Patrik Ouředník | Europeana

The Communists and Nazis said that it was necessary to establish a world that would correspond to the natural order of things. Historians and anthropologists later said that Communism and Nazism replaced religious belief with a belief in revolution and that people supported Communism and Nazism for the same motives, the strongest of which was the feeling that they belonged to the elect, in whose hands the fate of mankind would rest henceforth. The Nazis believed that the harmonious world of the future would be composed of powerful, selfless individuals linked by solidarity, and the common interest and kinship of them all would create a bulwark against the sort of decline to which the Humanists and the Enlightenment had brought the old world. The Communists, on the other hand, thought that in the new world all citizens would be mutually interchangeable and people would create a monolithic and unbroken whole, and no one would have private interests because everything would be shared, and that would prevent the decline to which the selfish interests of the ruling classes had brought the old world. And they both proclaimed the need for terror as the only successful way to fight democracy that eroded everything and led people to become homosexuals and Anarchists and parasites and skeptics and individualists and alcoholics, etc. And they agitated against homosexuals and parasites and drunkards, and in Communist Russia the children of drunkards were made to parade around the square each Sunday with a sign around their neck saying DADDY, STOP DRINKING. I WANT MY PLACE IN THE NEW WORLD, and in Nazi Germany drunkards had to parade around the square with a sign saying I've drunk my pay and there's nothing LEFT FOR MY family. And when the drunkards did not mend their ways they were sent to concentration camps where they worked for the good of all. In the German concentration camps the sign over the entrance read WORK SHALL make you FREE and in the Soviet concentration camps the sign over the entrance said WORK SINGLE-MINDEDLY TO FULFILL THE PLAN. And instead of GOOD morning, the Communists said HONOR WORK because they thought work was important and if everyone worked Communism would be victorious worldwide. And people who instead of HONOR WORK said GOOD MORNING or hello or GOD bless YOU were suspect and their neighbors would say they were not good patriots. 

Translated by Gerald Turner