wicked
Jewish Nazis who rule that stolen Russian territory and wage a genocide against
its innocent Russian-speaking people.”
There are very few ‘useful idiots’ left among the Czech population after
several generations of close and mostly unpleasant contact with the ways of the
Russian state. What most of the people who voted for Babiš were really thinking
was “Sorry about the Ukrainians, but I don’t want my childen to die in a
nuclear war.” And they were right too.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine was stupid and criminal, and it must be
resisted. The doctrine of nuclear deterrence that is supposed to prevent that
resistance from causing escalation into a nuclear war is necessary, but
unreliable. The problem is war. Not just this or that war, but the entire
institution.
Wars always used to be about territory, and they are older than mankind. Most
animals defend their territories one way or another, and predators who live in
groups generally defend them by force. That includes early human beings:
practically all hunter-gatherer groups made alliances and fought wars to
protect or even expand their territories.
It made sense for them, and it still made sense for the people who began living
in larger groups called civilisations, because territory was the only real
source of food, of wealth, and of power. We built ever bigger and more complex
military institutions to protect and expand our lands, and the societies we
live in today were the winners in that process.
However, for the past two centuries, since the industrial and scientific
revolutions, land has no longer been the principal source of wealth and power.
Moreover, the level of destruction is so high that even the winner rarely makes
a profit in the wars of the 20th and 21st centuries.
The military institutions should therefore be shrinking by now, but they are
not. The number of casualties has dwindled over the past 75 years and no
nuclear weapons have been used, but we are suffering from a bad case of
cultural lag.
It’s not that people are unaware of the problem. The effort to replace the
military ‘balance of power’ with civilian international institutions that would
arbitrate between countries and prevent aggression began after the two world
wars of the last century (the League of Nations and the UN) and continues
today, but progress is very slow.
And what has all this to do with the outcome of the Czech election? Just that
the arguments of the two sides, however partial and distorted they may be, are
just one more round in a debate that is already more than a century old, and
still nowhere near a conclusion.
Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
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