I remember the good mood you and other authors were in at the beginning of March at the launch of the book Chronicle of the covid era in the Kámen theater in Karlín. You gave the impression that you captured the absurdities and incredibly restrictive interventions in people's lives during those two years, but it's over now and it won't come back. Do you still have the optimism that we can never experience any lockdowns, mandatory masks or respirators or anything like that again?
I'm afraid you might have gotten the wrong impression from the cheerful atmosphere - we might have seemed relaxed, which is all that's left of today, but it's the exact opposite.
The whole anabasis with covid is certainly not over and it will come much harder in the fall - now in the spring and summer it's just an imaginary permission of the chains for people.
There are hundreds of thousands of viruses that naturally exist around us - only the human ones have been described in thousands, so it is not a problem to focus on any one, start watching it as covid and cause fear and panic in people. After all, we see it with the years-old monkey virus.
But far more dangerous is probably the flu, which was not here at all last year, and the doctors I trust agree that it will probably hit much harder this year.
I would like to be wrong, but for some people with weakened and damaged immunity - perhaps due to an unhealthy lifestyle, vaccinations, or wearing unnecessary respirators - it can be quite problematic in autumn. just look what's going on about flu in heavily vaccinated australia…
However, many people assume that this cannot happen again simply because there are now people in the government who, as oppositionists, vigorously opposed the measures of that time. But time pulled the curtain and the new government set passed the pandemic law against the will of the Senate, the Minister of Health Vlastimil Válek approved the use of the third dose of the covid vaccine for children aged 12 and over despite the negative opinion of the State Institute for Drug Control. The public is then dosed drop by drop with information about how we will get vaccinated again in the fall or wear masks or respirators. Do you think Minister Válk's plans will come to fruition? Who would be more likely to stop him, people's dissatisfaction, or colleagues in the government?
Again, I think it's the exact opposite - we've been warning against the new government from the beginning, and today a lot of people who blindly voted for them and ran into them are proving us right.
They are not as bad as Babiš - they are many times worse, and what one would have thought was almost impossible a year ago is unfortunately a reality today.
For Babiše, it was so "Czech, weak", but they are, unfortunately, very efficient in what they do and conscientious about the EU. And I think that is very dangerous for this country in the future...
However, you are primarily a writer, not a covid expert. Nevertheless, it seems as if your books touch him, even the ones you wrote before covid swept the world. I will start with the book Butterfly Scream, which was published in 2018 and is about elites and conspiracies. Have you succumbed to the temptation to compare what you described in the book with what really happened during the covid crisis, as this period is called? Or even think about who actually decides on the whole civilization, ecology and our lives?
When I book Butterfly scream he wrote in 2017, I spent almost a year looking for data and studying various powerful associations, such as Bilderberg, which meets annually.
The book, even though the genre is a thriller and the story is fictional, it actually contains almost 90 percent of all information and facts that are true and easy to find.
When I finished writing the book, I thought to myself - it's a force, but what can a person do with it, and besides, it doesn't concern him. But a few years passed and suddenly everything started to concern us as well.
Today, those associations have different names, they control politicians and, through them, entire countries, and they no longer hide anything at all - they have learned to do everything completely publicly and transparently and call it, for example, the Green Deal or the Great Reset, but if you point out that what they are doing , is not quite right, so you are immediately labeled as a conspirator, because they bring good after all.
If you had asked me a few years ago, I would also have tapped my forehead with my finger that it couldn't be a global conspiracy controlled by a few people, companies and money - but when all "normal" explanations fail, then it is necessary to start, even if only to admit, the crazy and improbable…
When you control the media, you control public opinion and with it the truth.
During those two years, we were deprived of our rights and freedoms. In your next book Lustr pro ponte, you focused on unfreedom, camps, and whistleblowers. You would also find some similes in it with the covid era, although curfews after 9 p.m., bans on travel between districts, bans on visiting various facilities without a vaccination certificate, various lockdowns and others were probably only a weak decoction against the conditions in Minkovice prison, where is the story happening?
It's still the same - because people are still the same. And it doesn't matter if it's the persecution of a Jew, a boy innocently convicted of communists, or someone who doesn't wear a mask and isn't vaccinated.
If something happens in society that allows the dark part of the human soul to come to the surface, then unfortunately almost anyone can succumb to evil.
People do this evil among themselves - the guards from Minkovice and Jáchymov from my book were also fathers from families who had families in nearby Ostrov nad Ohří, and they still live there today and nothing happened.
However, we also know from Nazi documents that often the biggest sadists from the concentration camps were exemplary parents at home.
In short, people don't change - they just dress better and have iPhones.
That's how the stories are still the same, and that's why I think they're so universal and Chandelier for the Pope it still works great for readers today.
Also, it's crazy that everyone knows about the 1950s camps, but almost no one knows what happened in the 1970s and 1980s, and everyone is shocked after reading it.
The Ark of Books was recently released to you, which deals with something similar to what we experienced here between the beginning of 2020 and 2022. Did you let covid inspire you so much and to what extent does the story correspond to reality?
It's paradoxical, isn't it Ark of books it is also largely about the epidemic, but I wrote it back in 2019, when no one knew about any covid. Well, it was because of covid that its release was delayed and it was finally released only at the end of 2021.
It's funny that before publication I had to edit passages in several places where the main character says that "unprecedented events took place that had no parallel in the world - that the whole country was being quarantined..." - and these very things and measures they were completely common at the time, so it had to be out of the book.
In short, reality far outstripped my imagination.
I know that your latest book, The War with Trees, will be on the shelves of bookstores in September, which also does not avoid covid, but it does not lack humor. What can you reveal about her?
The War with the Trees is something completely different – even the paraphrase of the War with the Newts is of course not accidental.
The book tells about parables and absurdities that have been happening around us for two years.
The story is about the aging Novák couple, who are enjoying their peaceful small-town life, until fate decides to turn it upside down for them - just like eight billion other people - because trees start to fall.
A banal and actually funny event, which, however, manages to spin a whirlwind of completely absurd events that the family has to face.
And safety helmets are just the beginning…
Don't you think, when some media are silenced, when the Government Office launched an initiative in which it calls on citizens to report misinformation or otherwise inappropriate texts and encourages them to do so by assuring them that it is definitely not "crap", that it could also happen to fiction or literature in general?
A year ago I would have told you that it was stupid, that it wouldn't happen and that we live in a democratic world where the hand of the market determines what sells, but today?
After private companies censor social media to please governments? When does a private company in our country ban the websites of other private companies - without a court order - simply "just like that" because they think it's good and corresponds to the correct "truth"?
In a time when people are afraid to speak up and get fired JUST for a different opinion?
I am afraid that today it is more and more real, that soon it will also come to literature.
Of course, it won't be posted anywhere - under the Communists, what was allowed and not allowed wasn't directly written either - but it was known somehow, and people and publishers had their own self-censorship and guessed what "shouldn't be done".
Today, Tománek will probably not be banned by anyone, but it is enough that the publisher does not want his next book, which I have already solved by publishing the book myself as a publisher after years of cooperation with Albatros, but then the censorship can go even further and then perhaps neither the distributor nor the bookseller will want it.
There are so many ways to silence someone...
For Parliament Papers – Jiří Hroník
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