The history of the Arab media is interesting because it shows how important role the media can play in political changes. Arabs, as one of the nations conquered by the Ottoman Empire, began to use the press as a mean of national revival already in the 19th century, later this process intensified significantly in the 1940s´, where the press became one of the arenas of the struggle for the independence of Arab states. The role of the media in the Arab national liberation struggle is underestimated. However, their powerful force was noticed by the new Arab regimes, which completely subdued the media market of the nascent Arab states and began to use the media for their own political purposes. This situation continues to this day, but the emergence of the Internet in this part of the world has reawakened the Arab national liberation mood, which culminated during the Arab Spring. Nowadays, Arab new media is considered to be the next arena of the fight for political change and democratization of this part of the world.
Following the distinguished contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou is asked the question by the author: What does it mean to change the world? Similarly, he proceeds from more abstract ontological presuppositions of the change (world, being, existence, identity) to the philosophy of political change focusing on the reach and character of the change in question. Consequently, attention is paid to factors preventing a more radical change as well as those enhancing it.
The paper is focused on the Communist Party of Slovakia, power and political relations between communist functionaries in the 1950s. During the 9th Congress of the Slovak Communist party in 1950 the so-called bourgeois nationalists, previously influential high communist functionaries like Gustáv Husák, Ladislav Novomeský or Karol Šmidke, were finally eliminated and criticized. After elimination of these members of the Slovak communist elite the position of the Chairman of the Communist Party of Slovakia, Viliam Široký, was strengthened. He was the most powerful politician in the party at that time. However, this situation was changed by the development during the next three years, which were characterized by ongoing political downfalls and arrests of many communist functionaries, some of them Široký’s close co-workers. After the death of Josif Vissarionovič Stalin and Klement Gottwald in 1953 the position of V. Široký weakened and functionaries oriented towards the First secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia Antonín Novotný prevailed on the political scene.
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