The motto: “Who is not left-wing in youth, has no heart,” is meant literally at my host faculty in Marburg, Germany. Primarily it’s funny because we, the young people from Central and Eastern Europe, often see it a little bit differently.
In the era when the Czech Social Democrats were led by Jiří Paroubek (around 2005-2010), it wasn’t cool to call yourself left-wing among young people at all. Although it was pretty superficial, but almost every young person was against this kind of left-wing populism and we also saw the threat that our free land could once again be ruled by Communists.
Many of us are also from families that have a direct personal experience that the regime under the leadership of the Communist party oppressed them, made it impossible for them to live freely, to develop their talents and so on. It is natural for us to be anti-communist, and we tend to consider this ideology as equally bad or maybe even worse than Nazism or fascism.
But in West Germany they do not have this kind of experience. For young people there, the role of the authoritarian and reactionary evil is played by conservative, christian-democratic or right-wing liberal ideologies and parties. For them these are associated with the evil Western and global capitalism, imperialism, (neo)colonialism and so on. Professionally, it is then called for example neoliberalism. And the worse are only nationalists or Nazis.
The funny point is that Marxism or neo-Marxism are regarded as an intellectual paradigm there. If a person is centre-right, so he or she feels like inappropriately as well as the radical left-wing students must feel like at our universities in Czech lands.
Generally, one has a feeling that even Bernie Sanders in such an environment would be condemned as a radical right-winger, and it is unlikely to meet there someone who would have another favorite in contemporary America.
However, it seems that the situation that Czech (but also probably other Central and Eastern European) departments of Political Science/Philoshophy or social science faculties are very often right-wing/centre-right, is quite rare in the global context.
I hope it will not be a problem to publish here some photos. The mixture of radically left-wing anarchism, Marxism and neo-Marxism, in which one doesn’t know if it is still a revolt of youth, or already a uniform setting of everyone who do not want to be labeled a neo-Nazi, is in the context of the historical experience of my country very interesting. And there are a lot of more of these signs and stickers on the faculty and around the city.
The inscription on the left of the entrance to Philosophical Faculty: Capitalism kills!
Folk creativity at the entrance to the Building C
Expropriate banks and corporations!
Varoufakis, the new European hero/celebrity
There were more inscriptions like this: Refugees Welcome!
Some kind of a “solution” to the European immigration crisis
And some kind of euroscepticism – “The EU kills refugees”
Whether it’s unclear who reigns here
… and the World will be perfect
Does BFE mean this?
The enemy is clear: Nazis, capitalism, armed forces
Capital isn’t cool
NPD isn’t cool too
The fight against the Nazis is cool
Radical feminism is also cool: Live and read radically!
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