My Crazy Century

by Ivan Klíma

  As soon as it seizes power, every totalitarian regime proclaims plenty of magnificent and lofty goals along with pleasing slogans. Soon, however, it becomes obvious that few of them can be fulfilled.

  Another task of propaganda is to create a fictive world and persuade the people that only this fictive world is real, while the real world is a fiction that has been thrust upon them by the enemy, who has still not been uncovered. Propaganda seeks to convince its citizens that almost everything that was promised has been fulfilled. You just have to be able to see it, or, more precisely: You have to know how to look. Propaganda thus emphasizes a point of view: Whoever does not see it is looking at events from the enemy’s point of view.

  A new fictive reality full of zealous partisans swells to the deafening roar of the celebration of glorious and magnificent victories. The press abounds with enthusiastic speeches by shock workers, loyal party followers, vigilant citizens who uncover traitors and pen resolutions in which they announce their devotion to the government, demonstrators, sloganeers, voters who vote 99.18 percent for the candidates proposed by the government. (In Kim Il-sung’s North Korea, it is reported that all were chosen without a single exception.)

  Entire apparatuses are delegated to the organization of enormous mass demonstrations and parades. Triumphant ride through the city. Hundreds of thousands rejoice. Fireworks rise into the heavens, celebratory salvos and the people rejoice. This is Berlin, Goebbels notes in his diary. Radio announcers describe the rejoicing May Day parades in Moscow, in Prague, in Warsaw, and in other Communist dictatorships. They read out the soul-destroying slogans borne on red banners. The mass media follow these orgies of assent in word and picture.

  In order to substitute this fictive reality for real life, isolation is necessary. Propaganda must proclaim the entirety of the rest of the world as a degenerate, rotten place, in which a relentless battle, exploitation, poverty, nationalistic prejudice, irresponsibility, and sexual perversion reign, where representatives of a lower race or international imperialism made their way to power, endeavoring to subjugate the rest of humanity. On one day (January 5, 1953), Rudé právo published articles with the following headlines:

  Barbaric Bombardment of Korean Cities and Villages

  Strikes on the Rise in Canada This Year

  Denmark’s Grave Financial Crisis

  Latin American Hatred for American Imperialism Is Growing

  Escalation of American-British Tensions

  New Provocation by West Berlin Police

  Boycott of Tito Banners by Yugoslav Workers

  The Brave Opposition of French Sailors to American Gestapo Regulations

  Italian Government Again Violates Peace Agreement

  News reports are masterfully composed to confirm the fiction. The mayor of Detroit speaks out on the horrible poverty threatening the lives of the unemployed and their children in his city. This is accompanied by a photograph of Soviet Pioneers departing for vacation. These are children whose blissful lives are threatened by nothing because they live in a Socialist country.

  Propaganda must assiduously lie about the democratic part of the world, but power must facilitate it: It must restrict the input of information, the exchange of individuals and ideas; it must strictly control everyone who leaves or enters its realm and declare foreign printed matter contraband. Finally it must build a wall and stretch barbed wire along its borders, obviously in order to keep diversionists out of the country. To overcome the recklessness of all its assignments, propaganda must fulfill yet another task, the confusion of language. George Orwell describes this ingeniously in his novel 1984.

  Propaganda labels wrongful situations—in which the police investigate, condemn, and execute whomever they want—the highest justice. Concentration camps are referred to as reeducation institutions. Slavelike work under inhuman conditions is called the path to liberation. A system in which people cannot without permission leave their region is called the government of the people, bondage is called freedom, and poverty is prosperity. Their backwardness is an example for the rest of the world; their empire surrounded by barbed wire is the only place a person can live in happiness and contentment. Murder will be called an act of justice.

  In 1934 Hitler had his former collaborators and friends murdered en masse so that he would not have to share power. When the citizens wondered at the bloodiness and gore of the purge, one of the official media (the Westdeutscher Beobachter) reported the following:

  Never before has a leader suppressed his own personal feelings so completely; never before has any statesman taken such extreme care for the welfare of his nation as the Führer. Not even Alexander the Great, no other king or emperor of ancient history, not Bonaparte, not Frederick the Great, has done anything like this. . . . One must follow the Führer for years, as we have, to be able to appreciate the enormousness of his sacrifice and to understand what it meant for him to give the command to execute so many of his former friends.

  When the Nazis installed a reign of terror against any kind of opposition after the occupation of Austria, Goebbels noted in his diary: The hour of freedom has arrived for this country as well.

  At the end of 1918, when unforgivable massacres were taking place in the name of the proletarian revolution, Lenin wrote: Proletarian democracy is a million times more democratic than any bourgeois democracy. A few decades later, his student, the foremost Hungarian Marxist György Lukács, elaborated upon this lie: Our people’s democracy, after the victorious battle against bourgeois democracy, is fulfilling the function of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This of course is not logical nonsense, not even an outright confusion of concepts, Czech Marxists will explain thirty years later. One cannot identify the dictatorship of the proletariat with violence. It is a new method of democracy. Every totalitarian power requires strict discipline and the obedience of all, and thus propaganda militarizes everyday vocabulary. It announces a battle to fulfill the plan, a battle for peace or Socialist morality. To help the workers, it sends brigades; it talks about offenses to exceed the quota, of the necessity to ensure an effective defense against enemy propaganda. It talks about successes on the cultural front, about capitalist encirclement, about the almighty army of workers. It emphasizes vigilance and watchfulness. The dictator himself (Stalin) proclaims: The closest practical goal of the kolkhozes [collective farms] consists in the battle for sowing, in the battle for the spreading of the tracts of sowing, in the battle for the correct organization of sowing.

  But words are not sufficient. One can avoid them, refuse to read the newspaper full of catchwords, ignore the radio, and not go to the cinema. Therefore it is necessary to impose upon the citizen at least those catchwords and symbols of the current power. Everywhere he goes, he stumbles upon an abundance of swastikas: on the sleeves of pedestrians, on flags hung everywhere the eye can see. As soon as he enters the door, he must cower before hammers and sickles. They will be hung above factory entrances, pasted on windows, sewn or printed on red banners. State banners with their symbols wave on all holidays; they are hung on every column. No structure will be spared the symbols of perverted power. They are engraved on the graves of functionaries and soldiers who fall in battle.

  Whenever a person enters a room, he hears not “Good afternoon” but “Heil Hitler!” He hears the same thing when he leaves, if people do not say to him, “Honor to work, Comrade!” Stalin’s face, with its pockmarks smoothed over, stares down at his every step, and he will be forced to acclaim Stalin’s glory at every meeting of the gardening club or trade union. And he will applaud and stand in tribute to the great führer or the immortal generalissimo.

  The fictive reality, day after day, month after month, with the help of all media, insinuates itself into the minds of the people and, in technical terminology, brainwashes them. At least in some cases it achieves its goal, and people succumb to the repeated lies and begin to wonder which of the realities is the real one. Most people accept bifurcation: In all intrinsically societal
situations they accept the fictive world of propaganda as reality, while in private they move in the real world—they grow lettuce in their gardens and during the Christmas holidays stand in real lines for tangerines or bananas.

  Propaganda protects the fictive world to the very end. When the broken Adolf Hitler, whose hand shook so much that he could sign his name only with difficulty, organized in his shadowy bunker his own theatrical wedding, he cursed the German people for their inability to be victorious. He then shot himself and his newlywed bride. The abating propaganda informed the people, who were thinking of nothing but escaping their own destruction, that their führer fell in heroic battle while defending the capital.

  Totalitarian power cannot survive without its thoroughly mendacious propaganda, and propaganda cannot exist without a regime hell-bent on every iniquity. When the regime falls, its propaganda dies with it. For most people, the long-awaited moment of truth arrives, but there are plenty of those who are frightened of this moment, which will throw them from the fictive world back to into real life.

  Dogmatists and Fanatics

  The Encyclopedia of Politics defines the concept of dogmatism as: Dogmatism (from Greek dogma = opinion)—a persistence of views without regard to new findings. Dogmatism was used in the political sphere primarily in the 1960s in connection with the attempt to reform Marxist-Leninist theory and the political practices of the Communist Party.

  The Academic Dictionary of Literary Czech provides a more precise definition: Dogma is an unproved assertion accepted on the basis of faith and considered incontrovertible, infallible, and eternal.

  For example, the basic Christian dogmas as established in the Apostolic Confessions of Faith prescribe that Christians believe that Jesus is the Son of God, born of the Virgin Mary; he was crucified, died, descended to hell, and on the third day he rose from the dead and ascended to heaven. The Confessions also include faith in corporeal resurrection after death and eternal life. The dogma does not concern itself with how a person can die and come back to life, or how we will all, on some unspecified day, perhaps millions of years after death, be resurrected in our bodily form, or what eternity means. Dogmas can only be believed.

  It is natural to want to live in truth. People desire that what they affirm and stand behind—what guides their life—be correct and that other people believe it to be correct as well. But who is entitled to judge what is correct? Certain norms are generally accepted, and laws must be based upon them or society will descend into chaos. But what about those areas that do not fit into these norms? How should society be organized so that a person is assured he is spending the time he has in the best way possible? How can he tell beauty from ugliness? Art from mere diversion? Does something suprapersonal exist? If so, where do we look for it? Which of the various offers put forth by different prophets do we choose?

  Most people incline to some sort of canonized guidance or explanation, to commandments, to ideals against which they measure their own deeds and behavior. The stricter and more apodictic these ideals appear, the more people are attracted to them. Whoever accepts them as his own is protected by their uncontestable authority, and he can feel safe. He abdicates all responsibility and, if necessary, renounces his own conscience.

  We have no conscience, announced Hans Frank at the beginning of Nazism. My conscience is Adolf Hitler.

  Dogmatists are usually uncreative people, but because they cleave wholeheartedly to some incontrovertible, infallible, and eternal truth, they acquire the certainty—the conviction—that they have the right to judge and to condemn all who do not recognize their truth.

  Dogmatism, therefore, becomes dangerous and destructive when it joins together with power or when it seeks to attain power.

  At the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern era, dogmatism was triumphant in the Christian church. In order to spread the Christian faith, crusades were undertaken whose participants sometimes slaughtered adherents of Christian sects and at other times adherents of Islam. The rabble would organize pogroms against Jews. To defend its dogmas, the Roman Catholic church established the Inquisition, an institution that suppressed manifestations of independent thought and killed heretics and women accused and “convicted” of witchcraft.

  The infamous Malleus Maleficarum is the fruit of such a perverted spirit which, by appealing to the church fathers and the Bible, proved the existence of witches and their nefarious deeds.

  But there is no bodily infirmity, not even leprosy or epilepsy, which cannot be caused by witches, with God’s permission. And this is proved [!] by the fact that no sort of infirmity is excepted by the Doctors. For a careful consideration of what has already been written concerning the power of devils and the wickedness of witches will show that this statement offers no difficulty.

  This preposterousness can by explained by the preposterousness of the era. Even in the Bible itself we find mention of witches and evil spirits. In Exodus we find: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. It was the merging of dogma with the enormous power of the Catholic church that led hundreds of thousands of women to be slaughtered.

  The twentieth century is distinguished by the revolutionary development of science, and new dogmas adapted themselves to this reality.

  The official explication of Marxism connected with the power of the Marxist state was fraudulent. Marx’s dialectical materialism (later developed into Marxism-Leninism) was proclaimed as the highest level of scientific knowledge, as the only permissible method of research. Several fundamental dogmas—the decisive significance of relations of production, the economic basis (which defines the political and ideological superstructure) of sustained class warfare, the historical mission of the working class as the bearers of progress, and the felonious character of the exploiting class—were continually confirmed as ingenious by propagandists who feigned the scientific method. Most important, they transferred this dogma to all branches of human activity and production. Scientific work was judged not according to whether it was objective and revelatory, but precisely the opposite, according to how it managed to support derived and unoriginal claims, with citations from classical Marxism. The teaching of philosophy at universities was replaced by dialectical and historical materialism. No academic degree could be achieved unless the candidate passed a test in Marxism. Since all spiritual aspirations resisted this conception, it was necessary to establish strict control over them. One redoubtable interpreter of the Marxist doctrine, the Chinese Communist dictator Mao Zedong, provides the following definition of culture:

  In the world today all culture, all literature and art belong to definite classes and are geared to definite political lines. There is in fact no such thing as art for art’s sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics.

  It is precisely a mind bound by dogma that is predisposed to believe it has discovered the truth, the one and only indisputable truth, which is therefore universally valid. And the duty of the one who has discovered this truth is to disseminate it and then, by all possible means, destroy its (that is, his) opponents. Fanaticism is characteristic of cells of enthusiastic militants prepared to unleash terror, revolt, or revolution and beguile those who merely look on.

  Thus faithful Christians abetted (through their denunciations), or at least watched, the burning of heretics, just as during the French Revolution crowds of Parisians rejoiced at the execution of the opponents of the revolution and, a little later, the execution of its leaders.

  Lenin was all the more convinced that he had uncovered the only valid truth concerning societal activity and history, and thus had uncovered the only correct evolution of society. The Bolshevik leader Grigory Zinoviev, a comrade of the beloved leader, characterized Lenin as a man who as early as age twenty-five felt responsible for all of humanity. Obsessed with his idea of constructing a communist society (against the will of everyone), Lenin declared the legitimacy, indeed the necessity, of dictatorship. The dictatorship of the proleta
riat is a stubborn struggle—bloody and bloodless, violent and peaceful, military and economic, educational and administrative—against the forces and traditions of the old society. The force of habit of millions and tens of millions is a most terrible force. For a zealot of the new faith, a new world, and a new society, the most dangerous things of all are the traditions of the tens of millions who refuse the salvation he wishes to impose upon them.

  Lenin and his followers had the tsar and his family murdered along with hundreds of the monarchy’s representatives. Those who surrendered to Lenin’s vision, thinking, and conscience believed that each new murder confirmed the one and only truth, which they had accepted (or had been compelled to accept) as their own.

  Lenin was firmly and fanatically convinced that in asserting his truth, he was authorized to do anything. No less thorough was his successor, Joseph Stalin, who rightfully proclaimed himself Lenin’s pupil. This is how the Yugoslav politician Milovan Djilas characterized Stalin after numerous meetings with him:

  He knew he was one of the cruelest and most despotic figures in all of human history. But this did not bother him in the least because he was convinced he could, by himself, realize the intentions of history. Nothing bothered his conscience despite the millions slaughtered in his name and upon his orders, not even the thousands of his closest colleagues whom he murdered as traitors because they doubted he was leading their country to happiness, equality, and freedom.

  Adolf Hitler believed he was acting in the interests of history and following the will of providence, and he therefore demanded unlimited obedience and servitude from all. In his programmatic book Mein Kampf, he claimed that