…has recently taken hold of the leading Slovak publisher TORDEN through the “independent” Prague daily Právo. As he prefaced his “cup of tea” in the cultural section of 20 February 2025 under the enticing headline People, wake up! Stalin was a genius and Havel a puppet, Josef Chuchma, editor of the CT art website, admits, the motto of the publishing house is: If you want to know the truth, read books that forbid it. And then Chuchma goes on the offensive by mocking the proclamation of this publishing house from Starý Smokovec: “Our mission is to help people to wake up so that they can embark on the path to real freedom, to enlightenment.”
In the next lines he describes how he used the Internet to get into the editorial plan and what he found there. In his words: “He immersed himself in a parallel world where things were different.” And he picks up titles that we shouldn’t know about in the first place, because they tell us what our mainstream media conceal or alter in their own image. His editorial stomach churns at books about Stalin, he wants to vomit at the publication Demolition of Our Democracy – from Havel to Šimečka or, last but not least, at the book The Fox of the North about Vladimir Putin.
Where did Chuchm suddenly find so much editorial courage, when a few years ago he did not even squeal at the editorial plan of Naše vojska, selling portraits of Hitler’s generals in its U Anděla bookstore in Prague, that he did not protest against the publication of Hitler’s Mein Kampf or the sale of T-shirts and mugs with likenesses of fascist greats?
But let us return to the production of the Torden publishing house. Koniáš Chuchma in his reflection quite deliberately and purposefully suppresses a series of other books, moreover, mainly from the pen of Western European or American authors, such as, for example, the publication The Mystery of the Katyn Massacre: Katyn – a lie that became history (what does not fit into the beauty and how it really was?), The Ukraine Deception (how decades of corruption in the former Soviet republic led to the false impeachment of Trump), or Illegal Wars (how NATO countries are sabotaging the UN), or The Notebook from Hell (what broke on Biden’s son and his activities in Ukraine).
There is neither the time nor the space allotted to these polemical lines to devote to the full range of Torden Publishing’s editorial schedule, but the discerning reader will surely realize, or piece together from even that little, that the publisher’s aforementioned slogan, If you want to know the truth, read books that forbid it, is being fulfilled to the letter. The same cannot be said of a fraction of Czech publishing houses, most of which are uncompromisingly censored and self-censored.
In the conclusion of his scarf, Chuchma summarizes that there are also various nests of “parallel views” in the Czech Republic, but we will not find such a concentration of “banned books” as Torden shows here. Unfortunately, we are bidding. It’s tough with our totalitarian democracy that suppresses unsuitable views and stoops to falsifying history and historical events. It would probably take a Prague Maidan. Or even better, a new Prague Spring. Knocking at the door?
Ivan Černý
PHOTO – archive
