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Author’s note: I am cross-posting this report as a guest op-ed from disinformation researcher, author and podcaster Alex Alvarova, who dedicates it to American survivors of this ongoing war.
She wrote the following intro:
One of the officers of the Czech army, who understands informational operations, referred to our victims of new technological propaganda as "fallen on the field of informational warfare." These victims are our loved ones—our cherished mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, and even young sons—who have been deeply wounded in their hearts by various forms of radical operations targeting their psychological vulnerabilities from both sides of the political spectrum. Yes, in their hearts, not their minds.—Alex Alvarova, Demember 3, 2024
I am cross-posting her work here with the hope that between RadPod’s interview with Marci Shore and Alex’s lived experience, we can create a movement where “likes” no longer matter, and millions mobilize in real life in defense of American democracy. Our window is short, but it’s far easier to save a democracy than it is to get one back.—Heidi Siegmund Cuda for Bette Dangerous, December 4, 2024
Czech and Soviet leaders Gustáv Husák and Leonid Brezhnev, Prague 1976/Photo CTK
What Eastern Europeans Can Teach America Today: The Worst Fear Is of the Unknown
by Alex Alvarova
“A girl from the past is telling you about the future.”
Human longing to love, to feel important, and to find meaning in life has become a weakness through which disinformation strikes pierce human hearts. The victim does not die immediately; instead, they feel as though they have never lived better. So much new information, so many new friends who cannot live without them! This newfound knowledge fills them with purpose; they finally have a higher mission in life, a noble calling. Their hearts drive them to do strange things in the name of a greater good, contributing to the new work of a new leader, who rivals even Jesus.
A significant portion of their new "friends" are either the same zombies as themselves or even robots and artificial intelligence—lifeless, programmed matter. A victim, long isolated with their fears and troubles, suddenly feels happy from the newfound sense of control over their life. This poison strikes at the heart, not the mind.
Who wouldn’t want to escape this awkward reality filled with doubts, uncertainty, interpersonal struggles, and misunderstandings from others? Who wouldn’t long to wake up in a new world brimming with purpose, fighting for a new order, and earning recognition from new friends? The victims are reborn into a carefully staged folklore world that is not real and begin to appear to their loved ones as though they have been drained by Count Dracula during the night.
They no longer belong to this world but to a dark night ruled by supernatural laws.
We, the ones left behind, cry at night from longing or feel anger during the day for those who have left us to reside in a new realm.
For us, the survivors—destined now to helplessly observe the rise of a digital version of the novel "1984"—this article is intended. It will not be pleasant reading, but understanding it will allow us to prepare because the greatest fear is always the unknown.
A girl from the past is telling you the future
As you might know, I am a girl from Eastern Europe.
In your national narrative, the word "freedom" is entrenched as the strongest symbol—a programming meme that evokes pride simply by its sound. You have never lost it and do not know what it is like to endure bent backs and the need to dodge an all-powerful overseer like a rat before a cobra. Yes, we Eastern Europeans have broken spines, and many of us also suffer from Stockholm Syndrome.
Unless a miracle happens, you will now have to learn everything we have been trying to forget for the last thirty years.
You have never had Russians at home, so you do not know what awaits you.
Never in your history has every citizen, regardless of privilege, been subjected to state-organized oppression.
For us in former Czechoslovakia, privileged individuals were members of the Party; for you, it will now be MAGA.
The principle of Russian terror lies in the certainty that anyone, even the loyal or servile, can be labeled a traitor tomorrow. On the contrary, when a few loyal supporters are imprisoned or killed, fear grows even greater, becoming more effective.
When the Russians came to my country, my parents were still children. They grew up and matured in a bizarre world of fear and humiliation.
Shortly after the Communist coup in 1948 (the Soviets could not believe their luck that we, the fools in Czechoslovakia, voluntarily chose their Fifth Column under the influence of propaganda), the elections of 1946 led people to vote for the Party and a few other marginal parties allowed to participate.
By then, both the president and ordinary people had long been under massive Russian propaganda, terrified of the supposed retaliation by the Soviet Union and enchanted by the glory of Russia’s wartime victory.
By the summer of 1947, however, the Communists' popularity had significantly declined, and it was expected that the Party would suffer a major defeat in the May 1948 elections. This, along with the Communists’ poor electoral performance across Europe, led to Stalin tightening his approach to propaganda and subversive activities.
On February 21, 1948, twelve non-Communist ministers resigned from their government posts in protest. Being raised as democrats without Soviet training, it never occurred to them that an era of violating norms and circumventing rules was beginning. They were so confident in their moral superiority that they believed their step—resigning from power—would elicit a reaction from the public and the president, ensuring adherence to proper Czech customs. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Russians never played by the rules and always built their victories on breaking them.
Oh, how naively, tragically, and inexcusably Czech democratic politicians failed in the face of the greatest evil of the 20th century.
They protested the Party leader Gottwald's refusal to stop filling the police and army with loyalists and radicalizing them against democracy, believing that the leader would eventually yield to pressure. But the Russians knew exactly what advice to give. Armed and trained civilian militias and civic police occupied Prague.
On February 25, the old and sick President Beneš, fearing civil war and Soviet retaliation, capitulated and allowed the formation of a new government in line with all demands. After the coup, the new establishment quickly cemented their power and introduced sham theatrical elections, which they consistently won overwhelmingly from that point onward.
Those who remembered the Russian "liberation” — raped women, murdered and robbed individuals — were forbidden to speak. Those in the armed forces who opposed "new order" were immediately imprisoned, brutally tortured, and executed without trial after the 1948 coup.
Great emphasis was placed on eliminating war veterans and heroes who had experienced intense combat and were not afraid for their lives. They were the first to enter the torture chambers. The armed forces were systematically subverted under the secret supervision of Russian advisors, ensuring that at the key moment of the takeover, the army, intelligence, counterintelligence, or police could not resist.
It Began with the Judiciary
Justice became a bad joke. Quickly, "loyalists from the common folk" were appointed to judge positions to prevent a shortage of judicial capacity. At the top of this structure was the chief sadist and criminal, prosecutor Urválek, directly responsible for dozens of judicial murders. Trials were not conducted according to laws, as verdicts for the disobedient were sent to judges as directives from the government before the trial even began. The primary purpose of the trials was "a show" so they could be broadcast on the radio and in cinemas, and later television. In these monstrous trials, even the highest-ranking Party members—colleagues of the leader Gottwald—were executed, as he feared their intelligence and abilities. Since Stalin hated Jews, fabricated trials were conducted against Party members of Jewish origin.
She had a young daughter, to whom she was allowed to write a farewell letter before her execution. Workers in factories were forced by their Communist bosses—who were unbearably stupid, uneducated, and incompetent—to sign petitions demanding Milada Horáková's execution.
The Party became filled with previous Fifth Column imbecilic loyalists and cynical career-driven monsters. These individuals reported every word uttered at work or school to the vast army of newly employed secret police or the "network of informants" within the Party.
The Russians had ample strength and experience at home to rule through fear and terror.
People desperately tried to escape the country, but when the Party stretched barbed wire along the borders to ensure someone remained in the nation and the dangerous invaders from outside could not enter, fleeing became nearly impossible. The only escape route led to Germany through dangerous swamps and marshes. Many drowned in the attempt to reach the free world.
Terror
Loyalty checks for the Party leader were conducted in the army and all schools. Students and educators who dared to speak differently than the official doctrine were expelled. Military and police officers, decorated with honors, were tortured or dismissed from the army and forcibly relocated from their homes to poor quarters in the countryside or rundown urban outskirts. Church leaders were given the choice to either cooperate with the regime and sign agreements with the secret police or be sent to concentration camps to mine uranium under inhumane conditions. The mined uranium was shipped to the Soviet Union without compensation. Scouts, students, civic associations, and all forms of civil society were listed as enemies, and their members could be imprisoned at any time.
People bowed to Stalin and Gottwald as though they were new Buddhas, and oversized, often gilded or bronze statues were erected in their honor.
Any extra word spoken was immediately reported by someone. People feared that if they didn’t report it themselves, someone else would denounce them.
A false opposition was built.
The State Security (StB), the secret police, in collaboration with the Soviets, established cells of armed resistance to lure those who wanted to join. One of our family’s acquaintances naively took the bait and was nearly shot during his arrest. He was saved only because he bent down to tie his shoe, and the bullets missed him.
He was then forced to mine uranium for the Russians for 13 years. He returned broken, emaciated, and ill. Not everyone was crushed by the concentration camps, but the brutal torture and grueling labor under harsh conditions took a toll on everyone.
The fear of concentration camps and torture spread like an invisible plague, even among those who had done nothing against the regime. It was impossible to read about what was happening in our country. Journalists and intellectuals were silenced, dismissed and replaced by loyal goons or criminal elements with sadistic tendencies.
At the edge of the border zone, between the barbed wire fences and deep in the forest, the State Security built a small house. Officers of the secret police who spoke German and English were stationed there. The State Security dressed them in convincing replicas of American and German uniforms, so people fleeing the country would think they had reached Germany or the American post-war zone. When these exhausted people, who had walked through forests and swamps all night to avoid armed patrols with dogs, arrived at the house at dawn, they rejoiced, thinking they were free. They were given tea, a warm blanket, and asked to describe in detail everything happening in Czechoslovakia for the records. These unfortunate souls never suspected that boarding the prepared bus meant their next stop would be a concentration camp or prison. Their gold and valuables were usually stolen during arrest by members of the underworld collaborating with the secret police.
Business as usual
Every minister in the Party was assigned shadow Russian advisors who had no need to introduce themselves to the public and held absolute decision-making power. Their names, particularly those stationed at the ministries of the interior, justice, and defense, spread among the public through whispers.
Within five years of the coup, the Party had driven the country into such poverty that they had to resort to extreme measures. Unexpectedly, they devalued the currency, which had previously been the strongest in Europe. The Soviet ruble had collapsed around 1950, and the Czechoslovak currency reform of 1953 tied the CZK to the ruble.
Everything was flooded with imbecilic Party propaganda glorifying the simple working class. Anyone educated was deemed a potential enemy. In schools, children were required to record their family backgrounds in classroom logs. Families were categorized as “working-class,” “peasant,” or “other.”
We, who fell into the “other” category, were closely monitored and evaluated by teachers who knew that our chances of attending university were slim. If a family in the "other" category had additional “red flags” in their archival files, the omnipresent surveillance regime ensured that studying was impossible or that parents could only find menial labor jobs.
Everyone was equal, according to the propaganda.
Photo courtesy Alex Alvarova personal archives
However, Party leaders immediately seized the properties, villas, and cars of those they had executed or who had managed to escape after the coup.
A ruling class of extraordinarily wealthy, corrupt idiots emerged, who, by the 1980s, began exporting their vast stolen assets to Switzerland, London, and other places to purchase apartments in buildings like Trump Tower. By the 1980s, there were no longer concentration camps since there was no will for armed resistance, and uranium deposits were depleted. By then, everyone knew the truth: The Party and secret police members were millionaires. The normies who had nothing—including members of the Communist Party—despised them deeply.
Prague Spring 1968
By the 1960s, Czechs—a cheerful and creative nation capable of producing incredible GDP even under miserable conditions—had somewhat recovered from the terror and began to long for music and fashion from the West.
Television and gramophone records occasionally offered a taste of forbidden fruit: the joyous and free music of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Who, and many others. Czechs, who had been accustomed to setting economic trends in Europe before the war and now reduced to miserable beggars silenced by propaganda, never stopped dreaming of belonging to the West, where they drew their knowledge and cultural inspiration.
When this trend began to seep into the Party and the Czech military seriously considered separating its defense doctrine from Soviet influence, a logical blow followed. In 1968, the naïveté of the Czechs was crushed by Soviet tanks.
The Hangover After the Arrival of Russian Tanks
The 1970s were marked by depression, apathy, alcoholism, and the feeling that nothing mattered. As the poet Ivan Diviš noted, in Prague, it seemed that only alcohol-soaked corpses wandered the streets instead of people.
Even Party officials no longer believed in anything, nor did their secret police. The only thing that mattered was money, and even that had to be in dollars. Cynicism reached its peak among both the Party and the general populace.
This was a period when the Party began to rely on popular artists, entertainers, actors and comedians to cheer people up on television, as no one was really working. Most people merely pretended to work when they went to their jobs. The economy continued to decline, but there was still something left to plunder.
The Party began allowing care packages from relatives in the West. Money sent by families in hard currency was confiscated and converted into worthless paper vouchers. These vouchers could be used to buy mediocre Western goods. These and other financial operations were entirely controlled by the secret police and intelligence services, which had learned to conduct business in the West and established ties with Russian organized crime, which, by the late 1980s, had full control over Western underworld operations.
Hardworking Czechs were no longer as industrious; they had become indifferent, and many turned to alcohol like the Russians.
The national character of hardworking and educated people had almost died. It was replaced by a culture of laziness, cynicism, dark humor, corruption, and distrust—just as everywhere else touched by the boot of the Russian soldier.
Russian culture is one of destruction, death, and nihilism.
How We Survived
We survived. We remained paranoid, incapable of trust, devoid of civic cohesion, and full of cynicism and fear. You may ask what kept us alive when there was no hope of escaping this grotesque theater of stupid cruel monsters.
Humor.
Political jokes and anecdotes passed orally thrived from the 1950s onward. Initially, they were punishable by imprisonment, but the regime eventually gave up. The more exhausted it became, the better jokes people created among themselves. Humor became a currency of exchange, rewarding trust and hospitality. Of course, secret police agents and provocateurs often exploited humor to uncover resistance cells and destroy people's trust in life and each other. But as the regime weakened both economically and mentally, humor spread so widely by the 1980s that suppressing it was as laughable as trying to plug a burst water pipe with a few fingers.
Czechs, Poles, and Hungarians produced the most jokes about the senile officials. The inability to be replaced in a totalitarian system was widely known, so everyone had to wait until the half-blind, deaf, and senile leader did not wake up one day. The death of every Party elder was greeted in Czechoslovakia with bursts of cynical celebration, champagne toasts, and cascades of jokes.
One of them I still remember today:
In heaven, Saint Peter unlocks the gates and sees a long line of devils and demons waiting, mumbling something like "Bre... Bre... Bre..." and trembling. Peter takes the first one in line, but the devil is clearly in shock, continually muttering "Bre... Bre... Bre..."
Only the tenth devil can speak a little. Peter asks, "Don’t you know your place is in hell? Why on earth are you coming here?"
And the devil replies, "Brezhnev has died, and we’re the first refugees."
—Alex Alvarova for Bette Dangerous, December 4, 2024
Alex Alvarova is Czech-Canadian author and communication expert. In 2017 she wrote The Industry of Lies, a non-fiction work that introduces, outlines and fully supports a core concept: Russia used the 2013 presidential election in the Czech Republic as a trial run to perfect its hybrid-warfare aggression for altering the outcome of the 2016 US Presidential elections. In 2021, she published Feeding The Demons: The conquerors of America, a political thriller on behavioral propaganda. She wrote numerous expert articles on political marketing and algorithmic propaganda. Together with her co-host, expert on social media algorithms, Josef Holy, she hosts a czech podcast called Canaries In The Net, on algorithmic propaganda and AI.
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Brilliant! My husband and I still remember Prague Spring. We were just 18. 1968. It started with the Viet Cong overrunning the US Embassy during Tet. Then Johnson withdrew from the race for the Presidency. Martin Luther King was assassinated. Bobby Hutton was killed. Prague Spring. Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. Danny the Red. And then, the police riot in Chicago during the Democratic Convention. The Cleaver Controversy at UC Berkeley. Eldridge going to Cuba. ........ Richard Nixon.
1969. In Berkeley, it was the beginning and the end.
Brilliant! My husband and I still remember Prague Spring. We were just 18. 1968. It started with the Viet Cong overrunning the US Embassy during Tet. Then Johnson withdrew from the race for the Presidency. Martin Luther King was assassinated. Bobby Hutton was killed. Prague Spring. Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. Danny the Red. And then, the police riot in Chicago during the Democratic Convention. The Cleaver Controversy at UC Berkeley. Eldridge going to Cuba. ........ Richard Nixon.
1969. In Berkeley, it was the beginning and the end.