"Right to corrected information?" - Conversation

Before I started reading your latest book War with trees, you wished me to have fun with her. I'll admit, though, that it gave me chills, and with each subsequent page, I was more and more worried about the fate of the main characters. What did you observe by the fact that the initially humorous plot gradually turns into an increasingly serious note?

You are right that the story gradually changes from a humorous description of interpersonal relationships to an absurdly distorted reality. I like it when the reader laughs on the one hand, but after reading the book, he stops, thinks, and something stays with him. I would like to hope that The War with the Trees is a book that could open the eyes and hearts of many people precisely with feeling, because reason and facts have long failed to do so.
And judging by the reactions of people who have read the book so far, I think it has succeeded and the book has really impressed them. And I am very happy about that.

You literally admit that the paraphrase of the title of Karel Čapek's book is not accidental at all. In 1936, the famous writer and playwright warned of the coming fascism in The War with the Newts. What do you want to warn against?

The old fascism and nazism was militant, conquering and aggressive - essentially trying to wipe out a section of the population and expand into a huge empire. But the totality that is approaching today is far more stealthy, more subtle and what is worst – it hides behind virtue, truth and love.
She does not want to exterminate anyone - that is, to "democratically" limit those who disagree with her and to silence them. Under the guise of "goodness" and saving the planet, he wants to destroy the economies of entire countries so that people end up owning nothing but being perfectly happy. He wants to control people through health, war, or environmental threats, but pretend that everything he does is for their good.
Communism never worked anywhere in the world and it always ended in rivers of blood, but today's generation of young and promising people, who don't remember it, just want to try it, if it couldn't just work for the hundred and first time... But evil never came to the world directly - It ALWAYS had a mask of apparent goodness.

You dedicated the book to those who are not indifferent to what is happening around them. After the experience of what we have been experiencing here since the beginning of March 2020, would you try to estimate how big a part of society the indifferent are?

I think that the group that is trying to fight against the coming totalitarianism, or at least draw attention to it, is definitely not small - according to the demonstrations, it is certainly tens of thousands of people to lower hundreds of thousands. I even think that the group is many times larger than the one that promotes totalitarianism - but the latter is, unfortunately, far more visible, because all the media and the entire establishment are behind it.
In the end, however, the key is always the silent majority - i.e. some 80 percent of people who are silent and don't care about everything, or are just afraid and that's why they are silent.
But I'm not afraid that they too won't wake up from their dream eventually - it's just a matter of not being too late and there being more to save.

But aren't the silent people innocent in this, when they usually get only one truth from the public media, of which the covid period was a convincing proof? How can they know that the matter is actually completely different, or that there are at least two different opinions about it? Sometimes I hear "they said it on TV" as an argument for something, meaning in Czech. How can the average viewer be expected to doubt everything they hear on the screen? He receives one-sided information on important topics and immediately knows what to think. How can it be moved?

You know, after two years of living in those media lies, I have no excuse for those people. It is very convenient to say "I didn't know", "we didn't have enough information and data...". But that information is everywhere, the internet is full of it.
For example, it has now been leaked that the entire Lancet study on the so-called "dangerous long covid", which was picked up by over 1,600 periodicals, was probably falsified and is being retracted... I am not surprised at all. Or what is finally starting to seep into the mainstream about vaccines today - that is, that they don't work, are dangerous, and people die from them, something we've been warning against since their inception.
In vain, people didn't want to hear it and still don't want to…
But everyone has to start with themselves, the first step is to WANT and take life into your own hands. Wanting to change because the way we've been living is truly unsustainable. Stop living under the influence of media lies, corporations, medical lobbies that only create new patients, and banks that only put people in debt, and they lose their freedom because of the fear of losing their jobs because of the debt that hangs over them like the sword of Damocles … Quit the global and return to the local.

But it does not record the way of informing, for example, by the Kavčí hor staff with its approach i Prime Minister Petr Fiala? He reminded Miloš Jakeš with his statement: "We must protect at all costs, and this matters to me personally, freedom of speech, expression, all the attributes that belong to a free society, on the other hand, people have the right to the information has been corrected.” Where did such a right to receive only properly filtered information come from? And don't you think that the "right" of people to correct information has long been governed by the public media?

It is, unfortunately, the way it is, the media has been following a kind of code for a long time now, how and what they are "allowed" to report. I wrote about it in 2021 directly with links to the BBC article, where he even publicly brags about this. But the next level is that Fial's government and even the European Union want to directly implement this "officially" into laws.
In the name of good and "truth" they want to censor lies quite seriously - read the inconvenient truth - and I think this sentence alone is terrible and it actually contains everything.
The truth does not need any help, it always emerges in the end and can protect itself.

Founder Society for the Defense of Free Speech On the floor of the Chamber of Deputies, during a public hearing on a petition against restricting freedom of speech on social networks, Daniel Vávra paused at the fact that the Ministry of the Interior is currently preparing a law on disinformation, which tries to circumvent the Constitution by inventing that if you limit or make it difficult for someone to access to the content, it's not censorship. If it is accepted, will it still be about freedom of speech and democracy?

Of course, this is no longer freedom of speech and it is the slow burial of democracy. This right to "freely search for information" is even directly enshrined in the Charter of Basic Rights and Freedoms -
Article 17:
(1) Freedom of expression and the right to information are guaranteed.
(2) Everyone has the right to express their opinions in words, letters, print, images or in any other way, as well as and freely search, receive and distribute ideas and information regardless of national borders.
(3) Censorship is inadmissible.

So, if a similar law were to pass and the Constitutional Court would sanctify something similar, in my opinion we would no longer live in a democratic country. But of course it's not just about laws. In such a hostile environment, which, in my opinion, is being deliberately created by this and previous governments, even self-censorship is perfectly sufficient, when a person is afraid to write or say what he thinks, lest he lose his job, be dragged by the media, or simply ostracized by the bearers of the the only "truth".
I myself feel that when I write today, I value every sentence, and that was completely non-existent five or ten years ago.

I was also interested in the part of Vávr's speech in which he said: "It doesn't matter what some supporters of censorship think about the intelligence of their fellow citizens. Everyone has the same rights. The prime minister, an official of the Ministry of the Interior, a Czech elf, a university professor and Mrs. Vomáčková, who sends chain e-mails to her friends. No one has any special status and right to censor others' information because they are too stupid. Nowhere in any law does it say that smarter people, such as Mr. Kartous, a fighter against disinformation, a trained gymnast, have different, better rights than Mrs. Vomáčková." his own interest" to still censor, limit and filter something?

Everyone has the right to their opinion from the Charter and the Constitution, even if it is complete stupidity, and they have the right to say it publicly.
There is no such thing as a "better" or "worse" truth.
We already had that once here, that the Party and the people determined for us what is and what is not true. But the least understandable thing for me is that this new ideology and "struggle for the only truth" is also supported by a number of people who had rich experience with communist totalitarianism, and yet they are the ones who vehemently promote the "European Center for the Only Truth".

I will return to one of the initial questions. What can those who are indifferent do with the fact that the Prime Minister proclaims the right to correct information and the Minister of the Interior Vít Rakušan is preparing a stick for those who would like to think differently from what is true?

In the first place, they should not have voted for this government, about which it was quite obvious where it was going. However, the pace with which he does it, I have to admit, surprised even me. But this is actually secondary - I've already said the main thing. Everyone must start with themselves, they must stop being silent, if injustice is happening, they must not be afraid to speak up and most importantly, they just need to know how to say NO.
For the past two years, thousands of people senselessly checked the health status of other people, hundreds of people created laws and tools for this government, hundreds of people and entire advertising agencies advertised for the government on the pointless Dot, dozens of actors were involved in it. And all you have to do is say an easy NO - I won't be involved! And if enough people do this, all the problems are over.

(Interview for PL – Jiří Hroník)