When They Go Low, We Go High

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When They Go Low, We Go High Page 41

by Philip Collins


  But the conditions that allow men to keep their eyes fixed on falsehood leads him to the finest phrase in the speech: ‘The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment.’ This is as beautifully rendered an account of how human relationships are corrupted as Havel’s compatriot Milan Kundera documented in his magnificent series of novels about Czechoslovakia, written from the safety of France. When there is no truth-telling there can be no effective moral life.

  The previous regime – armed with its arrogant and intolerant ideology – reduced man to a force of production, and nature to a tool of production. In this it attacked both their very substance and their mutual relationship. It reduced gifted and autonomous people, skilfully working in their own country, to the nuts and bolts of some monstrously huge, noisy and stinking machine, whose real meaning was not clear to anyone. It could not do more than slowly but inexorably wear out itself and all its nuts and bolts. When I talk about the contaminated moral atmosphere, I am not talking just about the gentlemen who eat organic vegetables and do not look out of the plane windows. I am talking about all of us. We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all – though naturally to differing extents – responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery. None of us is just its victim. We are all also its co-creators. Why do I say this? It would be very unreasonable to understand the sad legacy of the last forty years as something alien, which some distant relative bequeathed to us. On the contrary. We have to accept this legacy as a sin we committed against ourselves. If we accept it as such we will understand that it is up to us all and up to us alone to do something about it. We cannot blame the previous rulers for everything, not only because it would be untrue, but also because it would blunt the duty that each of us faces today: namely, the obligation to act independently, freely, reasonably and quickly. Let us not be mistaken: the best government in the world, the best parliament and the best president, cannot achieve much on their own. And it would be wrong to expect a general remedy from them alone. Freedom and democracy include participation and therefore responsibility from us all. If we realise this, then all the horrors that the new Czechoslovak democracy inherited will cease to appear so terrible. If we realise this, hope will return to our hearts.

  This is a brave message to give to a newly free people. Havel uses the metaphor of the communist ideology as a machine that reduces individuals to cogs. But, daringly, he chooses not to develop that idea. It would have been safe to continue the critique of the Soviet years. Nobody would have contradicted him. Instead, he risks the charge that the guilt must attach to everyone. This passage is a counterpart to Kennedy’s famous Inaugural which asked the American people not what he could do for them but what they could do for their country. It is a stark message: take responsibility. Do not allow yourself to be browbeaten into the belief that it was all the fault of the regime. The first step towards recovery is for the citizen body to take responsibility for some part of the past as a prelude to taking responsibility for the future.

  The message was received as a painful truth, but it was by no means universally popular. Havel’s own moral standing on this question gives him the moral authority to make the point. He had been involved in the first organised opposition to the regime under the auspices of Charter 77, a manifesto for freedom signed by artists and former public officials and published in West German newspapers on 6 January 1977. The Charter was critical of the communist government for its record on human rights. Signatories were arrested and interrogated and many dismissed from their employment. One of the three founding spokesmen of Charter 77, Jan Patocka, a philosophy professor, died during a gruelling eleven-hour interrogation. Havel spent five months behind bars in 1977, with a further three months in 1978.

  Yet it is still a risky thing to say, and Havel is courageous to say it. It was an idea he had been harbouring for a long time. In 1975 he had written to the communist leader Gustáv Husák, saying the order that the authorities believed to be their great achievement was ‘a musty inertia … like the morgue or a grave’. The country, he thought, was rotting inside: ‘It is the worst in us which is being systematically activated and enlarged – egotism, hypocrisy, indifference, cowardice, fear, resignation, and the desire to escape every personal responsibility.’ Here, nobody escapes his attribution of responsibility.

  In the effort to rectify matters of common concern, we have something to lean on. The recent period – and in particular the last six weeks of our peaceful revolution – has shown the enormous human, moral and spiritual potential, and the civic culture that slumbered in our society under the enforced mask of apathy. Whenever someone categorically claimed that we were this or that, I always objected that society is a very mysterious creature and that it is unwise to trust only the face it presents to you. I am happy that I was not mistaken. Everywhere in the world people wonder where those meek, humiliated, sceptical and seemingly cynical citizens of Czechoslovakia found the marvellous strength to shake the totalitarian yoke from their shoulders in several weeks, and in a decent and peaceful way. And let us ask: where did the young people who never knew another system get their desire for truth, their love of free thought, their political ideas, their civic courage and civic prudence? How did it happen that their parents – the very generation that had been considered lost – joined them? How is it that so many people immediately knew what to do and none needed any advice or instruction? I think there are two main reasons for the hopeful face of our present situation. First of all, people are never just a product of the external world; they are also able to relate themselves to something superior, however systematically the external world tries to kill that ability in them. Secondly, the humanistic and democratic traditions, about which there had been so much idle talk, did after all slumber in the unconsciousness of our nations and ethnic minorities, and were inconspicuously passed from one generation to another, so that each of us could discover them at the right time and transform them into deeds.

  Having charged the citizens of Czechoslovakia with complicity in their fate, Havel compliments them, almost in contradiction, with having the strength of purpose to rebel. This speech is a bit like Philip Larkin’s description of the English novel: it has a beginning, a muddle and an end. Havel is not really clear about where the resistance has come from. This passage purports to excavate the sources of the resistance to the oppressor but those sources never really come into focus. The two reasons he gives for the survival of the urge towards freedom are really one. The first is that an oppressed people can retain the capacity to imagine a moral entity larger than themselves, even though the authorities try to kill it off. The second is that a democratic tradition has somehow survived the time of unfreedom in Czechoslovakia. But this tradition contains the moral capacity that was his first point; they are the same thing. It is also unclear how a tradition can really be passed down if nobody was articulating it or practising it. If the people really were as compliant and as complicit in the Soviet rule as he has just said they were, then they could hardly have been simultaneously harbouring the democratic tradition. The tip-off here is the word unconsciousness. Havel implies that the knowledge was hidden somewhere in the collective psyche; people both knew and did not know. Back in 1979 Havel had written of the process of rebelling: ‘We never decided to become dissidents. We have been transformed into them, without quite knowing how.’

  We had to pay, however, for our present freedom. Many citizens perished in jails in the 1950s, many were executed, thousands of human lives were destroyed, hundreds of thousands of talented people were forced to leave the country. Those who defended the honour of our nations during the Second World War, those who rebelled against totalitarian rule and those who simply managed to remain themselves and think freely, were all persecuted. We should not forget any of those who paid for our present freedom in one way or another. Independent courts should impartially conside
r the possible guilt of those who were responsible for the persecutions, so that the truth about our recent past might be fully revealed. We must also bear in mind that other nations have paid even more dearly for their present freedom, and that indirectly they have also paid for ours. The rivers of blood that have flowed in Hungary, Poland, Germany and recently in such a horrific manner in Romania, as well as the sea of blood shed by the nations of the Soviet Union, must not be forgotten. First of all because all human suffering concerns every other human being. But more than this, they must also not be forgotten because it is these great sacrifices that form the tragic background of today’s freedom or the gradual emancipation of the nations of the Soviet Bloc, and thus the background of our own newfound freedom. Without the changes in the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, and the German Democratic Republic, what has happened in our country would have scarcely happened. And if it did, it certainly would not have followed such a peaceful course … Let us not allow the sympathies of the world, which we have won so fast, to be equally rapidly lost through our becoming entangled in the jungle of skirmishes for power. Let us not allow the desire to serve oneself to bloom once again under the stately garb of the desire to serve the common good. It is not really important now which party, club or group prevails in the elections. The important thing is that the winners will be the best of us, in the moral, civic, political and professional sense, regardless of their political affiliations … In our country there are many prisoners who, though they may have committed serious crimes and have been punished for them, have had to submit – despite the good will of some investigators, judges and above all defence lawyers – to a debased judiciary process that curtailed their rights. They now have to live in prisons that do not strive to awaken the better qualities contained in every person, but rather humiliate them and destroy them physically and mentally. In a view of this fact, I have decided to declare a relatively extensive amnesty. At the same time I call on the prisoners to understand that forty years of unjust investigations, trials and imprisonments cannot be put right overnight, and to understand that the changes that are being speedily prepared still require time to implement. By rebelling, the prisoners would help neither society nor themselves. I also call on the public not to fear the prisoners once they are released, not to make their lives difficult, to help them, in the Christian spirit, after their return among us to find within themselves that which jails could not find in them: the capacity to repent and the desire to live a respectable life.

  This is an important passage in which Havel sets out his hopes that the Velvet Revolution will not go awry. He approaches this in two ways. The first is to locate the revolution in Czechoslovakia in the context of a regional collapse of the idea of communism. By raising the stakes and making this a struggle of liberty versus tyranny, Havel is gathering moral authority to his side.

  Havel also sets up his second stratagem, which is to signal a desire for clemency and forgiveness, a vital sentiment in the tumult of a change in regime. The generosity of these words conceals how controversial they were. It is one thing to ask people to forgive and another for them to do so. When Havel was as good as his word, when he enacted a general amnesty for some of the most serious criminals, when he apologised on behalf of Czechoslovakia for the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans after the Second World War and when he resisted the demands for a more draconian purge of secret police collaborators, he ran into strong opposition. Havel felt that the court verdicts of the previous regime could not always be trusted. He did not believe that most of those in prison had received a fair trial. He was probably right about that, but the most finely constructed words cannot brush off a troublesome reality. When the crime rate tripled in the four years after the Velvet Revolution, Havel faced the consequences of this first speech. Crony capitalism soon came to Czechoslovakia and, against Havel’s wishes, Czechoslovakia split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993.

  In conclusion, I would like to say that I want to be a president who will speak less and work more. To be a president who will not only look out of the windows of his airplane but who, first and foremost, will always be present among his fellow citizens and listen to them well. You may ask what kind of republic I dream of. Let me reply: I dream of a republic independent, free, and democratic, of a republic economically prosperous and yet socially just; in short, of a humane republic that serves the individual and that therefore holds the hope that the individual will serve it in turn. Of a republic of well-rounded people, because without such people it is impossible to solve any of our problems – human, economic, ecological, social, or political. The most distinguished of my predecessors opened his first speech with a quotation from the great Czech educator Komensk. Allow me to conclude my first speech with my own paraphrase of the same statement: People, your government has returned to you!

  Havel was always keen to speak less. Though he was a fine writer, of speeches as well as of plays and essays, he was not a natural orator. His voice worked at too low a pitch and he had a recognisable but not especially attractive habit of rolling the r. He also took a while to come to terms with the demands of speech-making, particularly for television. For a playwright he had a strangely rarefied sense of theatre. His revolutionary speeches had been mostly extempore or given from scanty notes. All at once he had to read his speeches from a text, as neither the Czechoslovakian television company nor the office of the president owned a teleprompter, a device that Havel in any case regarded as a trick. He also found the necessary discipline of political speech limiting and frustrating. A political speech needs to repeat and emphasise. Points need to be hammered in, but he thought repetition was poor writing. He was also, as a writer, fond of irony and understatement, and these are lesser currencies in rhetoric.

  The task for this speech was to inspire by telling the truth, so Havel was persuaded to harden his language. In an early draft he suggested ending the speech by saying simply ‘goodbye’. He was persuaded that goodbye would not do and so chose a phrase that is famous in Czech national mythology and which is ascribed to the seventeenth-century Czech educator Jan Amos Komenský: ‘People, your government has returned to you!’ And it had.

  Havel faced difficulties in office, but they stayed within the usual political frame. His great contribution was to oversee a peaceful end to the fantasy that had begun with utopia and ended in slavery. It had seemed, to cite the title of one of Havel’s volumes of non-fiction, to be The Art of the Impossible. It proved to be gloriously possible, and some measure of the joy to be taken from the Velvet Revolution is found in the fact that one of the new president’s first acts in office was to invite Frank Zappa to play a victory concert in Prague.

  Havel had a simple, almost wilfully naive, motto that stands as a summary of his political career and of this, his first and best speech: ‘Truth and love must prevail over lies and hate’. As Milan Kundera said, ‘Havel’s most important work is his own life.’ Many more citizens can afford to fly into Prague these days and eat organic vegetables and look out of the window at a modern city as they arrive. When they touch down they will enter the Czech Republic through Václav Havel Airport.

  ELIE WIESEL

  The Perils of Indifference

  The White House, Washington DC

  12 April 1999

  Eliezer Wiesel (1928–2016) was born into the close-knit Yiddish-speaking Jewish community in Sighet, a small town in the Carpathian Mountains in Hungary, the third child of Shlomo Wiesel and Sarah Feig. Before Elie there had been Hilda and Bea, his elder sisters. After him came a third sister, Tzipora. The young Elie was deeply studious and intensely religious. He loved the mystical tradition of the Hasidic sect of Judaism to which his mother’s family belonged.

  Sighet was insulated from the worst of the Second World War until 1944. Then the devil appeared in the form of German soldiers. The Sighet Jews were crammed into cattle cars and deported to concentration camps in Poland. When the Wiesel family arrived in Auschwitz, men were told to step t
o the left and women to the right. Wiesel went one way with his father; his mother and sisters went the other way. He recalled that as they walked away his mother was stroking the seven-year-old Tzipora’s hair. He never saw them again. Hilda and Bea survived Auschwitz, though Wiesel would not discover this until years later.

  Wiesel survived, as he says, in his memoir Night, by chance. He and his father were selected for slave labour by a monocled Dr Joseph Mengele ‘with a wave of a bandleader’s baton’. After moving from camp to camp either on unshod feet in the driving snow or in open cattle cars, Wiesel and his father ended up in a rubber factory. They were worked to the point of death, starved and beaten. As the Russian army drew close, Shlomo and Elie were moved to Buchenwald. Though neither of them knew it, when Shlomo Wiesel succumbed to dysentery, starvation, exhaustion and exposure, salvation was close at hand. In Night Wiesel describes witnessing his father’s death. It is one of the most harrowing passages in all literature. The whole book is hard to read, but it must be read.

  On 12 April 1945, American soldiers liberated the camp at Buchenwald. Wiesel was put on a train of 400 orphans that found its way to France, and he was assigned to a home in Normandy under the care of a Jewish organisation. There he mastered French by reading the classics, and in 1948 he enrolled in the Sorbonne. He became a journalist and wrote for French and Israeli newspapers. For ten years he said nothing of what had happened to him and his family. Then at the prompting of the French Nobel laureate François Mauriac, Wiesel started writing about his experience. The result was a 900-page manuscript, in Yiddish, called Un die welt hot geshvign (And the World Kept Silent). This version was published in Buenos Aires, but Wiesel struggled to find a publisher elsewhere. Finally, in a much-winnowed version, his memoir was published under the title of Night.

 

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