We firmly condemn the recent approval by the Czech parliament of an amendment to the Criminal Code that punishes with up to 5 years in prison the “promotion of communist ideology.”
This punitive crackdown clearly fits into the broader crusade promoted and coordinated by the European Union, which has made anti-communism its official ideology. In stark contradiction to the image spread by bourgeois propaganda of the EU as a land of freedom and democracy in contrast to so-called “autocratic regimes”—the Union is in fact a repressive cage. EU rewrites history to serve the interests of the large monopolies that dictate its policies, seeks to erase the shared memory of the peoples, and curtails political freedom by inventing new forms of opinion crimes while introducing harsher penalties and toughening up the class struggle repression. Bans, censorship, and repression are the actual “values of the West” that EU leaders never tire of rambling on, where “freedom” is nothing more than the freedom to ruthlessly exploit the proletariat and oppress the peoples.
The ahistorical falsification behind this latest anti-communist assault lies in the theory of the “two extremes,” which equates fascism and communism in the attempt at slandering the glorious experience of socialist construction in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and at erasing the memory of the decisive role played by the USSR, the Red Army, and the heroic armed anti-fascist resistance, led by Communist Parties, in the victory of the peoples over Nazi-fascism. This represents an outrageous provocation to the memory of all those who suffered and fell at the hands of fascism.
Already in 2019, and more recently in January 2025, the European Parliament had called for “an EU-wide ban on the use of Nazi and Soviet communist symbols.” The attack on the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia adds to the ongoing persecution of communists in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—not to mention Ukraine. The criminalization of communists goes hand in hand with the rehabilitation of the worst criminal collaborationists with fascism, now shamelessly celebrated as “founding fathers” in the propaganda of bourgeois regimes born from the counterrevolution. This is the “democracy” on which the present-day European Union is founded.
Anti-communism provides the ideological foundation for waging war against capitalist Russia—deliriously portrayed as the continuation of the USSR, when actually it is the product of counterrevolution. However, to promote war economy across the EU, this ideological offensive is not enough. Capitalists had promised a future of prosperity, freedom, and peace, but they have delivered poverty, crisis, unemployment, repression, and war—a reality the bourgeois propaganda machine can no longer conceal. In order to impose on the masses the further deterioration of their living conditions that war economy inevitably brings—more sacrifices in terms of lower wages, reduced social spending, and cuts to essential services—capital must intensify its dictatorship, increasingly resorting to authoritarianism and repression of all forms of class struggle and political dissent in the face of the capitalist crisis.
On this path, the imperialist bourgeoisie will always find communists blocking its way, because no ban, no repression, can erase the reality of the class struggle and the revolutionary organization of the working class. Fascism has not been able to do it, neither will these “Eurojerks”!
The Communist Front expresses its strongest fraternal solidarity with the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSCM) and with the communist movement in the Czech Republic, reaffirming our commitment to fight against any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party, its symbols, and its ideology anywhere in the European Union and the world.
Historical revisionism, the rehabilitation of fascist criminals, and further repressive crackdowns against the labor and communist movement will be defeated by popular mobilization and internationalist solidarity: the barbarity of capitalism will fall, replaced by workers’ power and socialist-communist society!
