My Crazy Century: A Memoir

Ideological Murderers

History can be seen as a series of bloody acts to which entire nations often fall victim. In some cities or areas humiliated during wartime, every living creature, including cattle, was exterminated. Sometimes, however, the slaughter following a victorious battle was carried out by the celebrating soldiers, and their behavior has been metaphorically described as “drunk with blood.” It is a sort of afterglow of battle during which “drunken” men, before they sober up, carry out even more devastation. The occupying German forces would continue their destruction of conquered territory in Poland, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union, where soldiers often assassinated, burned alive, or hanged the inhabitants they considered defiant.

In the slaughter of the Jews, there was something even more appalling. This had no connection with soldiers who had survived the moral peril of battle and continued killing in rage and ecstasy. It was a carefully planned operation, the goal of which was to destroy an entire, precisely defined group of citizens in the shortest amount of time, without regard to sex, age, profession, creed, or religion. Thousands of men and women, officials, guards, cold-blooded killers, sadists, and obedient administrators participated in this slaughter, and they were clearly not in the condition of a soldier drunk with blood. They had days, weeks, and months to consider what they were doing. They painstakingly — and soberly — carried out orders, whatever they were, whether they impinged on their emotions or perhaps were in conflict with whatever remnant of morality and conscience they had.

A similar slaughter, just as senseless and cold-blooded, took place two decades later in the Soviet Union. Certain individuals or entire groups, often chosen at random — there was a quota of enemies that had to be annihilated — were loaded onto trucks and executed somewhere in secrecy. Those who were not murdered outright were carted off to one of thousands of Siberian camps, where most of them, under the leadership of similar hatchet men, sadists, or obedient administrators, perished.

Where did so many people, who were suddenly willing to commit such villainy, come from?

Several years after the war when I was sojourning in Poland, I dug up the memoirs of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. I’ve never read a book so many times as this dry, matter-of-fact record of mass murder. I don’t think I was the only one fascinated by this memoir. It inspired the French novelist Robert Merle when he was writing Death Is My Trade. Today Merle’s novel, along with the Auschwitz commandant’s memoirs, has been almost forgotten, overshadowed by the more recent massacres in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia or the murders committed by Muslim terrorists and other fanatics. I believe, however, that there are few texts that demonstrate the degree to which one can be driven by blind obedience to an aberrant doctrine, when the fanaticized mind enables a person to concede responsibility for his actions and suppresses his last tremor of conscience.

In the spring of 1942 the first transports of Jews arrived from Upper Silesia. All of them were to be exterminated. They were led from the ramp across the meadow, later named section B-II of Birkenau, to the farmhouse called Bunker I. Aumeir, Palitzsch, and a few other block leaders led them and spoke to them as one would in casual conversation, asking them about their occupations and their schooling in order to fool them. After arriving at the farmhouse they were told to undress. At first they went very quietly into the rooms where they were supposed to be disinfected. At that point some of them became suspicious and started talking about suffocation and extermination. Immediately a panic started. Those still standing outside were quickly driven into the chambers, and the doors were bolted shut. In the next transport those who were nervous or upset were identified and watched closely at all times. As soon as unrest was noticed these troublemakers were inconspicuously led behind the farmhouse and killed with a small-caliber pistol, which could not be heard by the others. .

Many women hid their babies under piles of clothing. . The little children cried mostly because of the unusual setting in which they were being undressed. But after their mothers or the Sonderkommando encouraged them, they calmed down and continued playing, teasing each other, clutching a toy as they went into the gas chamber.

I also watched how some women who suspected or knew what was happening, even with the fear of death all over their faces, still managed enough strength to play with their children and talk to them lovingly. Once a woman with four children, all holding each other by the hand to help the smallest ones over the rough ground, passed by me very slowly. She stepped very close to me and whispered, pointing to her four children, “How can you murder these beautiful, darling children? Don’t you have any heart?”. .

As the doors were being shut, I saw a woman trying to shove her children out of the chamber, crying out, “Why don’t you at least let my precious children live?”. .

According to Himmler’s orders, Auschwitz became the largest human killing center in all of history. When he gave me the order personally in the summer of 1941 to prepare a place for mass killings and then carry it out, I could never have imagined the scale, or what the consequences would be. Of course, this order was something extraordinary, something monstrous. However, the reasoning behind the order of this mass annihilation seemed

correct

to me. At the time I wasted no thoughts about it. I had received an order; I had to carry it out. I could not allow myself to form an opinion as to whether this mass extermination of the Jews was necessary or not. At that time it was beyond my frame of mind. Since the Führer himself had ordered “The Final Solution of the Jewish Question,” there was no second guessing for an old National Socialist, much less an SS officer. “Führer, you order. We obey” was not just a phrase or a slogan. It was meant to be taken seriously. .

Since my arrest I have been told repeatedly that I could have refused to obey this order, and even that I could have shot Himmler dead. I do not believe that among the thousands of SS officers there was even one who would have had even a glimmer of such a thought. Something like that was absolutely impossible. . I am convinced that not even one would have dared raise a hand against him, not even in his most secret thoughts. As leader of the SS, Himmler’s person was sacred. His fundamental orders in the name of the Führer were holy.

Rudolf Höss came from a narrow-minded Catholic family. His father had destined him for the clergy and inculcated in him a boundless respect for authority. His father, however, died when Höss was young, and at sixteen he enlisted in the army against his mother’s protests. After the war he joined the semilegal units of the Freikorps, and when he heard Hitler’s 1922 speech in Munich, he joined the Nazi party. He and his pals then participated in the murder of a teacher whom they believed to be an informer. Höss always considered this murder an act of justice, and it was correct to carry it out because it was highly unlikely that any German court would have found him [the teacher] guilty. Höss was sentenced to ten years in prison for the teacher’s death but was released after five for good behavior. Before he joined the SS, he had made his living as a farmer. He writes that he enjoyed this work and harbored a love of horses. When the war ended, he evaded arrest and worked as a farmhand under the name of Franz Lang. During these eight months before he was captured, he didn’t kill anyone and probably didn’t feel the need to, since no one was giving him those orders, and the architect of the iniquitous ideology to which he subscribed was dead. In a letter to his wife just before his execution, he writes about himself: How tragic it is that I, by nature kind, good-natured, and always obliging, became the greatest mass-murderer. ., who cold-bloodedly and with all the attendant ramifications carried out every single order of extermination.

Adolf Eichmann, the man who, with wholehearted diligence, ensured a steady supply of victims, lived after the war as a more or less respectable Argentinean citizen for fifteen years without committing any crime. Eichmann, who during his trial in Jerusalem declared that he was no anti-Semite, explained his criminal activity as mere obedience.

Had they told me my father was a traitor and I had to kill him, I would have. At that time I followed orders without thinking about them. . Orders were given, and because they were orders, we obeyed them. If I was given an order, it wasn’t meant to be interpreted. . Do you think such an insignificant person as myself was going to worry his head about it? I receive an order and look neither right nor left. It’s my job. My job is to listen and obey.

When the elite representatives of the Nazi regime stood before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremburg, all of them, except a few, pretended to be astounded and shocked by the atrocities committed by the regime. During the screening of films from concentration camps or even when bearing witness to what went on, some even broke down in tears. Of course emotion can be simulated, but it is also possible that the moment Nazi ideology was defeated and it was clear that the consequences had inflicted misery not only on those at war with Germany but also on Germany itself, the accused, stripped of all glory and inviolability, suddenly saw the world and their deeds from another point of view.

One of the most barbarous and vindictive SS men in Terezín was Rudi Heindl, an electrician by trade. Witnesses at his trial in Litoměřice testified that he had placed an old man on a red-hot stove. One witness testified that he had kicked her mother so hard that she died from the wounds inflicted. Many others related tales of his barbarity. After the war he again worked as an electrician and mistreated no one. In court he claimed that he didn’t want to cause anyone pain. Everything he did was upon orders from his superiors. Now he asked only that he be allowed to go to his family, his two daughters and his son who needed him. To them and to everyone around him he had always been amiable and good-natured.

They sentenced and hanged him.

One wonders. If Nazism had not existed, would these men have gone through life as honest, respectable farmers, workers, electricians, officials, or shopkeepers and committed no crimes? Without criminal ideologies which, often in a sophisticated way, deceive those who believe in them, would these slaughters have occurred, slaughters symptomatic of the entire first half of the twentieth century? One of course also wonders if these criminal regimes would have existed, whether hundreds of concentration camps — from Kolyma to the banks of the Rhine — would have come into being if such acquiescent people as Rudolf Höss, Adolf Eichmann, and those who had wept before the tribunal in Nuremberg had served them.

Höss was put on trial by the Supreme National Tribunal in Poland, which on April 2, 1947, for all the evil he inflicted upon humanity. . and at the behest of the world’s conscience, sentenced him to death.

In a farewell letter to his wife, the commandant of Auschwitz admits:

Based on my present knowledge I can see today clearly, severely and bitterly for me, that the entire ideology about the world in which I believed so firmly and unswervingly was based on completely wrong premises and had to absolutely collapse one day.

For the several million who were slaughtered in Auschwitz, this insight came too late. And we can certainly assume that it never would have come if it had not been preceded by the absolute military defeat of the regime that the fanatic perpetrators of these crimes served.

Utopias

It sounds paradoxical, but all escalating violence, all barbaric and unparalleled murder or theft usually occurs in the name of the good, of morality, or of reason, or, during the modern period, in the name of the people, progress, and finally the common good. All great ideologies, such as the utopian projects of the ideal communities, sought those lofty goals, or at least professed them.

Plato emphasizes that a person tasked with protecting the good of the community must be brought up from earliest childhood with that goal in mind. Then Plato poses the logical question: Can a bad example serve the reinforcement of the good in education? The presentation of a lie as something beneficial? And from this basic premise he draws conclusions, which have always suited those who justify censorship: Let none of the poets tell us. . and let no one slander Proteus and Thetis, neither let any one, either in tragedy or in any other kind of poetry, introduce Hera disguised in the likeness of a priestess. . And he adduces entire passages from Homer and Aeschylus that cannot be approved. Then he enumerates what is necessary to reject in poetry. Education is perverted by everything that elicits horror, everything that describes suffering, the moaning and lamentation of those in torment or dying, or the description of death at all. Furthermore, events that elicit laughter cannot be depicted because laughter transforms a person in inauspicious ways.

More that two thousand years later, Bernhard Bolzano was living in the Czech lands. All of his activities were aimed at strengthening democracy, eliminating social differences, and expanding education. In his utopian On the Best State (from Selected Writings on Ethics and Politics), however, he draws conclusions similar to Plato’s:

As books may never become the property of individuals, they shall be published at the expense of the state. From this it obviously follows that not everything anyone wants to publish shall in fact be printed. . Those who urge us to accept an unrestricted freedom of the press no doubt also wish it to be accompanied by an unrestricted freedom to read. Thus once a bad or dangerous book is printed and distributed, one could hardly prevent it causing incalculable damage. . Concerning. . the production of new works of art, one is not nearly so mild in one’s judgments. . For this reason, one will not so easily permit someone to make poetry or musical composition, etc., his primary business when he does not show promise of accomplishing something truly extraordinary.

As far as censorship was concerned, as a man of the Enlightenment, Bolzano wanted an enlightened, educated, and strictly limited censorship. It should be aimed primarily at immoral works, when a book contains scenes depicting lewdness or other vices in a provocative way, or even defends such vices.

It is true that freedom of the press and freedom of expression provide an opening for many depravities, but censorship in itself is a depravity that harms society more than any erotic scenes. Moreover, the linking of censorship with the Enlightenment is a contradiction.

The Frenchman Étienne Cabet, the founder of the Icaria movement, was even more radical in his relationship to freedom of the press. In his utopian Voyage to Icaria he envisions that only his enlightened republic would have the right to print books. The republic [would be] able to rewrite all the books that were imperfect. . and to burn all the books judged to be dangerous or useless. Cabet later moved to the United States and in the middle of the nineteenth century attempted to create a model republic based upon his ideas, which of course, at the beginning, would assume the form of a pure dictatorship and would compel the inhabitants to adhere strictly to all established norms of life in the colony. He forbade drinking and smoking and instructed the denizens to establish families and turn over to the community the responsibility of raising the children. Cabet’s ideal republic (like all ideal communities), however, had no hope of succeeding and rapidly disintegrated.

Bolzano too planned out the life of his society in detail. He did away with property inheritance and outlawed youth organizations unless each meeting was overseen by an elder who had the proper worldview. He planned education and determined how many workers would be needed in various places. Everything was to be done, of course, in such a way that they would be happy.

All architects of the ideal state appealed to the happiness of the citizens. It is I, claimed Charles Fourier, who will be thanked by current and future generations for initiating their happiness. . We are going to witness a spectacle which can only be seen once in each globe, the transition from incoherence to social combination. This is the most brilliant movement that can ever happen in the universe, and the anticipation of it shall be a consolation to the present generation for all its miseries. Every year of this period of metamorphosis will be worth centuries of ordinary existence. But humanity did not thank him, and he did not become an actor in his theater.

The mistake of the utopians lay in their assumption that it is possible to build the ideal state with the agreement of the people. They believed in the ideal person who, as soon as he is afforded the opportunity to act honorably and fairly, would be transformed into a conscious citizen doing his utmost to serve, happily and willingly, the good of the community. And so was born the image of the joyful, enthusiastic citizen for whom the enlightened ruler would plan all of his feelings, activities, and mutual relationships (including amatory ones) and rigorously subordinate him to discipline — which was, however, gladly accepted. He who does not submit has chosen the fate of the pariah. It was a logical conclusion. As soon as the incontrovertible good was discovered, it would be possible and correct to require that everyone be in its service. Those who did not, were violating it, and because the community embodied the good, it would be necessary to deal with them as criminals.

It is here that the onetime advocates of the ideal community are in agreement with their modern successors. When we read not only the works of Marx but also Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun, or Bolzano’s vision of the state, we are amazed that all these dreams of justice and the new arrangement of the community actually epitomized the despotisms or at least the precursors of dictatorships as they are commonly understood. Their authors rightly suspected that people would hardly wax enthusiastic over artificially created relationships. Therefore, they mercilessly put to death everyone who wrenched himself out of the established order. Thomas More suggested imprisonment for those who engaged in premarital sex, and because the parents were responsible for such corruption, they should be imprisoned as well. Marital infidelity would be punished even worse; the serial transgressor would pay for it with his neck. More also advocated the execution of anyone who dared discuss public affairs unofficially and would proclaim war on every state that possessed uncultivated land and did not allow the immigration of surplus citizens of the Utopia. We do not know if Adolf Hitler read Utopia, but at least on this point he decidedly acted according to its principles.

In Cabet’s Icaria, there is not a police uniform to be seen. But this is not important. Uniformed policemen are unnecessary because in our community all citizens must keep watch over the upholding of the laws and pursue or report criminals. How accurate this two-hundred-year-old characteristic of the police state is.

In his turn, Campanella demands the execution of everyone who deviates from the strict order of his state. For example, he would punish with death a woman who uses high-heeled boots so that she may appear tall, or garments with trains to cover her wooden shoes. His image of prisons and hangmen in the future ideal state is prophetic of Bolshevism, which came several hundred years after Campanella’s death. They have no prisons, except one tower for shutting up rebellious enemies. The accused who is found guilty is reconciled to his accuser and to his witnesses, as it were, with the medicine of his complaint, that is, with embracing and kissing. No one is killed or stoned unless by the hands of the people. . Some transgressors are allowed to put themselves to death: they will place around themselves bags of gunpowder, light them, and burn to death, while exhorters are present for the purpose of advising them to die honorably. . Certain officers talk to and convince the accused man by means of arguments until he himself acquiesces in the sentence of death passed upon him.. . But if a crime has been committed against the liberty of the republic, or against God, or against the supreme magistrates, there is immediate censure without pity. These only are punished with death. He who is about to die is compelled to state in the face of the people and with religious scrupulousness the reasons for which he does not deserve death, and also the sins of the others who ought to die instead of him, and further the mistakes of the magistrates. If, moreover, it should seem right to the person thus asserting, he must say why the accused ones are deserving of less punishment than he.

It is as if the modern era were begun by Rousseau’s Social Contract which, just like many other utopias, begins from the proposition that at one time people lived in a state of marvelous innocence. Their primary luxury was freedom and will. This paradisiacal condition was destroyed by the emergence of private property. Rousseau does not suggest doing away with private property, however. He describes in detail the specter of the people or the citizen as a kind of revolutionary power, a source of truth, a guarantor of knowledge, and therefore the highest judge. Something incontrovertible and just, which is called the general will, emerges from the unified will of all citizens who have a common interest. This is expressed by the law. The state itself watches over the fulfillment of the laws and the carrying out of justice. This general will always embodies truth. He who refuses to submit can be compelled to be free. He who continually contravenes, he who scorns the will of the people, deserves nothing less than death. Rousseau deliberates over who should ensure that this general will is fulfilled and at the same time not abused, and he comes up with the enlightened ruler, who would be able, as it were, to change the nature of every individual.

The people, then, over the course of further centuries, would become the shield concealing the crimes of those who in their name act as their benefactors and enlightened rulers.

Karl Marx identified this revolutionary force, which alone could achieve a just society, with the proletariat. When it took power, it would create a revolutionary society different from all previous societies. Marx translates his utopian vision of the future society that would be built by the proletariat into the Communist Manifesto: He predicts that as soon as all property is in the hands of the proletariat, the bourgeoisie will be destroyed, and class warfare and contradictory social interests will disappear. In place of the old bourgeois society with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. Just like all creators of utopias, he possesses the fantastic conviction that he has at last found the key to happiness, justice, abundance, and a dignified life — truth. It is possible that the struggle to create this happy society would require time, but the future would reward the people for it. The utopians managed to capitalize on people’s longing for impersonal guidance in order to persuade them of their vision no matter how unreal or even absurd. In backward and impoverished Russia, the resolute, fanatical adherent of Marx’s communist vision, Lenin, actually tried to build a communist society. In 1920 he did not hesitate to proclaim that the generation that is now fifteen will live to see a communist society.

In a Communist society, as Lenin understood it, each person had the right to satisfy all his needs. In ten to twenty years, the country in which prosperity was to reign was stricken with a famine that took the lives of millions of citizens. Further millions perished because they refused to proclaim, or did not sufficiently proclaim, their enthusiasm for the unreal vision.

The greatest danger threatens humanity when adherents of utopia succeed in seizing power in its name and try to realize their dreams of a better society. Their unrealistic visions make them blind to reality. The horrible crimes of communism and Nazism arose above all from the utopianism of these ideologies. This forced life into a brutal stranglehold of illusion. When the illusion collapsed, the regime could not disown it without forfeiting its legitimacy. Therefore, it suppressed life — that is, precisely the people whom it invoked.

Despite all the disastrous experiences, new utopian projects will emerge. People long to live in a better, kinder, and more just world, and are therefore prepared again and again to succumb to the seductive promises of tyrants, political or religious dreamers who promise it to them, either in heaven or in heaven on earth — in both cases, however, for eternity.

The Victors and the Defeated

Several days after the coup, the Communist weekly Tvorba printed an impassioned editorial. The 25th of February is one of the greatest days in our history. On this day our nation for the first time in the history of its thousand-year existence actually created a government truly of the people. A government dedicated to realizing all the just demands of the working masses, who will be hindered by nothing in their constructive labor. As one can see from this brief excerpt, the author, Arnošt Kolman, did not excel in literary style. It is likely, however, that at the time he believed what he was writing. (At the end of his life, he admits in his memoirs: Heavy thoughts force themselves upon me near the anniversary of Victorious February 1948, the day that unfortunately also predetermined August 21, 1968. For the rest, I admit that I too had a hand in that Pyrrhic victory.)

Meanwhile, the newspapers published a manifesto titled “Forward, Not One Step Back.” The propagandistic text full of phrases about the people and progress, undoubtedly created in the ideological department of the Communist Party, implored all of the creative intelligentsia to support the new regime:

The magnificent days during which the fate of our nation and our republic is being decided beckon all upstanding patriots, all people of goodwill, to a state of readiness and responsibility.

. .

At this historical moment, we turn to all the workers of the mind, to the entirety of the nation’s creative intelligentsia to take their place at the side of the Czech and Slovak people, who so readily rose to the defense of the country. The Czechoslovak working people

. .

in a powerful national uprising thwarted sabotage, prevented confusion and disruption, and are now flocking to the new and vital National Front, the genuine representative of the Czech and Slovak nation. Join the action committees of the National Front. Help exterminate the forces of darkness and obscurantism. Join us in the formation of the progressive powers of the nation, which will ensure a happy and joyful future for our glorious country.

Forward, not one step back.

This text, composed in the new language in which the proponents of democracy are referred to as the forces of darkness and obscurantism while the representatives of dictatorship are called honorable patriots laboring to create social progress, signaled the end of Czechoslovak democracy. Nevertheless, it was signed by hundreds of educated people — writers, actors, singers, and painters. Among the signatories devoted to the Communist Party, there were certainly opportunists, those with a bad conscience, but there were more who believed that the future belonged to socialism. Enchanted and confused by the illusion that existed only in the minds of dreamers, demagogues, and false prophets, they were prepared to sacrifice their own freedom as well as that of society.

Years later, on the anniversary of the February coup, we would see films of the ecstatic crowd in the Old Town Square. It is possible, by various means, to compel people to go into raptures. Enthusiasm can be feigned or organized, but one can assume that the enthusiasm of the crowd on this late February day was neither forced nor feigned. To bring the supporters of revolution to the square was not difficult for the conspirators behind the scenes.

The history of our modern era is permeated with revolutions and coups, which always proceed to the zealous consent of the crowd in the streets. The people of France thrilled to the execution of their king and queen. They then rejoiced at the beheading of the revolutionary leaders, and a few years later the same anonymous people welcomed Napoleon’s coronation as emperor. There were plenty of people who believed that the Bolshevik Revolution would inaugurate a new era of history; it would banish inequality and return the decision-making process to the people — that indefinable but repeatedly invoked societal entity. They sang the glory of the leaders: Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin. (The first died in time, the second was murdered by his comrades, the last two perished on the scaffold to the excited or enforced agreement of the mob.) And throughout Germany, the crowds hysterically cheered the victory of Hitler’s Nazi party, which promised to return glory and prosperity to the humiliated country.

It is as if a dream of paradise slumbers in our thoughts. Christian thinkers recognized that people would gladly believe in a new kingdom in which they would know more love and God’s forgiveness. This kingdom, however, was accessible only after death. Now came a new promise: an earthly paradise in which equitable relations would reign here and now. The poor would receive property; the silenced would receive their voice; the suppressed and the dissatisfied would receive satisfaction.

If the appropriate historical situation arrives, or if a sufficiently powerful group of conspirators manages to change conditions, someone will eventually appear promising to lead those who yearn for the unattainable to the goal of their longings. The crowds will go out into the street and shout in beatific anticipation that their lives, heretofore tormenting in their everydayness, finality, loneliness, and banality, will be transformed. The crowds will acclaim the glory of the leader, the idea, the future, which they believe they are just beginning to create. The crowds applaud; wave banners, slogans, portraits; offer freshly picked flowers to the leaders of the revolution; sing and dance. For a moment, hope wins out over life experience. There is something magnetic about the ecstatic crowd, not only for those who participate in it but also for those who observe it, often with fear. This attraction overwhelms them. It inhibits their will to resist the progression of events, even though they are convinced the events will be destructive.

When we look back at those epochal times and the rejoicing mobs, we usually forget, or at least do not notice, that we’re seeing only a portion, sometimes an inconsiderable one, even though it is the louder portion of the participants. Because besides its victors, every revolution has its losers, and they are usually greater in number than the victors.

When the Czechoslovak republic was coming into being, there were three and a half million Germans in the country. They were frightened by the emergence of a “republic of Czechs and Slovaks” because it meant the loss of their influence and their station as leaders. Not even the hundreds of thousands of citizens connected with the old monarchy rejoiced. Its downfall threatened the end of their world, or at least their careers.

When the German occupation ended, in addition to millions of Germans who had until recently been Czechoslovak citizens, there were hundreds of thousands of people who were somehow connected with the occupying power living in the country. They had served the Reich, informed on their fellow citizens to the gestapo. They hated both the Jews and the democrats. When the Communists carried out their well-planned coup, besides the jubilant crowd in Old Town Square in February 1948, besides the misled proletariat and several hundred deluded, naive, cunning, or party-disciplined artists who had signed the manifesto of cultural enslavement, there were many in our country who believed in democracy and had fought for it in armies abroad. There were many who refused to accept that in the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin human knowledge had reached its zenith. There were many who believed in God in the heavens, not in the palace of the Kremlin. There were thousands who owned something and suspected that the new regime would take everything from them, things that had often been the work of entire generations. But they were caught unaware by the impetuosity of the changes, numbed by the roar of the victorious crowd, the ruthless determination of the new leaders. Some decided to bide their time, others fled, and still others, out of anxiousness or calculation, decided to join the victors.

Every euphoria caused by societal change quickly disappears, and suddenly it turns out that the number of defeated outnumbers that of the victors. If the revolution enthroned a dictatorship, the new power tries to destroy the defeated by force, drive them from their cities, silence and imprison them. The most defiant are executed. Thereby an all-pervading terror is created, but at the same time disappointment, which gradually becomes apathetic inactivity or hatred, often precisely among those who allowed themselves to be lured by false promises. All of these will gradually prepare the fall of the revolutionary power.

If the dictatorship falls or even if it retreats in the face of democratic change, the elated victors soon realize with horror that the recently defeated representatives of totalitarianism are once more struggling to seize the power of which they have been deprived. One cannot defend against this intermingling of the defeated with the victors, not only because democracy refuses to persecute anyone who does not conspicuously commit an offense but also because it is often difficult to determine who is the victor and who is the conquered. It is precisely this condition that contributes to the fact that the expected societal rehabilitation seems to dissolve and disappear, and once again those who would welcome a more visible division between the victors and the conquered appear, assuming that they themselves would be among the new victors.

Thus swings the slow pendulum of history.

The Party

There were many who recognized that the goals of the Communist Party were subversive and nefarious. The moment the party took control after the war, these people were prepared to resist the new power. At that time, there were also many who believed the party would lead society to the goals that generations had longed for, and after the appalling experiences of war, the party would do everything to ensure that the long-awaited peace would endure. But even the faithful who joined the party, convinced of its ability to carry the people to lofty goals, must have seen relatively early on that it was an organization not above baseness, lies, intrigues, or even villainy.

When I joined the party, its name signified that it belonged to Czechoslovakia. In reality, however, it had long been a mere copy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

The Communist Party arose in Russia (just as the Czech Communist Party did later) through the fragmentation of the Social Democrats. At the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party (it took place abroad because the activity of the party was illegal in Russia), the faction led by Lenin garnered the majority, and from that time on its shrewd leader used the epithet “Bolshevik” (that is, the majority). Lenin’s group, composed of several thousand devoted revolutionaries, seized power relatively easily with several armed campaigns at the end of the First World War. They then announced a dictatorship. And since dictatorships like to veil themselves with lofty or at least seemingly altruistic attributes, they called themselves the proletariat and announced that they were building a Socialist society, which during the next generation would become Communist, classless, and prosperous — the most just society in history.

The Bolsheviks were victorious in a country where political life, as far as it went, had been playing out in secret and where not only nonconforming politicians but also many intellectuals and artists were forced to spend parts of their lives underground or in exile. The party, whose fanatical leaders lived as conspiratorial outlaws, could not but differ fundamentally from political parties in democratic countries. Like every conspiratorial organization, it had to preserve strict discipline and introduce a military hierarchy. There could be no doubt concerning the leader’s orders; they were to be fulfilled without hesitation. In theory, this principle was called democratic centralism. The members of the party had the right to defend their opinions until a resolution was accepted, and then they had to comply. T. G. Masaryk captured the basic outline of Bolshevism in his book The Making of a State, published a few years after Soviet power took hold in Russia:

Bolshevik centralism is especially rigid; it is an abstract regime deduced from theory and forcibly implemented. Bolshevism is the absolute dictatorship of a single person and his assistants; Bolshevism is infallible and inquisitorial, and that is why it has nothing in common with science and scientific philosophy. Science, which is what democracy is, without freedom is impossible.

Lenin’s concept of dictatorship was merciless and was characterized by barbaric cruelty. Immediately after assuming power, he established a political police force that had the task of uncovering all genuine and imaginary enemies of the new regime. Lenin repeatedly demanded that the new power be ruthless. In the name of the revolution, it had the right to shoot, hang, or take hostages. Then it would take entire families hostage. If the enemies did not submit, the adults were executed and the children taken off to camps where most of them perished.

During the reign of Lenin’s successor, Stalin, the leader had already become infallible. His views were indisputable. Anyone who dared act against them was branded as a deviationist. Even those who only appeared to deviate from the official dogma were not only expelled from the party but were also accused of antistate activity. Thus, political life, the exchange of opinions, disappeared from the only existing political party. The party was transformed into a mere privileged echelon whose task was to ensure that the orders of the dictator were carried out.

The First World War aroused a revolutionary mood not only in the Russian empire but also in most European countries. When revolutionary fervor cooled, Communist parties remained in these countries, and the Russian Bolsheviks saw them as allies. To ensure that these allies were truly reliable and would defend the interests of “the first country ruled by workers and farmers” (as the Bolsheviks craftily and deceitfully characterized their dictatorship), it was necessary to impose the same principles the Bolsheviks had employed in governing their own party. They founded the Communist International, which then arrogated to itself the right to intervene in the politics of the individual Communist parties anywhere in the world. The Soviet government — that is, the Soviet dictator — was supposed to stand atop the entire movement.

The history of the Czech Social Democrats was different from that of their Russian counterparts. From its beginnings, theirs was a legal party and had no reason to accept Bolshevik methods. Czech Communists who split off from the Social Democrats in 1921 were not denied a part in the political life of the new republic, and their leader, Bohumír Šmeral, believed that he could push socialism through parliament. Jacques Rupnik in his History of the Ruling Communist Party of Czechoslovakia cites the aphoristic assertion by the Austrian Social Democrat Otto Bauer: “I know two good Social Democratic Parties: the best is of course the Austrian Party and immediately after it is the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.”

The Communist International could not accept the moderation of a subordinate party. Following their conspiratorial tradition, Soviet Bolsheviks prepared a putsch of Czechoslovak Communists. It had one goal: to exchange the current leadership for one that would accept Bolshevik principles. In 1929 the coup was realized, and Klement Gottwald, a man with neither education nor scruples, became head of the party. He revered Stalin and shared his hatred of democracy. Most Czech Communists departed the party in protest, but this did not bother the new leaders. They possessed the mind-set of a sect: Only they knew what was correct, and their goal was either to convince the others of their truth or to destroy them. There were far fewer Russian Bolsheviks when the party took power. Power — absolute, uncontrollable power — is what the Czech Communists had to acquire if they wanted to realize their plans, plans of which most citizens had no understanding. Twenty years later, Gottwald and his henchmen did indeed acquire this power.

They saw the victory of the allies as the victory of their Communist truth. With Leninesque deviousness, they exploited the fact that the Red Army had occupied most of the republic. They presented themselves as defenders of the interests of Czechoslovak citizens; they fashioned themselves as the true spokespersons not only for the workers but also the farmers, intelligentsia, tradesmen, and small-business owners. They promised to defend their interests, call to account traitors and the greatest exploiters, and quickly introduce prosperity throughout the land. They pushed through (with the assistance of three naively acquiescent or mistakenly calculating democratic parties) the nationalization of large enterprises, mines, and banks, and prohibited most prewar political parties, which they saw as threats dangerous to healthier social relations. In reality, they sought absolute power and attempted to infiltrate every institution of the still democratic state. They occupied the most important ministries and prepared their armed militia. It would be needed when the moment came to strike the final blow to democracy.

After the war, the Communist Party became a heterogeneous group in which the old adherents of the Communist vision were joined by both those who yielded to Communist demagoguery and those who rightly suspected where the rule of society was headed and, along with it, the advantages that come with loyalty. After the February coup, thousands more joined the party: former Social Democrats who were forced to unite with the victorious Communists, and also opportunists or just frightened citizens who were presented with an application form and made to understand that if they did not sign, things would go badly for them. Finally, there were the young, who knew little about the rest of the world and democracy. As early as the 1950s, the party was merely pretending to be just another political party. Although it appeared that members of the higher political organs were elected, in reality they were merely approved, since the candidates came from precisely these organs. The general secretary ruled the party without restraint. He then chose a small body of members to make up the presidium. The only task of these so-called elected officials was to carry out the orders of the head of the party (and as happens in a dictatorship, of the state). In his turn, the head of the party was obliged to conform to the orders of the Soviet dictator in all fundamental decisions.

The power the Czech Communists acquired was only seemingly absolute. It was primarily derived from and subordinate to a foreign power. This was ensured by Soviet advisers, the secret police, and party organs that had been painstakingly screened. Only discipline, subordination, and expressions of enthusiasm or hatred, depending on what the party needed at the time, was required of the party members. It was unthinkable that a member raise objections to party policies. If you refused to sign a petition, or even dared express disagreement with forced collectivization or political processes, you would appear as an enemy and be dealt with accordingly. On the other hand, if you painstakingly advocated everything considered proper policy, you could expect the appropriate rewards. The party leadership decided everything: which era was worthy of following, which should fall to the wayside; which thoughts were necessary to disseminate and which to forbid. Who was a hero, who a coward, who was an inventor, who a scientist, who a cheat, and who an ally, and, most important, who was an enemy, a subversive, a saboteur, a revisionist, a cosmopolitan, a Zionist, a Trotskyist. Nothing announced by the party could be doubted unless the party doubted it. The party decorated its general secretary with the highest honors and a year later had him hanged. The party had a monstrous monument built to Stalin, and then the party had it destroyed. Whoever refused to curse that which a year before he had to approve became an enemy. It was a period of perverted values. The uneducated were promoted to ministers, party secretaries to attorneys; tailors and lathe operators became army commanders, while the experienced pilots who participated in the Battle of Britain, army generals, and members of the democratic resistance were sent to concentration camps or even the gallows.

In the name of the party, the leadership seized not only most of the wealth acquired over generations but also — and this was worse — all spiritual values. It claimed it had replaced mistaken religious views with scientifically recognized truth, and that a dog-eat-dog society would be replaced with a society in which comradely relations were the norm. In fact, the opposite happened. The party destroyed all traditional relationships. It introduced the cadre questionnaire and interviews in which those who wanted to continue in their work were supposed to disown their relatives. It misappropriated history; it erased great personages and replaced them with people whose only merit was membership in the party. It misappropriated peace, since it labeled its confederation of dictatorships a camp of peace, which only with the greatest efforts was keeping the imperialists from starting a new world war. It misappropriated the idea of democracy because it called its dictatorship the highest form of democracy.

Political life in the party and throughout the country was dead. Votes on anything were unanimous. The party ruled without restraint and introduced into the constitution a clause stating that it was the sole governing power of society. But it was the members of the party who became the primary danger for the genuine occupiers of power. Therefore, it was necessary to keep even the highest members in a state of constant fear. Klement Gottwald accepted this policy of Stalin’s along with all the other principles of his rule and did not hesitate to hang all of his closest collaborators even though they had stood at his side from the very beginning and participated in the murderous (and suicidal) Bolshevization of the party. He considered self-evident his right and responsibility to hang opponents of the Communist regime.

The theory of hidden and deceitful conspirators in the highest positions of the party could shatter the faith of even the remaining idealists or those who hadn’t completely renounced their own judgment. These, however, were ordered: “Believe the party, Comrades. The party is becoming murky by the uncovering of hidden enemies.” At the same time, it was not important if any Communists lost faith. What was important was that they be afraid. If the reign of terror for some reason weakened, the party could reawaken the slumbering dangers. To be sure, the Communist leaders constantly warned of the threats from imperialists, international reactionaries, the remnants of the defeated bourgeoisie, and various deviationists and saboteurs, but in reality they were much more afraid of those in whose name they repeatedly claimed to rule: the workers, farmers, and even the members of their own party.

Revolution — Terror and Fear

Fear is common to all living creatures. It is a manifestation of the instinct for self-preservation. We are afraid of pain, loss, death. If we want to live, we must be afraid. If we want to survive with dignity, we must overcome fear.

In general, we hope that the things with which we are happy will continue while the things with which we are unhappy will improve. In youth we believe that death will not come for us, that we won’t lose our job, that a friend will not disappoint us, that if we’re decent and honorable, we will not be punished. We will start a family and have children who, in some form or another, will continue the work that we must someday abandon. We assume that if we do good work, we will be rewarded and our position will improve, that no one will accuse us of crimes we did not commit, and, quite the reverse, genuine criminals will receive their just punishment.

The basis of every revolution is that it categorically declares all previous values and goals wretched and demeaning. The revolutionaries pronounce the old order corrupt, unable to suppress criminality, to erase poverty, to ensure the functioning of society and thereby a dignified life for its citizens. They must do away with this order along with its values, its morality. According to the Communist Manifesto, the proletariat’s mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and assurances of, individual property.. . The proletariat. . cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air. Mussolini was terser: Everything that exists must be destroyed!

In place of a corrupt order, revolution offers the people a vision of better justice, more prosperity, a more dignified life. It promises to correct wrongs, whether to a person or the collective, and it promises the entire society (with the exception of those who are designated as traitors and determined enemies) unprecedented prosperity, even glory because it is precisely glory that will become the banner of world progress and national renewal. Revolutionary leaders announce a new moral category, which they call revolutionary consciousness. By this they mean that every citizen who joins the revolution will be freed from the tyranny of his own consciousness. The leader, who is troubled only by the infringement of the revolutionary ideals, selects this new consciousness for him. In the name of the ideals it is possible to change all values that have previously been valid. Many values that until recently have been considered base or criminal become of service to the revolution. Whoever informs assists the new society to purge itself of sinister elements; whoever plunders is merely correcting centuries of injustice. Whoever murders an enemy of the revolution (it is sufficient for one merely to designate someone an enemy) is a soldier in the revolution and deserves to be decorated. Many succumb to this confusion of values. So it happens that people who were recently honorable commit deeds that only yesterday they considered repulsive and unthinkable.

For one revolution, nobility becomes an ignominious sign; for another, one’s origin or property and resulting wealth. For another it is perhaps religious indifference or another faith, and almost always it is education, decency, and the conviction that one is not prepared to give up personal responsibility. The first great revolution of the twentieth century classified people according to their class origin. Their leaders placed those of the working class at the highest level of values. They still allowed smallholders, but they did not hesitate to divest the other levels of society of their fundamental rights. They tried to abuse some ill-fated individuals; others they banished, interned, or murdered. They murdered even the tsar along with his whole family, including the young children, since the dynasty was a deadly class enemy.

Another revolution only a few years later classified people according to their racial heritage and placed Germans at the highest level. It did not hesitate to persecute members of other races, and it resolved to exterminate those designated as Jews or Gypsies. As Albert Camus writes: The unavoidable fundamental and intrinsic attribute of most revolutions is murder.

A society that accepts such aberrant criteria, especially in modern times, cannot operate without inflicting grave trauma on its people. But the revolution takes this into consideration. In the beginning, it has its fiery supporters who are willing to sacrifice everything for their ideals. They believe in their greatness or at least assume they will create personal prosperity. The number of devotees, however, is never enough, so the revolution acquires adherents precisely among those who joined out of calculation or fear, and it succeeds in gaining supporters among those it had unexpectedly elevated. After the victory of the revolution, new members pour into the party, either the Nazi or the Communist. Whatever the party, it will differentiate between “old” and “new” members.

A common characteristic of every revolution is the co-opting of the dregs of society, whether judged from a material or moral point of view. Revolution offers them social security and inclusion in the functioning of governance, but primarily participation in the spreading of terror and the resulting fear, which in turn provides those beaten-down or inferior with a feeling of satisfaction. No revolution can do without its guard, which it quickly arms and endows with special powers. At its head it places fanatical and fiery leaders: Trotsky, Dzerzhinsky, Yagoda, Yezhov, Röhm, Himmler, Heydrich. Only with them can the government begin its revolutionary terror.

The architects of the revolution soon realize that there are quite a few who do not long for their rule and rightly fear the impending changes. As time goes by, it turns out that the system the leaders of the revolution are trying to implement on the basis of their spurious visions cannot function. Therefore, they begin to battle for its existence.

The police no longer pursue only criminals but also pursue those whom it designates as enemies of the new order. Newly appointed judges sit in judgment not in order to strengthen justice but rather to call it into question, in order to make it clear that anyone can be designated an offender and found guilty. The citizen must understand that at any time he can lose his work, his freedom, even his life, and the same can befall his loved ones. The citizen must live in constant fear.

The first demented adherent of revolutionary terror in the twentieth century, Lenin, announced: You certainly do not believe that we will be victorious if we don’t use the harshest kind of revolutionary terror. . If we’re not capable of shooting a White Guard saboteur, what sort of great revolution is it? Nothing but talk and a bowl of mush. In his decree “On Red Terror,” he then orders: It is essential to protect the Soviet Republic from class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps. Anyone connected to the White Guard organizations, conspiracies, and rebellions will be shot; the names of all those executed will be published.. . We shall not hesitate to shoot thousands of people. In the name of the revolution, he and his followers had thousands, hundreds of thousands, and later millions of people murdered.

Immediately after Hitler became chancellor, the Nazis began to arrest genuine and possible opponents. The arrests increased after the Reichstag fire on February 27, 1933. Hitler lost no time in forcing President Hindenburg to issue an “emergency decree,” whereby all basic human rights ceased to be valid, from freedom of the press, expression, and demonstration to even the assurance that no one would be unlawfully deprived of freedom. This opened the door to unlimited terror, which continued for the remaining twelve years of the Nazis’ “thousand-year” Reich.

In Nuremburg, a Social Democratic representative testified about what had happened to him ten days after the Reichstag fire. Members of the SS and SA came to my home in Cologne and destroyed the furniture and my personal records. I was taken to the Brown House in Cologne, where I was tortured, being beaten and kicked for several hours. Over the course of a single month in Germany, twenty-five thousand people were taken off to concentration camps. Prussian police were allowed to use weapons against enemies of the state, and many people branded as enemies were executed on the spot. Hitler noted somewhat later and in passing: It is a good thing if the fear precedes us that we are exterminating Judaism. The Nazis aroused fear not only among Jews but also among Christians, Communists, Social Democrats, and the democratically minded intelligentsia.

Fear gives rise to informers and collaborationists. It drives people to the ballot box, where they cast their votes for candidates whom they hate or to whom they are indifferent. They attend demonstrations and applaud murderers who speak from the rostrum. When the mob smashes a window of an enemy of the new order, a Jew or a kulak, those whose windows were not targeted draw their curtains. When the secret police take away the innocent, those innocent who were not taken away pretend to see nothing that does not concern them. When they are summoned, they sign resolutions demanding the death penalty for everyone designated an enemy of the revolutionary state. The regime thereby brazenly pretends that except for a handful of enemies, everyone is its supporter. And the masses that live in fear accept this role and hope that if they display acquiescence, they will be spared.

Not even the representatives of the regime and the implementers of terror can escape fear.

The mob in police uniforms then knock on the doors of their houses and lead them off to the torture chambers. With fiendish schadenfreude, they force from them confessions to implicate other revolutionaries. Since the French Revolution, hangmen have received their victims from the ranks of the defeated victors as well. Hence the maxim: Revolution devours its own children. This metaphorical formulation, however, is sentimental and indeed false. Revolution devours its own children along with their parents. It begins to murder not only its victims but also their murderers.

During the period of the greatest wave of Stalin’s terror, to which hundreds of thousands of “parents and children” fell victim, Stalin delivered a grand speech:

Some journalists abroad are babbling that the purge of spies, murderers, and evildoers such as Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Jakir, Tukhachevsky, Rosenholz, Bukharin, and other scum has “shaken” the Soviet system, it has injected it with “degeneracy.” This disgusting babble is laughable. . Who needs this pitiful band of slaves who sold out?. . In 1937, Tukhachevsky, Jakir, Uborevich, and other scum were sentenced to death by firing squad. Then elections for the Highest Soviet of the USSR were held; 98.6 percent of voters voted for the rule of the Soviets. At the beginning of 1938, Rosenholz, Rykov, Bukharin, and other scum were sentenced to death by firing squad. Then elections for the Highest Soviet of the federal republics were held; 99.4 percent of all voters voted for the rule of the Soviets. I ask you: Where are there signs of “degeneracy,” and why did not this “degeneracy” appear in the election results?

Indeed, fear did not fragment the society, for even fragmentation is movement. It killed it. The moment fear, without distinction, seized both the victors and the defeated, the rulers and the ruled, it immobilized the entire complex apparatus because no one dared decide anything. Everyone tried to avoid responsibility for this intractable situation. Terror brought society to the edge of annihilation.

There are only two points of departure in such a state of affairs. The first is war, that is, the transference of terrorist methods onto the international field. The second is the cessation of terror. The first subjugates the citizen even more in the name of war mobilization, but it leads nowhere. In case of a military defeat (such as that suffered by Hitler’s Germany), the revolution along with its ideals and its representatives is swept out, and the country is destroyed. In case of victory (such as that achieved by Stalin’s Soviet Union with the help of democratic powers), society returns to its prewar situation: Terror continues and with it the all-immobilizing fear.

The other point of departure, which calls for the renewal of at least partial freedom and thereby extricates itself from the rule of fear, likewise does not safeguard the revolution. Revolution and the dictatorship it establishes cannot survive for long without the coregency of fear simply because the ideals forced upon the people have been so compromised that almost no one accepts them.

Revolutionary power must necessarily die away, sometimes early, sometimes not for several generations. In both cases it leaves behind innumerable dead, a devastated country, an incomprehensible number of personal tragedies, frustrated possibilities, destroyed talents, subverted morals, and the memory of omnipresent fear, which will inhibit for a long time the activity of those who experienced it.

Abused Youth

On March 1, 2006, the Czech News Agency reported that around five thousand children from eight to twelve years of age gathered for a demonstration in Karachi, Pakistan, and called for the execution of the authors who caricatured the prophet Muhammad. (The children had certainly never seen the caricatures and had probably never seen a caricature in their lives.) The hijackers of the planes that hit New York and Washington, which took the lives of thousands of civilians in suicide attacks, were young people. Most Muslim suicide bombers are young. It also was young people, even twelve-year-old children armed with machine guns, who fought in most of the African civil and tribal wars. They fought enthusiastically and ruthlessly.

All totalitarian regimes, all fanatical ideologies see in the young the most appropriate executors of their goals. Here are the words of one of many Socialist songs from the ’50s.

Forward, boys and girls,

a new world we are building among perils.

This one has but little strength,

thus all must work together at length

Forward, boys and girls,

a new world we are building among perils.

Lenin, Stalin, Gottwald as well,

them we shall follow and enemies expel.

The coup was supposed to be a new beginning of history. But there were, and still are, more convenient reasons to celebrate youth. Radicalism belongs more to the young than to the old, just as does the image that the world could be better organized than it ever has been. The young have a tendency to question the values of their parents’ generation and are more open to slogans and simplifying explanations of society’s ills and the promise of a finer world. They cannot oppose a false ideology with their own insufficient life experiences, and they usually lack a deeper understanding of history and the inherent laws of society. On the one hand, the totalitarian regime flatters the young, and on the other it forces upon them its own image of the ideal person and the ideal society.

In 1920, Lenin outlined his ideal of a young communist:

The Union of Communist Youth will deserve its name and will show that it is a union of the young Communist generation only by linking up every step in its studies, training, and education with the continuous struggle of the proletarians and the working people against the old society of exploiters. . This generation should know that the entire purpose of their lives is to build a Communist society. . [Its] morality is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society and to unite all the working people around the proletariat, which is building a new, Communist society.

Fifteen or sixteen years later, it was precisely this generation that was killed off in Stalin’s purges, and a new generation of fifteen-year-olds was bombarded with flattery. Pavlik Morozov, who informed on his own parents and fulfilled Cabet’s vision that every citizen will be an informer, became the new official hero and role model recommended to Soviet youth according to Lenin’s theory of the new morality.

At the same time (1935), Adolf Hitler was embodying his image of the young generation in images that corresponded to his poetic invention: In our eyes, the German youth of the future must be slender and supple, swift as greyhounds, tough as leather, and hard as Krupp steel. We must cultivate a new man in order to prevent the ruin of our nation by the degeneration manifested in our age. A year later the Reich government passed a law specifying that, among other things, all German youth besides being reared within the family and school, shall be educated physically, intellectually, and morally in the spirit of National Socialism to serve the people and community, through the Hitler Youth.

The first of the Ten Commandments for students, delivered in Nazi Germany in 1934, was: It is not necessary to live, but it is necessary that you fulfill your duty to the German people. Whatever you are, you must be German.

The Nazis emphasized the mission of the people, the Communists the mission of the working class; today’s theoreticians of Muslim fundamentalism emphasize the cleansing mission of their religious faith as revealed in the Koran, from which they select those passages that justify the hatred and violence they commit.

The youth of postwar Czechoslovakia was an especially propitious section of society upon which Communist propaganda could concentrate. The life experiences of those born during the 1920s and ’30s were one-sided and mostly negative. The way their parents’ generation had organized society seemed unconvincing and had obviously caused, or at least allowed, not only a cruel economic crisis but even the war and an unbelievable number of casualties.

Politicians and thinkers of the older generation, even those democratically minded ones, admitted their mistakes. The president of the republic, Edvard Beneš, in a speech at the law school where he was receiving an honorary degree shortly after the war, criticized late-nineteenth-century liberalism.

Politically

this is a society with an expanded number of contending and anarchizing political parties, which are subverting the nation as a whole with their battle;

economically

— it is a society with a highly cultivated culture of capitalism and industrialism, which produces a relentless class struggle between the exploiters and the exploited;

socially

— it is a society waging an exalted battle between the person of the past with his feudal aristocratic conceptions and the person with egalitarian ideas attempting to assert the equality of people;

culturally and artistically

— it is a superficial and aestheticizing society, a welter of opinions and chaotic conceptions without any literary or even artistic style; in short, it is a

sick society, uncertain, searching for something new and incapable of finding it

.

Even though Beneš reached the conclusion that the new society must be democratic, he defended friendship with the Soviet Union as well as a new social politics: One of the most important issues is to open the gates to social change in the sense of socialism.

It was not difficult for Communist ideologues to interpret this to the members of the younger generation, who barely remembered the First Republic, as a clear condemnation of liberalism and of an unjust social system, and emphasize the necessity of doing away with the bygone system and replacing it with a Socialist one.

To the naive or politically inexperienced, it could seem that democrats and Communists were in agreement on the need for societal and economic changes.

When the Communists achieved power after the February 1948 coup, they sought as quickly as possible to destroy or remove their political opponents from all important positions. It was, however, necessary to replace them posthaste. Suddenly there was an opportunity not only for the “reliable” ones — genuine believers in Communist ideology, or pragmatic careerists who understood that the new authority would reign for many years — but also, and primarily, for the young, who still had no political past and were now being offered a marvelous future as long as they assumed the proper form. And so, in only a few weeks, the young enthusiasts could become (as long as they underwent the necessary courses) attorneys, judges, teachers, officers, factory directors, even doctors, although they often lacked a degree.

At the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the ’50s, young people voluntarily and often enthusiastically left home to construct huge smelters in Ostravsko and a Railway of Friendship into eastern Slovakia. News articles and films were produced upon the order of the party, celebrating their heroic feats of labor. Journalists praised these marvelous achievements with the pathos characteristic of the time. These disingenuous campaigns served several purposes. They provided an inexpensive labor force, and participation in a work brigade contributed to the further reeducation of people and transformed them into confirmed disciples of the new regime. At the larger construction sites, the organizers invited young people from democratic countries as well. Thus young adherents of communism from different countries came together to spread revolutionary ideology.

That some members of the young generation expressed their approval of the new regime and accepted its activities without suspicion was certainly due to the fact that they had grown up under Nazi occupation and had been denied education. These efforts produced a paradoxical result. Nazi propaganda was seen as deceitful and antagonistic, which was how all attacks against Bolshevism came to be perceived. (When the Nazis announced their discovery of the mass graves of Polish officers who had been murdered in the Katyn Forest by Stalin’s secret police, few doubted that this was a Nazi lie.)

Who of the youth knew the details of the Soviet dictator’s path to power? Who at ten or fifteen years of age was interested in trials in which the Soviet dictator liquidated his opponents group by group? Who knew that millions of innocent victims of the Communist regime were leading miserable existences or dying in Siberian concentration camps?

But because the trials of enemies of the people, reactionaries, conspirators, spies, and traitors became one of the fundamental and essential pillars of Communist dictatorship, it was necessary to acquaint those who suspected nothing, who were uninterested, with these methods.

And so, soon after the coup, carefully manipulated information concerning these events began to appear. Alongside the quickly translated and published transcripts of the staged trials (which were sometimes difficult to accept if only for their absurdity) or the boring and, for the uninitiated, incomprehensible History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, further works of Stalinist propaganda were published that were masterful in their mendacity. Among them was The Great Conspiracy, which pretended to be nonfiction: To provide it with the appearance of greater objectivity it was written (or at least signed) by two American Communists, Michael Sayers and Albert E. Kahn. This pamphlet about a worldwide imperialist conspiracy against the land of the Soviets skillfully and suggestively employed transcripts from political trials. It cited fabricated conversations and secret meetings between disciples of Trotsky and others later condemned as “traitors, spies, and terrorists” as if they had actually occurred and had been written down on the spot. From this the authors inferred the existence of an enormous conspiracy, whose goal was to destroy the first Socialist state of workers and farmers. Hundreds of thousands of copies were distributed and, like all similar works of propaganda, served as the foundation for wholesale slaughter.

For a reader unfamiliar with these events, it was easy to believe that sabotage units, conspiracies, and even cunning imperialistic spies in fact existed, that everything presented as historical fact was indeed true. There was of course no mention of the phony political trials that took place in the Soviet Union practically from its inception; that they were carried out upon the order of the steeled man of steel, Stalin; and that all confessions were acquired by means of unspeakable torture, signed beforehand by hangman interrogators, and then under threat of further torture repeated by the broken prisoners at their trials.

The Necessity of Faith

Since time immemorial, man has sought to explain the connection between himself and everything that is remote or estranged; he wants to uncover his own origin and the origin of the world. During different periods, people in different parts of the world hit upon a satisfactory explanation, which was handed down from generation to generation because they believed it was incontrovertible.

Faith helped them live in a world full of mystery, of inexplicable phenomena, when at times there was enough food whereas at others they were hungry, where one day a person was alive and the next he was some kind of lifeless, cold matter.

In various places on our planet, people accepted events as the work of someone or something much more powerful. One could perhaps implore the higher being to revoke his decisions, but even so, times would come when one could no longer implore. One must die. But while he was alive he could try to please the powerful one to avoid suffering while on earth and then be allowed live on in some other realm — perhaps beneath the earth, perhaps above it — or perhaps he would be reincarnated in another being or an inanimate object. And then this object would be revered.

Since long ago, the world was, in the imaginations of our forefathers, inhabited by gods and goddesses, powerful beings both good and evil. Some of these dwelled nearby, in trees, animals, or water; others inhabited the heights and revealed themselves only in the form of lightning, thunder, sunlight, or illness, which drew near from the unknown. In his relationship with the powerful forces, man was full of humility; nevertheless, he believed he would one day enjoy some sort of beatific condition that went by various names — heaven, nirvana — but was always a condition in which a person was happy, where all pain, all cares, all fears of the end ceased. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, it was even supposed that at one time we had lived in such a state, and only our own reckless longing for knowledge had deprived us of it. The longing for knowledge, however, although stigmatized, persisted.

Gradually the individual gods lost their concrete forms or retreated in the face of one most powerful God until they disappeared entirely or turned into his servants or lingered on as water nymphs, sprites, naiads, genies, or angels.

While the gods changed their form, the human need for faith changed only little. Man wanted to believe there was someone above him who would judge all his deeds, who would reward good and punish evil, who would right the wrongs, who would even arrange it so that after death he would encounter those he had loved.

Although human societies arose at different times and places, and they developed various and oftentimes very dissimilar religions, many things connected them: All religions had their own rituals. They celebrated the festival of the solstice, the arrival of rain, the metamorphosis of a boy into a man, the joining of man and woman, and the dead on their final journey. All of this persisted for generations, and it never occurred to anyone to doubt the usefulness and necessity of observing the rituals.

Every religion, every deity, had its own chosen people or caste, its own shamans, monks, lamas, or priests who ensured that all the prescribed commandments were obeyed.

Religion required unswerving faith in everything it claimed, in everything it demanded, even in what it promised. Only the insane, the outcast, or the blaspheming heretic could not believe.

As thousands of years went by, man continued in his aspirations, which caused his banishment from paradise. He wanted to know and discover new and better explanations for phenomena in his world. Reason appeared against the enduring faith in the constancy of ancient explanations. Reason announced that everything could be subject to doubt; it was necessary to examine and explore everything. Even the ancient Greek philosophers reached the conclusion that man was after all part of nature and like everything else was subject to old age and then death. Not even the Greek materialist philosophers doubted the existence of immortal gods, but they assumed that immortal beings cared little about the fate of mortals. They themselves had to seek how to avoid anguish from nonbeing, from the meaninglessness of their existence, and at the same time how to escape this meaninglessness.

In the seventeenth century, however, thinkers began to emphasize the significance of reason over the long-standing conclusions issuing from faith.

During the Enlightenment, reason became the instrument that should guide a meaningful life. In subsequent centuries, reason achieved unexpected successes. There is no sense enumerating them, but reason, along with its child science and its grandchild technology, altered essentially the conditions and utility of life. As knowledge and understanding developed, certain religious dogmas began to be doubted. Science arrived with a new conception of time; it began to explain the origin of man and the origin of the earth and the universe in an entirely different way. It began to investigate and finally even break down matter. Gradually, at least in people’s everyday lives, the inexplicable diminished, and reason began to insinuate itself and take the place of God.

But the need of man to believe, to turn to some power greater than himself, a force that was certainly not rationally explicable but that one could approach through exaltation and with the aid of dance, music, or song, was not dead in the least. People missed the cults and rituals as well as the saints; they lacked an absolute superhuman authority.

Enlightenment reason cast God’s power into doubt and, along with it, the earthly and religious rulers who were supposed to reflect that power. Emperor Josef II abolished monasteries and expelled monks as freeloaders; just a little while later the French king and his family were executed (rather, murdered), and not long after that, Russian Bolsheviks murdered the tsar and his entire family. Rulers and their ministers, people who only recently were looked up to with reverence, were dead or overthrown. But could their places remain empty? People wanted to look to something higher, an authority that determined what was good and what was evil, who deserved punishment and who deserved acclaim. New leaders exploited this need, but they derived their claims not from God’s will (even though Hitler enjoyed announcing he had been chosen by providence) but rather from the will of the people who flattered themselves as the very embodiment of a wise and reasonable power.

It is significant that both of the powerful ideologies of the twentieth century were atheistic and professed scientific or, rather, pseudoscientific theories; at the same time they adopted signs of religious faith. At first this fascinated millions of both the educated and the unlettered.

The ideology of German National Socialism combined elements of socialism with an obscure racialist theory. It declared that the German race, which according to the Nazis represented the highest level of human development, was destined to rule the world. This theory was not based on contemporary, scientifically provable facts and therefore could be accepted only on the basis of faith. This faith, however, was indeed quite gratifying. It elevated its adherents above all others; it offered them a vision of a marvelous future, the building of something suprapersonal — a thousand-year empire.

Communist ideology emphasized its rationality even more; it claimed to have arisen on the basis of the most modern, ingenious, and fundamentally insuperable scientific method of Marx and Engels. The conclusions reached by these two thinkers while studying societal forces and their development were supposed to have eternal validity, like the laws of Archimedes or Newton, for instance. It was precisely the scientific basis of their teachings that was supposed to guarantee they would lead to a perfect society, to heaven on earth. In reality, this utopian vision was unscientific; it could be believed only on the basis of blind faith.

Textbooks of Marxism or historical materialism resembled a catechism in which every question had a prepared answer that applied irrefutably.

Historical materialism is a pragmatic and harmonious scientific theory that explains the evolution of society, the transition from one societal system to another. At the same time it is the only correct scientific method of investigating all societal phenomena and the histories of individual states and nations.

Everything that did not conform to the dogma of the new Word was condemned as heresy and had to be suppressed and punished.

Holy writ, of course, enjoyed natural authority. The wisdom of entire generations was collected in the Old Testament. There was no need to continually belaud its authors (disregarding the fact that according to the Orthodox interpretation the writers of the texts were merely interpreters of God’s will). Marxist, fascistic, and Nazi ideology, however, brought a new faith, and their interpreters considered it necessary to convince the readers that the new prophets were the only genuinely elect and proselytized the only truth.

Fifty years after the death of Lenin, when it was obvious to everyone who had not lost his reason that the regime he created with unusual cruelty had plunged the citizenry of an enormous empire into poverty and subjugation and deprived several million people of their lives, Lenin’s official biography was published in the Soviet Union with this evaluation:

Lenin’s activity and his deep and noble thinking influenced and will continue to influence the course of world history and the fate of all humanity. . V. I. [

sic

] Lenin showed the nations of the world the path to genuine freedom and happiness.

Communist ideologues perhaps attributed the most oracular characteristics to Stalin. Through his ingenious perspicacity he glimpsed the contours of future prosperity. . and masterfully elaborated and sketched out a grandiose program of Socialist construction. . In his unrepeatable, ingenious analyses, he pointed out the abysmal difference between the world of capitalist decay and disintegration and the efflorescent and deeply humane world of socialism.

Furthermore, like a true prophet, Stalin was extremely simple, modest, far-sighted, uncompromising, ingeniously perspicacious; his logic was overwhelming, his thoughts crystal clear. Therefore, he became for us our teacher and father, the greatest luminary of the world, a coryphaeus of science, the great leader of the working class, an ingenious strategist who has written the indelible Word in the book of history.

The miserable poet and Hitler Youth leader Baldur Benedikt von Schirach composed Hitler’s panegyric:

That is the greatest thing about him,

That he is not only our leader and a great hero,

But himself, upright, firm and simple,

in him rest the roots of our world.

And his soul touches the stars.

Yet he remains a man like you and me.

The attempt by totalitarian ideologies to satisfy the traditional need to believe was remarkably consistent. Leaders renewed the significance of ritualistic gatherings, pilgrimages, and marches to the sound of monotonous music. They returned banners and images of their own saints to the hands of the people. They used religious-sounding words. They loved to talk about eternity and immortality. An often banal and vacuous statement was passed off as a prophetic revelation. Because of his unlimited, mystical fascination, remarked Goebbels on Hitler’s address at a party gathering, it was an almost religious rite.

Every year the Nazis organized eight days of ritual celebrations that were supposed to function like religious pilgrimages. The American diplomat and author Frederic Spotts, in Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, notes:

The fifth day was the “Day of Political Leaders” and from 1936 this event culminated in the dramatic high point of the rallies. After sundown 110,000 men marched on to the review field while 100,000 spectators took their places on the stands. At a signal, once darkness fell, the space was suddenly encircled by a ring of light, with 30,000 flags and standards glistening in the illumination. Spotlights would focus on the main gate, as distant cheers announced the Führer’s approach. At the instant he entered, 150 powerful searchlights would shoot into the sky to produce a gigantic, shimmering “cathedral of light,” as it was called. . “Cathedral” was the apt term since the essence of the ceremony was one of sacramental dedication to Führer and party. Encased in a circle of light and dark, the participants were transported into a vast phantasmagoria.

Film clips of the enthusiastic crowds greeting the new gods embodied in the figures of Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, or their successors even today bear witness to the fact that many people upon meeting their leaders truly experienced the ecstasy of religious rapture and were prepared to do anything the new gods commanded — work oneself to death, go to one’s own death, or put someone else to death.

Often fear lurked behind this ecstasy, but of course it was never very far from some sort of religious faith.

Totalitarian ideologies demanded devotion from their followers, absolute obedience in carrying out their (often absurd) commandments. They demanded that people believe the image of reality precisely in the form submitted to them. Millions of Germans believed so fervently in the villainy of Jews that they permitted their slaughter. Plenty enthusiastically made this perverted idea a reality. In the same way, many Germans believed they were destined for world domination and were willing to sacrifice their lives to the new divinity in the name of this horrible but suprapersonal goal.

The Communists accepted that entire groups of inhabitants had to be suppressed or killed if a new and better society was to be created. Absolute and uncritical faith was necessary to believe that the recently celebrated members of the party leadership were subsequently revealed to be traitors and must therefore be forcibly removed from the world of the living.

The faith of some was so strong that they were not willing to renounce it. They could not turn away from their villainous god even when standing upon the scaffold. When Hitler with the help of Himmler’s SS suppressed a nonexistent conspiracy by the SA, the SS men led the alleged conspirators before the firing squad. Before dying they managed to shout out their elementary slogan, “Heil Hitler” (while the execution squad received the order, “Heil Hitler, fire!”). Many Communists sentenced to death during the trials, which took place upon Stalin’s orders, died while crying out, “Long live Stalin!” They could not imagine that their god, in order to elevate himself, had demanded their death, and they did not have the fortitude to admit that the entirety of their faith had been an error, for which they had sacrificed their lives. It is probable that at least some of those who stood across from those carrying out the execution also invoked Stalin’s name. It is even possible that several of those who were to die the very next moment believed that they were serving a magnificent goal to which society was allegedly drawing near. Paradoxically, fanatically believing hangmen and victims stood face-to-face, each convinced that everything he had lived through and everything he was undergoing served a great and laudable objective.

Many German citizens, almost to the final moment, believed in the megalomaniac who had driven them to death and to the very end glorified his name in the same way they glorified the name of God. Even after the defeat of Nazism, even after the disclosure of the crimes of the Stalinist regime, many refused to admit that their faith had been misplaced and even villainous. They remained true to their faith because without it their lives would have fallen into even greater meaninglessness.

Totalitarian ideologies built on faith collapsed, but the need for faith remained. Even where traditional churches retreat into the background, people look for some kind of replacement for traditional faith. They believe in astrology, in people from outer space, in the miraculous power of a faith healer, in alternative medicine, in karma, in clairvoyance.

Perhaps surprisingly, however, the strongest faith is evoked by that which faith has always denied: reason, science, and technology. At least in our part of the world, people began to believe in their own redemptive abilities, their own wisdom. Science should be able to reveal and explain the past and predict the future, ensure prosperity for everyone who tries hard enough, overcome illness and finally even death. Lately scientists have begun to experiment with decoding the human genome. More and more we hear in the popular press ebullient cries that man stands on the threshold of immortality.

People have once again begun to believe in the paradise that science will bring them from heaven.

Whenever people begin to believe in the attainability of paradise, they usually enter upon a path leading to hell.

Dictators and Dictatorship

The governments of two especially cruel dictatorships affected my life directly, but during the same time a Fascist dictatorship ruled in Italy; at the end of the 1930s democracy was suppressed in Spain; a totalitarian, or at least undemocratic, regime came to power in Poland, Hungary, and Romania. And outside Europe? Dictatorships persist today: in Communist China, North Korea, Cuba, and a number of Muslim countries in both Asia and Africa.

With the benefit of hindsight, people continue to wonder how, in a country with such a tradition of learning and culture as Germany, citizens could voluntarily entrust their fates to the hands of Adolf Hitler and the riffraff that surrounded him. One could say the same thing, of course, about the country in which Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Tolstoy wrote.

Usually certain obvious arguments are adduced for a blossoming of such reckless dictatorships: the humiliation of defeat, the collapse of the economy and resulting world economic crisis (which in Germany deprived almost half its working-age citizens of work), the inability to resolve social questions, military traditions, even a fascination with self-sacrifice and death in Germany and conversely the ruminations and popular debates concerning a better society in Russia. But it is obvious that there was something more general and overarching.

Considerations of national character, culture, or people’s behavior usually substitute the image of society for the image of the elite. Cultured Germans knew Goethe and Schiller (probably not all had read them), perhaps also Hegel and Kant (probably not all had studied them). Certainly some of the educated were acquainted with the German myth of the Nibelungs and might have considered that the meaning of German fate lay thus in self-sacrifice. It’s safe to assume, however, that most citizens in these categories did not consider that most Germans were not knowledgeable about the great German minds, just as in semi-educated Russia most muzhiks had not heard of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Chernyshevsky, Berdyayev, or Plekhanov, let alone cogitated over their works and allowed themselves be inspired to action.

Who were the people of the twentieth century? How did our lives differ from the lives of our forefathers?

The twentieth century brought unprecedented technological progress, new revolutionary developments in communication, the automobile, the radio, and the smashing of the atom, as well as new forms of entertainment, which was dominated by the recording of pictures and sound. New heroes were proclaimed. Celebrities of the entertainment industry — film stars, athletes, and singers — replaced the spiritual elite. The twentieth century brought ruin to many traditional values: Religious faith flagged; the village community faded in significance, as did the feudal nobility; and the family started to fall apart. A spiritual emptiness suddenly opened up before humanity. The atmosphere of precipitous development compelled people to ask how they could fill this void. Movement, change, upheaval, the cult of the new — these were most clearly expressed in art. The modern began to disdain tradition, while everything new seemed to be a revolutionary contribution and was showered with praise. What had until recently been considered a virtue, for instance, communicability, clarity, or even an idea, was snowed under by the ridicule of those who saw themselves as adjudicators of art. An abyss opened up between those who considered themselves the creators and everyone else. The tragedy was that “everyone else” made up the great majority. This majority, now deprived of certainties that until recently had provided them with faith — the traditional arrangement of society and generally recognized values (even if most of those values were mistaken) — found themselves untethered. The overturning of traditional values was exacerbated by serious societal crises, the most serious of which was the world war at the beginning of the century, the largest and bloodiest thus far in history, both in extent and in its use of new, lethal weapons. The war, however, ended with the defeat of the militaristic and undemocratic regimes. In their stead, in the place of defeated monarchies, new democratic republics began to establish themselves. For a brief moment, the promised rule of the people aroused brash and grandiose hopes of a way to escape the void. Yet these hopes went unfilled, and the people were overwhelmed with disappointment. The poverty they had longed to escape persisted and, moreover, they found nothing suprapersonal, nothing absolute to cling to, nothing before which they could bow down in religious devotion.

What a splendid opportunity for fanatical prophets of hope, for demagogy promising to fill this void and endow life with a new meaning.

The first place where restlessness broke out was in Russia during the war, where they had deposed the rule of the tsar and tried to replace it with a democratic government. They decided not to end the war, however, and it didn’t appear that the new democracy could fulfill any of the hopes the people had placed in it. Nevertheless, the fall of the authoritatian regime made it possible for freedom, which had long been suppressed, to enter into life. An expanse opened up for both reformers and revolutionaries. The first to avail himself of this newly formed freedom was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, aka Lenin, a fanatic with a utopian vision He placed the value of the ideas he propagated above the value of human life and was prepared to spill any amount of blood on their behalf. As soon as he took power he announced he was immediately embarking on the creation of a new, just societal order and that he would end the war because the workers were perishing in the interests of their exploiters. He would carry out land reforms, fulfill projects that previous utopias could only dream about but that two Communist theoreticians in the modern period, Marx and Engels, had scientifically worked out and deemed realizable. The new arrangement of society — which was not to be limited by national borders, since it was in the interests of all of the exploited classes, that is, most inhabitants of the planet — was supposed to develop in two phases. The first was socialism, which would do away with property inequality, seize the means of production, and thereby develop production to ensure general prosperity. Over the course of, at most, two generations, a new, free, and classless society would arise in which all could satisfy their needs. This second phase, which was suspicious to thinking people as a delirious and unrealizable utopia, was to be called communism. To lead people to this freest of societies, a dictatorship was required.

Lenin’s idea of revolution inspired enthusiasm even in other countries. The first reports of unbridled Bolshevik terror, however, also inspired revulsion and even fear among the propertied members of society as well as among enlightened intellectuals. Moreover, Lenin never denied that he despised democracy, which was supposed to exist (but in a distorted form) only inside his party. Despite troubling accounts issuing from the land of the Soviets, enough politicians in democratic countries agreed that the societal order that had heretofore existed was unsatisfactory. In a society laid low and impoverished by war, with an economy that had not yet managed to recover from its war wounds, future leaders eager to promise anything and commit any crime in order to acquire power began to prance about as prophets of new ideas and new hopes.

Two countries seemed to have been affected by war the most: defeated Germany and victorious Italy. Germany was humiliated, Italy frustrated in its hopes and cheated, it was assumed, out of the war booty it deserved. Immediately after the war, Germany was hit with inflation, impoverishing the majority of its citizens. Italy, weakened by worker unrest and quickly escalating violence perpetrated by members of the growing Fascist movement in their fight with Socialists, searched in vain for a government that could lead it out of recession.

It was primarily the workers in both countries, but also part of the intelligentsia, who saw a solution in Socialist rule. In both countries and at the same time, spokesmen and other opponents of democracy found receptive, eager adherents. In Italy it was a teacher and journalist, a demagogue intending to take power: Benito Mussolini. In Germany it was an unrecognized painter refused by art schools, a devotee of opera and ostentatious architecture, a half-educated deadbeat, pathological anti-Semite, and megalomaniac who was convinced of his calling: Adolf Hitler. They thundered against ineffectual democracy, warned of the dangers of Bolshevism (Hitler added Judaism), and promised to renew national glory and power and thereby provide their citizens with pride. They even offered a new savior who would solve everything and whose powerful will would rescue the country from all hardship. Everyone who believed in and followed him was promised a portion of the eternal glory in the new empire he would create.

Both men stood out as passionate opponents of Lenin’s revolution and, when we compare their deeds with the benefit of hindsight, we find that the dictatorships differed from each other only slightly. At the same time that each was maligning the other, each also was looking to the other for inspiration as they introduced despotism.

Dictatorship as asserted and defined by Lenin means nothing less than absolute power unlimited by any laws, absolutely unhampered by rules, and based on the direct exercise of force.

Almost simultaneously, Benito Mussolini announced: Now in light of new political and parliamentary experiences, the possibility of a dictatorship must be seriously considered. And elsewhere: Violence is not immoral; sometimes it can be moral.

Only a little later did the Spanish leader General Francisco Franco formulate his credo: Our regime is based on bayonets and blood, not on hypocritical elections.

During his brief stay in prison (convicted for an unsuccessful putsch), Adolf Hitler formulated his hatred of democracy:

For the view of life is intolerant and cannot be content with the role of a party among others, but it demands dictatorially that it be acknowledged exclusively and completely and that the entire public life be completely readjusted according to its own views. Therefore it cannot tolerate the simultaneous existence of a representation of the former condition. . With this, however, the movement is antiparliamentarian, and even its share in such an institution can only have the meaning of an activity for the smashing of the latter, for the abolition of an institution in which we see one of the most serious symptoms of mankind’s decay.

And in a political testament only a few hours before his suicide, once more and for the last time, he shouted out his tyrannical credo:

I am the last chance for [a united] Europe. A new Europe will not be built on parliamentary vote, not on discussions and resolutions, but only compelled by violence.

The fanatical revolutionary and prophet of class hatred, Lenin, died too early to view with satisfaction how his theory would travel around the world. He found, however, in his own country executors of his legacy. The seminary dropout, reckless revolutionary, and crafty intriguer Stalin transformed his theory into dogma no one could dispute. He who disagreed would not be convinced under Stalin’s rule; he would be executed.

On his path to absolute power, Stalin made violence the primary tool of his politics. During the period of greatest terror he circulated requirements as to how many people in a given district should be disposed of and approved sometimes hundreds of death sentences a day. During the trials, which were preceded by the torture of the accused, he sentenced to death members of all strata of society, his closest collaborators, eminent artists, practically the entire leadership of the army and clergy. Even his relatives were not spared. The wives of the executed were either murdered as well or sent to concentration camps along with everyone who questioned his unshakable leadership. Led by the logic of dictatorship (and of all mafiosi), he executed those who could testify to his crimes, since they had committed them on his orders.

Every dictator proclaims himself a spokesman for the people, that is, for everyone over whom he holds power, and he expends much effort to appear as a benevolent father. Dictatorship, proclaimed Lenin, cannot be administered by the entire working class (in part because they were not conscious enough and were corrupted by imperialism). It could be realized only by the vanguard, which had absorbed the revolutionary energy of the class. This is how terror is justified. In theory it is employed by one party with respect to all society. In reality it is employed by a handful of leading party functionaries and finally in the name of the one and only leader.

The great mass of a people, contemplated Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, is not composed of diplomats or even teachers of political law, nor even of purely reasonable individuals who are able to pass judgment, but of human beings who are as undecided as they are inclined toward doubts and uncertainty. Contempt for people and democracy is characteristic of all dictators. It allows them to conclude that it is possible to enslave the minds of the masses and that it is necessary — and correct — to devote all care and diligence to this effort if they are to rule. Dictatorships have gone as far as they can go in their methods of controlling human thought. To justify their deeds, which they claimed would protect society from ruin (whether from outside or within), it was necessary to create an image of the enemy who, no matter how weak and destined by history to disappear into eternal nothingness, is a constant threat and must be uncovered, isolated, and finally liquidated. Lenin had a wide range of enemies: the bourgeoisie, the White Guard, the imperialists, the members of all other parties, the nobility, and all of his opponents, whether they belonged to these categories or whether they were prominent artists or scientists who abhorred his terror. Hitler embodied evil, danger, and destruction in the figure of the Jew who was an enemy of culture, peace, and all humanity. (For contemporary Muslim fundamentalists, the United States and all democratic countries are the embodiment of evil. Among them, the most execrated is Israel.)

A dualistic view of the world, a strict delimitation between good and evil, is innate to human perception. Demons of darkness and light, devils and angels, the goddess of abundance and the god of the underworld — this division is found in all mythologies. Dictatorships bring this mythology to life: First they offer to rid the world of evil forever by simply exterminating evil’s representatives. Some are murdered straightaway without trial. Others are carted off to concentration camps, where they are slowly destroyed by hunger, arduous toil, and finally gas, like troublesome insects.

The dictatorship announces a merciless battle or fatwa against enemies of the state, of the people, or of the only true faith. Genuine cohorts of criminals are formed in the battle against an imaginary evil (at one time they were called the Cheka, at another the SS or SA, and at another State Security), and are determined in the name of an idea, a faith, or the unerring leader to commit violence, to torture and murder. Because the leaders well know the real character of their deeds, their rampages take place in secret. Often people living in the vicinity of an extermination camp had no idea what was going on behind the barbed wire. For months no news about the gas chambers leaked out, even though several thousand people were murdered there daily.

At its most glorious moments, a dictatorship appears to be indestructible and thus eternal. Even Hitler, for a short time, when he controlled an empire that encompassed almost all of Europe and reached from the Atlantic and North African coast to the Caucasus and the Volga, seemed undefeatable. Before his death, not only did Stalin rule the largest country in the world, whose territory spread to the Baltic republics and the eastern part of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Romania, but he also controlled puppet governments in a series of European and Asian countries. In these others, often numerous and influential Communist parties were subordinated to his will.

The dictator lawfully fastens the fate of his regime to his own. Although his merits are set up as indubitable, his glory as immortal, and the idea he serves as eternal truth, one day the dictator will fall in the battle he himself has unleashed, or he will die a natural or violent death. And suddenly, perhaps in the small Dominican Republic, the larger Spain, or the enormous Russia, the ingenious creation of the dictatorship established will collapse or at least begin to deteriorate.

The Betrayal of the Intellectuals

At the head of the two powerful European empires, which in many ways defined the insane events of the twentieth century, stood two semieducated men, two apparently down-and-out individuals. Hitler graduated from high school, Stalin not even that — he fled from a seminary before he could receive any education. Both attempted to adopt the persona of intellectuals; after all, they lived in a century of science. Hitler was even a decent painter and considered himself an art expert. He was a compelling orator who could fascinate a crowd. Stalin was a bureaucrat who excelled at nothing but intrigue, villainy, and boundless cruelty. When we examine what both of these homicidal maniacs preached, we are amazed at the emptiness, the backwardness of their words. They were preceded, or accompanied, however, by others who were more educated and who gave shape to their lunatic visions.

The creators of the modern Communist utopia were intellectuals: Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Lenin, who consciously abolished any sort of law and replaced it with revolutionary justice (or as he called it: revolutionary terror), was paradoxically an erudite lawyer. Even Fidel Castro graduated with a law degree, and Pol Pot, the Cambodian organizer of cruel revolutionary slaughter, studied at the Sorbonne. Educated revolutionaries proclaim principles, even values, that often go against everything mankind has achieved.

It was also college graduates who helped formulate the basic principles of National Socialism. Hitler’s right-hand man Joseph Goebbels received a doctorate in literature and philosophy. Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s second, was also educated. He too tried to justify the murderous goals of the SS with a mystical theory of the exceptional individual and the historical calling of the chosen race. Albert Speer was apparently a capable architect, and he later designed megalomaniacal buildings according to Hitler’s ideas. Hans Frank was a lawyer by profession who, at least in the beginning, tried to get the regime to respect some basic legal norms such as the presumption of innocence until a defendant is proved guilty and the right of the accused to an independent defense. In the end, the opposite took place, and, as the absolute ruler of occupied Poland, he had on his conscience numerous illegalities, depredations, and murder.

The Wannsee Conference at the beginning of 1942 where the planned slaughter of Jews in all occupied lands was decided, as the historian Mark Roseman points out, was attended by primarily people with academic titles; two-thirds had university degrees, and over half bore the title of doctor, mainly of law.

One of the creators of the Soviet political or politicized trials, in which innocent people were condemned on the basis of forced confessions and name-calling that substituted for proof (stinking carcass, fetid pile of human garbage), was the knowledgeable prerevolutionary lawyer Andrey Vyshinsky. His Czech disciple, Josef Urválek, was a lawyer as well.

Far too many intellectuals were in the service of a fanatical idea that contradicted and betrayed everything humanity had thus far achieved.

In 1934, just after the Nazis took power in Germany, Karel Čapek published several remarkable reflections on the role of intellectuals in the political tragedy that was unfolding.

An entire nation, an entire empire spiritually conceded to a faith in animality, in race, and in other such nonsense. An entire nation including university professors, preachers, men of letters, doctors, and lawyers. . What has happened is nothing less than the immense betrayal of intellectuals, and it has resulted in a horrifying image of what intelligence is capable of. Everywhere that coercion occurs on cultured humanity we find intellectuals who are engaged en masse, even brandishing ideological arguments. This is no longer a crisis or the powerlessness of the intelligentsia, but rather its quiet and energetic complicity in the moral and political mayhem of today’s Europe. . No cultural value can be exceeded if it is abandoned. . Destroy the hierarchy of the spirit, and you prepare for the return of the savage. The decline of the intelligentsia is the path to the barbarization of everything.

Nevertheless, it did indeed happen, and for decades scholars have repeatedly tried to explain this mass failure of the intelligentsia.

Thus far I have mentioned only the intellectuals who participated directly in the creation or the operation of totalitarian regimes. It is significant to note that, with only a few exceptions, these were not especially gifted thinkers. (This is particularly true of the Nazis just mentioned.) Goebbels was merely a capable demagogue; in reality, as his diaries show, he was inwardly insecure. For years he despaired over his fate, which seemed to him so hopeless that he considered suicide. Himmler was just as uncertain. His entire youth was utterly without success, and from his lack of confidence was born a raving fanaticism. When he finally decided to assume the mantle of the intellectual, he proclaimed only fatuous prejudices based on romantic German mythology. Their ferocious anti-Semitism bears eloquent testimony to the base intellectual level of both men.

Not even among the Communist intellectuals do we find great minds. Although numerous paeans have been written about Lenin’s intellectual achievements, no one has yet sought inspiration in his flights into the area of philosophy or the social sciences. When examined objectively, his theses are a conglomeration of cranky polemics, simplifying interpretations, and, above all, errors and lies presented as scientific truth.

Otherwise, intellectuals did not participate directly in the achievement of totalitarian power, but they either actively endorsed it or tolerated it without objection. Of these there were millions.

During the birth of Communist ideology, enthusiastic supporters were found all over the world (even more than in the Soviet Union), and many were outstanding intellectuals. Artists were captivated by the utopian vision, the marvelous goals, and the skillful demagoguery with which Communist dictators managed to defend everything that took place in their empires (terror, famine, murder, and imprisonment). Some of these artists, at the beginning of the Bolshevik reign, were still allowed to work. During the first postrevolutionary years, Boris Pasternak, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Anna Akhmatova, and Isaac Babel even approved of and were willing to publicly defend the Communist vision of a joyous society, as if it had already been created. Although other recognized and influential minds of the time condemned Bolshevism immediately after the revolution, they also found positive things to say about Russia. H. G. Wells visited Russia in 1920 and was shocked by what he saw. However, he ended up writing several complimentary things about Russia and Lenin. He concluded his book about his visit, Russia in the Shadows, with the assurance that only the Bolsheviks were capable of preventing the collapse of Russia. It was as if he’d forgotten that it was precisely the Bolsheviks who had brought Russia to the brink of collapse in the first place.

In The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, Bertrand Russell, who visited Russia at the same time as Wells, spoke more ambivalently about Bolshevism.

One who believes as I do, that free intellect is the chief engine of human progress, cannot but be fundamentally opposed to Bolshevism as much as to the Church of Rome. [But] the hopes which inspire Communism are, in the main, as admirable as those instilled by the Sermon on the Mount [!], but they are held as fanatically and are as likely to do as much harm.

It is true that the First World War shook people’s faith in current political systems, and this caused even educated people to look with expectation upon this great social experiment the Bolsheviks were trying to bring about in Russia.

There were many intellectuals who supported Stalin even during the period of his greatest cruelty. Usually they found a rational justification for their weakness concerning the merciless totalitarian regime. Hewlett Johnson, nicknamed the Red Dean of Canterbury, one of the most passionate advocates of the Soviet regime, considered it more humane than capitalism. In his trilogy of journalistic books about the Soviet Union, he writes only about that which lent itself to Soviet propaganda. He enthusiastically praises free medical care, education, and the tax system, and justifies his praise (like Stalin) by pointing out the great support the regime receives in its elections. If such a large percentage of the population participates in elections — on May 10th, 1946, it was 99.7 percent — and if 99.18 percent voted for the selected candidates, there must be truth behind the elections in a country where there are equal voting rights, where voting is secret, and where elections are direct. Whether this prominent intellectual public figure from a country of traditional democracy actually believed this claim is difficult to judge. Lenin, however, called such intellectuals useful idiots. Useful idiots were used and abused, often cited as authorities, and showered with admiration and accolades. (Johnson was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize.)

Of course, it is true that Soviet politicians cunningly continued the Russian tradition of showing willing visitors their country. After the war they deftly exploited the atomic fears of a series of intellectuals, and although they themselves were feverishly producing atomic weapons (intended to defend their camp of peace), they unleashed an enormous political campaign against the spread of weapons of mass destruction — and for this campaign they enlisted the foremost scientific experts, the Nobel laureates Frédéric Joliot-Curie and Linus Pauling.

A few decades later, just after the publication of The Black Book of Communism, an editor for L’Humanité announced on television that even eighty million dead did not tarnish the Communist worldview. After Auschwitz, he opined, one cannot be a Nazi, but after the Soviet gulags, one can be a Communist.

Certainly it is possible to remain a Communist standing over the mass graves of the murdered (they were, after all, enemies of the greatest and most humane society), it is possible to remain a Communist on the scaffold (whether as the condemned or the hangman), but it is impossible to remain an intellectual or a cultured person. Because the betrayal of intelligence leads to the barbarization of everyone.

On Propaganda

Propaganda, although it has not always gone by this name, has existed since antiquity. Oftentimes a capable and demagogic individual would win over so many adherents through disclosures and promises and an ability to provide the people with bread and circuses that he would succeed in achieving absolute power. With a certain schadenfreude one can say that every leader, every regime prefers the darkening of the minds of its subjects (called citizens in modern times). More precisely, the subjects should possess only enough knowledge to confirm the rule of those who hold power.

Whereas democracies seek ways to limit the tendencies of governments to transform their citizens into a mere assenting mob, totalitarian regimes try to achieve the opposite.

These regimes have a certain number of loyal citizens, often even fanatically devoted adherents (and approximately the same number of determined opponents). They attempt to acquire the rest of the citizenry for their goals or at least compel them to obedient silence. First they must protect each of their subjects from the influence of all enemy elements and ideas, and all thoughts that do not support the vision upon which the dictatorship is built are considered enemy ideas. Then they must besiege their opponents with correct thoughts. In his first speech as newly appointed chancellor, Adolf Hitler announced his cultural (or, better, anticultural) program. Concurrently with the political purification of our public life, the Reich government will undertake a thorough moral purification of the country. All cultural bodies, theaters, cinemas, literature, the press, and radio — all of this will be used as a tool to fulfill this goal. . Blood and race will once again become the source of artistic inspiration.

A few weeks after this, purges were under way in all cultural organizations, in all media outlets, even in churches. Bonfires of “harmful” books blazed on city squares and in front of universities. Books vanished from libraries and bookstores.

Over the course of a few months, the ground was laid for the dictator and his helpers to gain control over the people’s minds via propaganda in all media.

In modern times, propaganda has become an essential element of totalitarian power. In the first stages there is always the corruption of the people through the generous distribution of property, which was at one time stolen from the nobility, another time from the Jews, and still another from the capitalists. Then follows the attempt to control the minds of the citizens.

The clearest (and most cynical) function and mission of propaganda, as it is understood today, was defined by one of its creators, Joseph Goebbels, the author of the infamous dictum that a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth:

The goal of the National Socialist revolution was to seize power because the idea of revolution remains empty theory if not combined with power. Revolutionary political propaganda brought the ideas of National Socialism to the masses, and therefrom arose Adolf Hitler’s iron soldiers who, through faith in the gospel of his teachings, brought revolution all the way to the threshold of power.

Propaganda is a matter of practice, not of theory. . In other words, propaganda is good if it leads to the desired results, and propaganda is bad if does not lead to the desired results. . Its purpose is not to be decent, or gentle, or weak, or modest; it is to be successful.

The Communists were somewhat less direct in their speeches, but propaganda occupied the same essential position. According to Stalin:

There is probably no need to mention the great significance of party propaganda and the Marxist-Leninist education of our workers. I have in mind not only the workers in the party. I also have in mind the workers of youth organizations, trade unions, business unions, cooperatives, financial and cultural institutions, and others. . The attention of our party must be concentrated on propaganda in the press and in the organization of a lecture system of propaganda.

In reality, Marxist-Leninist “education” concentrated not only on party members but on all of society. Over the course of a few generations, it became the basis of education in the Communist empire, from preschool to doctoral students, and one could not receive a degree without successfully passing an exam on Marxism.

Modern means of communication transformed propaganda into a powerful medium; therefore, every totalitarian regime sought to bring them under its power as quickly as possible. The day after the Austrian anschluss, Goebbels, now the powerful Nazi minister of propaganda, noted: I am giving Dr. Dietrich precise instructions for the reform of the Austrian press. We must initiate an enormous reshaping of personnel. . We are establishing a Reich radio in Vienna. At the same time, we are creating a Reich Ministry of Propaganda.

In the days immediately following the February coup in Czechoslovakia, the Communists occupied the editorial offices of all newspapers and radio stations. They instituted action committees to expel tenacious editors and replace them with vetted personnel willing to cooperate. News organizations were purged, and those belonging to the party took power. Frightened non — party members often hastily joined their ranks.

In all totalitarian systems, the news media are directed by some sort of office (called varying names); however, it is always in the hands of the ruling party, or, more precisely, the group that rules in the party’s name. The office dispenses orders concerning what may be written about and what may not.

In the first half of the twentieth century, when radio was the most important news medium, the Nazis condemned to death anyone listening to “enemy” broadcasts. A few years later, Communists made it impossible to listen to foreign radio broadcasts by installing a net of jammers — this was not for humanitarian reasons; it was simply more effective.

A sort of canon of propaganda quickly arises. The fundamental means, policies, and goals can be condensed into a few points.

First, propaganda must name and define the basic idea it is implicitly to serve. It does not matter whether the idea is called National Socialism, Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, or Muslim fundamentalism. What is crucial is that it be transformed into Goebbels’s aforementioned gospel. The idea is holy, that is, unimpugnable, all-explaining, and eternal. Regimes based upon it will last for all time imaginable.

It is necessary to convince the citizens to willingly accept the fact that what has happened is irrevocable. The Soviet Union will endure forever because it embodies the most progressive and advanced societal order. Therefore, our friendship with it will endure forever. The Nazi empire will assume the rule of Europe. Nothing will change during those thousand years (a thousand years and eternity mean the same thing in the life of an individual), and from this it follows that only an idiot or someone on the enemy side would oppose it.

Article number two of the canon proves the existence of a cunning, deceitful, malevolent enemy intent on committing atrocities. (Without it, as I have indicated, no dictatorship can exist.) All effective propaganda is dualistic: It must battle for something the people long for, something to which they can fasten themselves, and at the same time it must battle against something or someone that is interfering with their desires and ideas. The enemy can be Jews, international imperialism, the United States, Israel, kulaks, the bourgeoisie, Trotskyites, plutocrats, Bolshevism, Zionism, cosmopolitanism, degenerate capitalism, seditious transmitters of Radio Free Europe, the CIA, German revanchists, Masons, or religious sects. The enemy can change shape over time too. It cannot, however, disappear from the world because the sanctity of propaganda is always strengthened by doing battle with satanic forces. The enemy is a pariah: deceitful, disgusting, dirty, corrupt, cunning, crafty, inordinately ambitious, treacherous, insidious, intriguing, destined to vanish from history. No comparisons are powerful enough. The enemy is a blood-letting dog (Stalin for Goebbels, Tito for Stalin). For Hitler the Romanian peasant is a miserable piece of cattle, Churchill an unprincipled pig. When Lenin writes his furious polemic with the foremost Social Democrat, the theoretician Karl Kautsky, he showers him with ever-new curses — Kautsky is a renegade, a parliamentary cretin, a bourgeois lackey, a sweet idiot. For Stalin, those he needs to divest himself of, the pariahs, are a handful of spies, murderers, and cankerworms slinking in the dust before foreign countries, infected by a slavish feeling of groveling humility before every foreign stooge.

Against the background of these repulsive monsters looms the refulgent yet almost kitschy image of the leader. He is kind, polite, wise; he has an understanding of the needs of simple people; he is uncompromisingly fair, works tirelessly, defends honor and decency, loves children, the elderly, and war invalids. Magazines and newsreels are chock-full of photographs of the leader and scenes from his life. Lenin with Gorky, with his wife, with his nephews. Lenin skates, collects mushrooms, and has a dog named Aida that he plays with. Hitler has his blonde. The führer also loves the children of his friend Goebbels. He skis and goes on walks, and we see him smiling and down-to-earth mit der kleine Helga. Stalin holds in his arms a pioneer schoolgirl, who has just brought him a bouquet of flowers. During the war, on the other hand, he inclines over a map of the front to demonstrate to everyone that it is he who is calling the shots in the final victory of his armies.

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 proletariat 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

the future of a movement is determined by the devotion, and even intolerance, with which its members fight for their cause. . The greatness of every powerful organization which embodies a creative idea lies in the spirit of religious devotion and intolerance with which it stands out against all others, because it has an ardent faith in its own right.

Through an unshakable faith in their own truth, their sense of chosen destiny, and their ability to bring salvation to the people, prophets of new truths and creators of new empires manage to acquire, at least for a time, masses of devoted and fanaticized followers.

Weary Dictators and Rebels

The beginning of every dictatorship appears to its contemporaries as solid and unyielding. The organs of a dictatorship function precisely according to calculations that suit the power being established. In their relationship with artists and the intelligentsia in general, their positions seem unequivocal. Those who glorify and subordinate themselves to the regime are praised. Those who refuse to subordinate themselves in thought and work are silenced by imprisonment, exile, or the scaffold. The new masters, the coffin carriers, appear as the guarantee that the dictatorship will persist undisturbed. In reality, it is precisely the opposite. The uncreative nature of the new masters, their dull-witted loyalty, is the beginning of a stagnation that will gradually mortify and kill off society, which begins to lag behind in all branches of human activity. Usually when the founding dictator steps down, is overthrown, or dies (one of these must inevitably happen), it is at once revealed that all that is left are masses of unfulfilled promises, slogans no one believes, absurd prohibitions, and directives that hinder life. Wearied by its own arrogance, weakened by its own dull-wittedness, rid of all personalities, hated by most of its subordinates, the dictatorship seeks some way to survive.

The new inheritors realize that as long as they continue the previous despotism, they cannot be sure their subordinates will not turn against them. They know they cannot trust each other. Some of them can turn to the subordinates, exploit their dissatisfaction, and deal harshly with the other inheritors who previously committed crimes under the protective hand of despotism. In the end, the inheritors of totalitarian power will decide not to risk it and instead flatter their underlings (including the army, police, and government authorities) by promising a renewal of law and order, a return to the original ideals, and a prosperity unseen anywhere else in the world. They will seek to retain absolute power without absolute repression.

The Communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia was derived from the Soviet dictatorship in both form and content. During the very first months of its rule, it decided to suppress unconditionally every sign of resistance in all areas of life. It formed action committees made up of fanatical Communists tasked with screening the behavior of individuals and organizations. It immediately closed down newspapers and magazines not under the government’s immediate control; it broke up and prohibited independent institutions. It nationalized all enterprises and later small workshops and businesses, and installed its loyal acolytes at the head of every institution. It took over film production, shut down theaters, closed private publishing houses, and began its attack against farmers. The richest were transferred to the border regions. Representatives of democratic political parties, if they had not fled in time, were sent to prison and concentration camps for long periods (some were executed when workers organized a mass campaign demanding the death sentence for the accused). Members of the Western resistance and army officers, university professors, journalists, and the educated in general who did not accept the Marxist doctrine were turned out from their jobs. The Catholic clergy, including nuns and monks, were locked up or at least silenced. Several Catholic poets were condemned to lengthy prison terms.

After the death of Stalin, however, and shortly thereafter that of his obedient vassal, Gottwald, a new, “wearier” form of dictatorship began to emerge.

The weary dictatorship no longer murders, it doesn’t even pronounce lifetime prison sentences, but it tries to corrupt all the more. Corruption does not manifest itself only in its most brazen form, allowing the most loyal followers to steal unrestrainedly or at least to enjoy sinecures. The regime now behaves more benevolently toward most of its subordinates. Until recently it compelled them to ostentatiously declare their love to the regime, to devote time and money to it, and t o go to meetings, brigades, and rallies; and even when they were doing so, they could never be certain the police would not accuse them of some serious crime, then interrogate them, torture them, and finally hand them over to a court that would deliver a predetermined conviction. Now the powers make it clear that whoever works, refrains from any acts of opposition, and confirms his loyalty once every four years in elections will be allowed to purchase a weekend cottage and cultivate bourgeois amusements, such as attending jazz concerts or collecting stamps; he will be allowed to read lyric poetry and from time to time vacation at the seaside of some friendly nation. He can even steal — a little. In return the regime will provide him with peace. From now on only criminal elements and genuinely determined opponents will be persecuted. Even the innocent, whom it had previously accused and ordered servile courts to sentence, now, after long years of imprisonment (if they survived), are hesitantly and discreetly released — as long as they understand that they may not communicate to anyone the details of their imprisonment. For a short time, peace, or, more precisely, torpor, will reign in society, which compared with the recent terror will becalm or even arouse hope.

The regime will alter its relationship to intellectuals. In its benevolence, which should be appropriately appreciated, the totalitarian regime will provide intellectuals and artists with a little more freedom, with the proviso that any doubts and solutions cannot be aimed at it. At most they may request that the regime rid itself of several (now admitted) vices, and the artists will always submit their conclusions for approval. As long as intellectuals behave in this way, they will be tolerated. As a sign of its goodwill, the regime will allow some, who until now had to remain silent, to speak, even if usually only on some inconsequential topic.

The retreat from direct terror creates difficulties for the totalitarian power. Whereas terror drove the surviving, freely thinking intellectuals deep into the underground or compelled them to be silent, now many refuse to be bought, refuse to pretend that the ground disintegrating beneath the vigilant governance of a weary but still totalitarian power is an empire of unprecedented freedom.

In the first half of the twentieth century, plenty of intellectuals and especially artists believed the erroneous visions and promises of the Communist Party. Between those who supported, or even believed in, the regime and those who understood its true essence was a border that was difficult to traverse. Some (often in good faith but always blindly) supported the dictatorship and helped stifle freedom, and thus bore, to a greater or lesser degree, coresponsibility for the crimes committed. Others understood that without preserving basic freedoms, society was doomed to destruction. Some stood up to power; others remained silent, but they knew that all terror was self-destructive and thus condemned to extinction.

After the death of the Soviet dictator, however, another analogous border was created within the Communist Party. Some considered a partial admission of crimes as an unprecedented, even admirable, act of self-criticism, which all citizens should appreciate and which entitled the party to further lead society to the goals it defined itself. To admit that the goal was mistaken or at least unrealizable seemed unacceptable. But many Communists began to realize that they had become members of a felonious party that had committed unspeakable crimes. It is impossible to ascertain the number of such people, but they were often active in fields of the humanities: journalists, film directors, scriptwriters, authors, historians, sociologists, university teachers — that is, those who could influence the thought of others, even if only to a limited degree under the conditions of a totalitarian state. Most of them could not accept that those who had answered for crimes committed in the name of the Communist regime had gone unpunished, that they still participated in governing the country. At least in the domain of the spirit, they wanted society to be open to the world.

Those who stood at the summit of party power and henceforth considered all similar opinions as revisionist, opportunistic, bourgeois, or Trotskyist at the same time perceived that a good number of intellectuals in the party were “infected” with these opinions. It even seemed that most of the grumbling, most of the dissatisfaction, most of the criticism of the current power was coming not from democratic opponents but from a reckless and unruly section of the party.

The party (and the police) organs were most likely correct in their suspicions. After all, the only remnants of societal criticism (at least those that might be made public) and political life survived precisely in the party itself.

The metamorphosis of disappointed disciples of the Communist vision into its opponents occurred in all countries. Utter disappointment is one of the most powerful experiences, and it is not important whether it is disappointment in faith in man or in an ideal. The most persuasive texts revealing the crimes of communism were written by its former disciples, for example, Arthur Koestler and George Orwell, and, more recently Milovan Djilas. Throughout most of his adult life, Koestler fought against dictatorships, something with which this century is so rich, and compellingly described the monstrous political trials. In 1931 he was still, as a member of the German Communist Party, convinced that communism is the global solution to all problems. In Animal Farm and his celebrated utopian novel 1984, Orwell depicted the horrifying possibilities of totalitarian states and their control over their citizens in both thought and action. During the Spanish Civil War, however, Orwell fought in the militia of the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification, and until the end of his life he considered himself a Socialist and adherent of that which he called democratic socialism. Milovan Djilas was one of the highest functionaries in the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and one of Tito’s closest associates. Even Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who convincingly revealed the criminal foundation of the Communist regime, began as a loyal citizen of the Soviet state. He graduated from the university, joined the Komsomol, and during the war was a decorated captain in the Soviet army. In his polemics with a Czech agent of the Soviet secret police, Tomáš Řezáč, he noted: I know how inexperienced and superficial our understanding of things is; after all, I myself began to sympathize with the unbelievably villainous Leninism. . I was entirely and fervently for the defense of Leninism.

As soon as the most brutal terror had passed, the number of Communists who were fed up with the politics of their party began to increase. They considered the leading functionaries and their blindness the greatest danger for the future of the country. The impossibility of founding a new party or establishing a faction within the party itself led to the emergence of groups of party members who were against the dull-witted dogmatism and absolute absence of democratic principles in both the party and society.

After the official party doctrine had rejected its primary ideological pillar — Stalin’s doctrine of the escalating class battle and his method of rule (that is, handing over every critic to the courts and then to the firing squad) — there was only one pillar left, one prophet: Lenin. The founder of the Bolshevik Party and the first architect of revolutionary terror was, after all, more educated than the Georgian seminary dropout. He had lived many years in Europe, even in democratic Switzerland and England. Even though he scorned democracy, his work contained defenses of, or even demands for, open criticism or at least a free exchange of opinions within the party he led. Now members of the party exploited this fact to defend their right to advocate opinions other than those of the leading functionaries.

By invoking Lenin, Communist rebels were demarcating another border they were not willing to cross. Even the most critical pronouncements tried to convince the ruling power that their advocates were actually acting in the interest of socialism, its development and enhancement. Their goal was not to overturn it but merely to return it to its roots. (The poison of these roots had already been forgotten, debilitated by myth.)

One of the leading lights of the nonparty opposition, Václav Havel, expressed his distaste for the “rebelliousness” of the Communists:

Please realize that your relativizing antidogmatism, which admires itself for its tolerance, is tolerant of only one thing: itself, that is, its own attitudinal amorphousness.

Rebellious communists, as long as they stayed in the ruling party, could enjoy many advantages, even rights, that were denied the rest of society. But in order to achieve some sort of change, it was necessary to reestablish an independent, or at least less dependent, judiciary. It was necessary to limit the influence of the semieducated and uncreative party apparatus and abolish censorship, which hindered the free exchange of opinions and the development of the spiritual sphere of life. It was necessary to extricate the economy from its dependence on unattainable long-term plans. All of this the party rebels tried to achieve, sometimes covertly, sometimes more openly. And even though they often invoked Lenin or some party resolution, their demands subverted the foundation of the ideology of exculpatory Communist domination. A totalitarian power cannot coexist with an independent judiciary, with free expression, or with an impugned ideology, which tries to justify its irreplaceable societal mission. Thus it cannot exist without absolute rule.

Dreams and Reality

There are moments in history when it appears that everything that recently seemed like destiny — for example, the unalterable run of everyday events — can be changed. It often seems as if a large part of a generation has been struck by a bedazzling flash of a belief in the possibility of change. People go into ecstasy; the vision of a better society (the bygone image of a paradise that preceded all the toilsome history full of cruelty and suffering) impels them to deeds they couldn’t have imagined only a short time before. Because paradise can exist only in dreams, only in myths, a cruel awaking usually follows, and enthusiasm turns into a hangover. Even in our modern history, such moments of hope flare up.

Our forefathers were at first blinded by a vision of national independence and citizenship within the Slavic tribe, which would gain self-confidence by inclining toward the powerful “Russian Oak.”

In June 1848, the Slavic Congress met in Prague. Pavel Jozef Šafařík read a fanatical speech ending with the challenge: For me it is not the time for long speeches, for artificial speechifying; that is something for another place and time. Only deeds concern us, action. The path from serfdom to freedom is not without struggle — either victory and a free nation or honorable death, and after death glory. The hall erupted in exultation.

Even the pragmatic František Palacký gave way to his feelings:

Something our fathers never dreamed of, something that in our youth kept entering our hearts like a beautiful dream, something we only recently did not dare to long for, today is coming to pass.

Soon after this congress, revolutionary events occurred that were connected with fantasies of establishing a democratic regime. As is well known, the revolution was suppressed (without blood, as is usual in Bohemia). Enthusiasm vanished, the participants in this Slavic and then democratic dream ended up in prison or retired into seclusion. Some — like Sabina — were bought off by the police; others — like Palacký—devoted themselves to scholarship.

Several generations passed without such fantastic visions. Only in 1918, at the end of the First World War, did a moment arrive that seemed to fulfill the dreams of contemporaries and forefathers alike. The Prague people behaved in exemplary fashion, recalls Jan Herben in his biography of Masaryk. They rejoiced, hung banners, sang hymns. (They also destroyed monuments. It’s difficult to understand what was exemplary about the whole thing.)

A few days later the otherwise severely critical historian Josef Pekař gave an impassioned speech on the grounds of the Czech Academy:

The day will come when they will tell us: You are free! This day of great tidings in which our joy tries to compensate for centuries of oppression and to measure our strength with the pain of entire generations who waited in vain for the morning star of freedom. They tried in vain, for years will pass before we will be able to consider and absorb the entire significance of this historical turnaround, the entire contents of our happiness. For the freedom that greeted us is not the freedom our fathers and grandfathers looked forward to: not freedom within Austria, but freedom from Austria, not the freedom of the feudal classes, but the freedom of all!

It also seemed that 1968 would bring a change that promised to touch the lives of most citizens. Not everyone saw it in the same way, however. For some, this was an attempt to cleanse the image of socialism in which they had once believed. For others, it was hope for the renewal of at least a limited democracy.

Substantial gatherings swelled with supportive petitions; enthusiastic ovations by courageous orators promised the end of dictatorship. A year earlier, people had participated in the May Day celebrations only with distaste. This time they went out spontaneously to emphasize and demonstrate their faith in the new leadership of the country. In an April public opinion poll, three-quarters of respondents expressed support for the process of renewal and the leading politicians Alexander Dubček, Josef Smrkovský, and the newly elected president, General Ludvík Svoboda.

Just as during the time the National Theater was being built and people donated their life savings and jewelry, the Fund of the Republic arose at the impetus of a few enthusiasts and collected almost eighty pounds of gold in two weeks.

When the Czech delegates left for Čierna nad Tisou at the end of July to meet with Soviet potentates, Literární listy accompanied them with a text by Pavel Kohout titled “A Dispatch to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.” This appeal reminded me of our recent and not overly encouraging history:

All the more eagerly did our nations welcome socialism, which liberation brought us in 1945. It was an incomplete socialism because it gave its citizens neither civil nor creative freedom. We began obstinately to seek it out, however, and started to uncover it after January of this year.

The moment has arrived when our country once again has become a cradle of hope not only for our nation. The moment has arrived when we can present the world proof that socialism is the only genuine alternative for all of civilization.

The dispatch went on to condemn the unacceptable pressure of socialist community spirit and appealed to the representatives of the party in the interest of our shared country and progressive forces on all continents to protect socialism, alliance, and sovereignty, and presciently pointed out that any use of force will strike our judges as well like a boomerang, it will destroy our efforts, and, primarily, it will leave a tragic blot on the idea of socialism anywhere in the world for years to come.

In order to understand this impassioned declaration of Socialist faith, we must enter into the tense atmosphere of the time. The Soviet leadership intended to halt, perhaps with force, the renewal of at least a few civil freedoms. The citizens sensed this. Thousands of Communists and others signed declarations. Suddenly the dream was revived that we were creating history, that our deeds were obtaining some sort of higher meaning.

For the first few days after the unbelievably massive invasion of the Soviet army, thousands of unarmed citizens tried to restrain the Soviet tanks and explain to the unknowing and manipulated soldiers that they were being abused, that what had been happening for the last eight months in Czechoslovakia was supposed to benefit socialism, not do away with it.

During these brief eight months, hopes for change for the better flared up. They even took (at least for many) the form of a dream of the fusion of democracy and socialism, despite the fact that history had shown that such a fusion was almost impossible.

Life in Subjugation

Our small country has been repeatedly afflicted with waves of emigration. The first big wave, following the 1620 defeat at the Battle of White Mountain, is half forgotten. But even then, it was the elites who fled the country.

Only in the last century have there been several waves of emigration. The first preceded the Second World War when, first from the republic and later from the protectorate, the leading democratic politicians, but especially the Jews, fled. (Most who did not manage to escape were murdered.) The second wave of emigration — more precisely, forced expulsion — affected almost three million Germans who (like their forefathers) had been born and lived in the territory of the republic. The next wave followed the Communist takeover when, within a brief period before the borders were closed, around fifty thousand people left the country. And after the Soviet occupation, more than a hundred thousand people emigrated. As is common in such cases, it was the more able and educated who left, those who believed that they would find greater opportunities in a freer world.

If we imagine society as a powerful body with a complicated circulatory system, then these waves represent huge bleeding wounds that are difficult to stanch.

But what does emigration mean for each individual?

Perhaps it is better to call emigration for political reasons escape from probable persecution, imprisonment, or even execution based upon a concealed verdict delivered by a manipulated court. It differs from normal relocation — that is, economic emigration. At the decisive moment, when a person crosses the border, whether legally or surreptitiously, his action appears as final and its results appear as irrevocable. A person on the lam must admit that unless the political situation changes in his country, he will never be able to return. He will never again see the places where he spent his youth, and he will probably never see his relatives and friends. With the exception of the displaced Germans, he knows he is leaving forever the home where he can best make himself understood in the language he has spoken since childhood. Emigration from a country that limits rights and freedoms offers the émigré more rights and better opportunities, but it also requires sacrifice, which to some might seem incidental, but to others might mean lifelong trauma.

Those who leave are, even if they refuse to admit it, surrendering a part of their soul. In more sober terms, they are interfering with the emotional ties that form the integrity of their personality. There will be some who seek out their compatriots and a certain nostalgia. At times they will recall their former homeland with satisfaction. Others, on the contrary, will avoid everything that might remind them of their former homeland and try to merge with the new society as quickly as possible; to achieve success, perhaps even property; to forget about both their previous home and their native tongue; to convince themselves that all their emotional ties were dispensable.

After the Soviets violently entered Czechoslovakia, for almost a year it was relatively easy to leave the country. Even during the first days after the occupation, the borders were open, and entire families were permitted to depart. Many abandoned property, employment, and even their country with the firm justification that they were leaving primarily for their children. At least they would grow up under free conditions. Of course, many of those who remained, or even returned to an occupied country, had children as well. Was their decision, therefore, bad or selfish?

We know that children quickly adapt to a new environment and a new language. They will accept the new country as their homeland. Nevertheless, even they are forced to break all previous ties. They are deprived of grandparents and other relatives, and if they are old enough to perceive their homeland, they lose that also. And what if the parents love their native land, their town, their language, their country and want to raise their children so that they have essentially the same values? Wouldn’t emigration leave a spiritual or physical burden on the children as well?

Parents make decisions for their children until they are old enough to choose their fate themselves. It is possible that when they grow up, they will reproach their parents or, on the other hand, praise them. But the decision whether to or not stay is the parents’.

For many of those who left, the free conditions helped them apply their gifts and abilities. Others were overwhelmed by their new reality, the new conditions in which they felt themselves uprooted. After the Bolshevik Revolution, most Russian emigrants incorporated themselves into their new environment only with difficulty and, for the most part, never learned the language of the country that had offered them asylum.

For many, freedom that they do not earn becomes something foreign and false. If a person is threatened with almost certain death, as the Jews were during Nazism, the decision to leave or remain is a false dilemma. It is different for a person whose life will most likely not be imperiled.

In a country that suppresses freedom, each citizen has the right to freely decide which of his values are more important. One can say: I do not want to live under these degrading circumstances and will do everything to escape them. One can also say: They are depriving me of most of my rights, but I will not allow myself to be deprived of my home and everything that goes with it. Therefore, I will stay.

The wave of emigration after the Soviet occupation was tragic for life in Czechoslovakia. If we consider the intellectuals, we see that most remained, even though living in oppressed conditions meant for them, at the very least, losing their jobs and sometimes even facing imprisonment.

But in this recent history, we notice another outcome. Many who left felt so tied to their homeland and its fate that they did everything in their power to counteract this decision. Various cultural organizations emerged abroad, even political parties and publishers — the books published abroad were then smuggled into their homeland. Even though they were far from their home, these exiles remained connected to the life of their country, perhaps even more than those who remained.

There is no generally valid resolution to the dilemma of whether to go or to stay. Each point of view has its justifications. It is up to each individual to decide which values are the most important to him.

In conclusion, I would just like to mention one curiosity that is characteristic of our history: Except for Václav Klaus, each of our presidents has spent part of his life in exile — or in prison.

Occupation, Collaboration, and Intellectual Riffraff

A brief dictionary definition of “occupation” reads: the seizure and conquest of a foreign territory.

If we conceive of the situation in which the Czech kingdom found itself after the defeat at White Mountain as the seizure of territory for the benefit of a foreign power — with a definite part of the inhabitants of the kingdom accepting this state of affairs — we can declare that, beginning in the seventeenth century, most generations spent their lives in occupied territory. Although the ruling Austrian powers became more liberal during the last few decades before the First World War, at the beginning of their reign, just like almost every other occupying power in history, they ushered in murder. Furthermore, they executed twenty-seven representatives of the Czech elite in a manner that was cruel even for those times. The elite, especially the spiritual elite, are the first target of all occupiers, even revolutionaries.

After twenty years of freedom during the First Czechoslovak Republic beginning in 1918, there followed a further seventy years of direct and indirect, but much crueler, occupation. It is no exaggeration to say that we have had a long experience with occupation. (In this respect, we do not differ greatly from many other small European nations.)

In all cases, including the last two — the Nazi and subsequent Soviet occupations — the government of the entire territory was moved to centers of foreign powers. It is not important that in the second case, the first twenty years of the occupation took place without the presence of occupying troops but only with the assistance of hundreds of Soviet advisers and hundreds of thousands of executors following the foreign power orders.

The phenomenon of collaboration is necessarily and legitimately connected with every occupation. Without it, the occupier could achieve its ends only with difficulty.

Collaboration, once again according to the dictionary, is determined by occupation. It is dishonorable (usually voluntary) cooperation (both overt and covert) with a ruling enemy or occupiers. If we focus our attention on the word “dishonorable,” we can expand this definition. Collaboration is cooperation with any illegitimate totalitarian regime that systematically violates the fundamental human rights and freedoms of its citizens.

Determining the extent of collaboration after the enemy is defeated or the totalitarian regime eliminated is not easy. Except for a handful of those who openly or secretly battled against the enemy, most inhabitants, at least passively, accepted the occupation or illegitimate regime.

After all, it was necessary to sow the fields, go to work, and earn one’s pay. The trains ran and the stores were open, even if at the same time thousands of people disappeared behind the fences of concentration camps, ended up before firing squads, or, in the case of Nazi occupations, perished in gas chambers. Occupying or illegitimate powers leave in peace most people who accept occupation as an unavoidable reality, even if it goes against their way of thinking. When necessary, the government is willing to corrupt this group of citizens — as the Nazis successfully did during the war — by offering them more money or greater rations of food.

Both occupiers and totalitarian regimes, of course, not only require this passive collaboration (they are well aware that it is legitimate and, in its own way, unavoidable for the subdued masses), but also seek support among those without whom it would be difficult to govern the country. They appeal to at least some of the populace and try to influence their thinking and to raise the youth in the “new” spirit. So they try to win over those who are most visible, whose positions or careers enjoy general respect or from whom society expects moral accountability, that is, politicians, distinguished journalists, well-known artists, and pedagogues. Essentially, all of the most well-known representatives of the intelligentsia are welcomed. In the entirety of modern history of war, occupation, and revolution, the victorious power always manages to acquire active collaborationists at all levels of society.

The minister of education during the protectorate and the founder of the activist youth organization Curatorship for Czech Youth, Emanuel Moravec — a symbol of collaboration with Nazi power — presents an admiring comment concerning Hitler, which he apparently heard from a German friend:

I would like you to keep one thing in mind. The Führer meant what he said, and if he said that this or that must look like this or that, you may be certain that he will do everything he said he would. And here we are at the question of intelligence, which culminates in genius. Genius is not leadership but rather prescience, the premonition of progress. The world is being rebuilt; we are going through a great, historical spring cleaning which, as you can clearly see, requires a little time. The democratic order that is now exiting was built by the Jews. If we look back in history, we see that all kingdoms and orders built by the Jews and Semites perished precisely when they rose, so to speak, to the stars. . Of one thing we are convinced. Our Greater German Reich and its courageous army will destroy the enemy. We shall be victorious!

Instead of arriving at the culmination of genius, we ended up at the very bottom of Czech collaborationist thinking. A half-educated maniac and mass murderer was proclaimed a genius who was supposed to lead the Czech nation as well.

Only a few years later, Communist collaborators with the Soviets touted new mass murderers as ingenious leaders worthy of being followed. Klement Gottwald asserted:

Only loyalty to the Soviet Union and the teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin can ensure the future triumph and prosperity of our nation and the well-being of our people and safeguard our country from the snares of imperialism.

Twenty years later, after the Soviet army invaded and occupied our country, other collaborationists publicly praised the occupiers. The Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Josef Kempný, claims:

More and more people are coming to the realization that in August of 1968, together with the armies of other members of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet army arrived just in time. The Soviet Union did not hesitate to offer assistance to our working class and workers even at the cost of incomprehension and temporary damage to its international prestige. The Soviet Union succeeded in providing international assistance, and history will appreciate the intervention as an example of class assistance in the battle against international reactionary forces.

All totalitarian and occupying regimes, of course, have their ideological adherents. Hitler’s Nazis, in the last free elections in Germany (like the Communists fifteen years later in the Czech lands), had the massive support of the citizens. Later, apparently only a small number of citizens, which included a minority of the intelligentsia, youth leaders, and artists (as well as those who emigrated), considered unacceptable the unprecedented persecution of ideological enemies and Jews.

German occupation, which for a significant part of Czech society was a shock, was welcomed by many who had an affinity for Nazism, militant anti-Semites, and various groups of Czech Fascists or staunch opponents of democracy. In the same way, Communist organizations established collaborationist groups. In complete disregard of the labor unions, they established the Union of Youth, the Pioneers for children, the Union of Czechoslovak-Soviet Friendship, the Union for Cooperation with the Army, the Union of Anti-Fascist Fighters, artistic unions that were supposed to ensure the loyalty of their members to the new regime, the Czechoslovak Union of Physical Education, and a reformed Pacem in Terris for acquiescent Catholic clerics. In addition, they indirectly ruled all special-interest groups including the two legal and entirely subordinated political parties.

These ideological kindred spirits become ever more dependent, both materially and morally, on this felonious power. Soon, many of them become its loyal servants and remain so even when their closest comrades and friends end up in prison, on the gallows, or in mass graves, murdered by other comrades and friends. They serve even though the idea has lost its credibility, and the images of a victorious empire, an earthly paradise, or at least a prosperous society have dissolved. Later, being linked to the occupation or illegitimate power will become a matter of life and death. Only in this way can we explain the desperate affirmations of the incontrovertible victory of the Nazi Reich at the very moment of its defeat.

Whereas German rule over the Czech lands lasted six years, Communist suzerainty over Czech society lasted four decades — and this was during peacetime, when the pronouncements of the spiritual riffraff did not have the appearance of treason. Perhaps precisely because they occurred during peacetime, they can be considered even more abject and disgusting.

The illegitimate power places in prominent positions only those who are prepared to offer unconditional service, to collaborate. In every society, one can find hundreds of thousands of those we call riffraff, the dregs of society, without any moral scruples. Writers of anonymous abuse letters, racists, followers of a ruthless government, or adherents of hateful ideologies are always on hand. In return for their blind support, the illegitimate power offers them a share in its prestige and its power, and the chance to settle accounts with those they hate, those they envy, those to whom they are inferior. They will write denunciations against Jews who dare go out without their yellow stars, against neighbors who listen to foreign radio broadcasts. Often with gleeful satisfaction, they ally themselves with secret police, whether it goes by the name of the gestapo, the State Security, or Cheka. They will acclaim everyone whom the power designates worthy of respect and will demand the death of others (or even the same ones), if the powers proclaim them worthy of death. They will execrate businessmen, the university educated, and former factory owners just as they did Jews. They will hang banners with a swastika and, with the same alacrity, banners bearing hammers and sickles. The moment for the spiritual dregs of society arrives with the fall of democracy, with the suppression of the country’s basic freedoms. In our country, these moments were connected with occupations and the violent establishment of totalitarian power.

The riffraff is not the same as the people, writes André Maurois in his History of France, whereby he clearly seeks to emphasize the difference between an individual’s social origin and his behavior. Collaborationist and totalitarian regimes, however, usually call the riffraff the people and rule only on their behalf.

Self-Criticism

With the development of science and the method of its speculation, the notion spread that the knowledge of each one of us is limited by both our abilities and the overall level of understanding. It is therefore accepted that most of our conclusions will most likely not be eternally valid; we might be mistaken. We are willing to admit, even publicly, our mistakes.

Such a way of thinking was, of course, until recently unique and condemned. Our forefathers not only possessed a firmly established set of values but also professed firm and eternally valid truths. Even Socrates was accused and condemned for not recognizing the gods that were recognized by the community, and for thereby corrupting the youth. According to the Evangelists, Jesus was accused of blasphemy because he did not deny that he was the Son of God before the high priest and predicted he would be “seated at the right hand of the Power and coming with the clouds of heaven.”

The majority of the most widespread religions oblige believers to accept the truth proclaimed in the recognized and immutable canon. There is one God, the creator of the earth and the heavens and all of creation. His Son, with whom he and the Holy Ghost form a unified entity, is the savior of all who believe in him.

There is one God, and (only) Muhammad is his prophet. Immutable and obligatory rituals were established. The Christian faith even conducted wars to determine whether believers could consume wine and bread as a symbol of the blood and body of the Lord or whether only the priests enjoyed that right. Other religions established how their temples or mosques could be situated and how one behaves in a house of worship.

For entire centuries in our lands, the Bible determined not only fundamental moral norms but also fundamental truths about history and the origin of the world and of life. (To be more precise: Those who arrogated to themselves the right to interpret the Bible determined which of the ideas of ancient pre-Christian philosophers and scholars could be reconciled with biblical tidings and what was necessary to reject and perhaps destroy.) Those who doubted their conclusions were pronounced heretics. For centuries, it was an indubitable truth that the earth was the center of the universe and the sun revolved around it. Not too long ago, it was thought that some women could be proved to be witches, that they flew around at night and participated in sinful sabbaths, that the devil traveled around the world trying to seduce people to sin, that it was possible to buy one’s way out of eternal damnation. Then, one of the most serious sins was to doubt the truths of established power. For centuries, the church ruled over people’s thinking. It introduced confession; it offered spiritual relief because it assumed the right to forgive the sins of all who humbly admitted to breaking the commandments. At the same time it ensured that the priests knew the thinking and disposition of their parishioners, their lesser and greater offenses, as well as any skepticism regarding the established truths.

At the end of the fourteenth century, the Roman Catholic church organized the Inquisition, whose mission was to make sure that Christians did not deviate from the truths or the practices the church had pronounced as immutable and infallible. Punishment for skeptics was sometimes exile, sometimes imprisonment, sometimes immolation at the stake. Tens of thousands of men and women were murdered for heresy, which sometimes consisted of casting into doubt the actions of the ruling church but often consisted of no offense related to the immutable truths. It was based only on confessions compelled by torture. Every institution, even the Inquisition, needs to prove the legitimacy and necessity of its existence. The inquisitor needed to fight heresy, and if he did not find it, it had to be invented.

At the same time, each person accused of heresy was offered the opportunity to recant what was called his error, to do penance, to loudly espouse the canonized truths. In a lengthy trial in which Jan Hus defended his teachings, even after he was condemned, he was offered the chance to recant. The proposed recantation read: I have never held nor preached these articles of faith, and if I had, I would have been acting against the truth for I pronounce them as erroneous and swear that I would neither hold nor preach them.

For the authorities, a heretic who recants is always more valuable than one who perishes in protest. The subjugated heretic is living proof of the invincibility of the one and only truth.

Two centuries later, Galileo Galilei recanted his teaching concerning the movement of the heavens and thereby saved his life. The Catholic church, despite wide acceptance of the fact that the earth rotates on its axis and orbits around the sun, rehabilitated Galileo only in 1992.

Totalitarian states, which derive their legitimacy from some modern ideology, likewise require faith in the immutability of proclaimed truths. Perhaps it was precisely this that increased their attractiveness; in the complicated modern world, with its crumbling traditional values, many people were enticed by a world in which values were once again established.

The sole truth became whatever the dictator proclaimed, whether it was Hitler, Stalin, or Mao. Furthermore, Communist ideology offered its holy writ in the classic works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. (The collected works of these holy books stood in the libraries of all secretariats as well as the offices of university professors; no one read them, just as few Nazis read the entirety of Adolf Hitler’s tome.) It was not necessary to read the books (those interested could get their hands on the most important extracts, so-called Red Books, and selected quotes). The dictator was also the highest priest who interpreted the word; he alone could give the eternal truths their obligatory form according to the demands of the moment. Because these truths mostly concerned everyday reality, which they unilaterally described or distorted, in addition to enthusiastic and infatuated followers of this new faith, skeptics could be found. It was necessary to uncover these modern heretics, incriminate them, and condemn them, sometimes to exile, at other times to prison or to death. (Over the course of the several decades of totalitarian rule, their number exceeded many times over the number of heretics condemned throughout the centuries of the Inquisition.)

Just like heretics, the contemporary skeptics were afforded the opportunity to repent, to recognize and recant their errors. Such repentance was called self-criticism.

In 1928, the Soviet dictator Stalin published a long article on self-criticism.

The slogan of self-criticism must not be regarded as something temporary and transient. Self-criticism is a specific method, a Bolshevik method, of training the forces of the Party and of the working class generally in the spirit of revolutionary development. Marx himself spoke of self-criticism as a method of strengthening the proletarian revolution.

In a society where freedom of expression did not exist, where any attempt to place into doubt the canonized truths — or even the ruling party and its leadership — was considered a crime, self-criticism was accepted as an intellectual or even societal exercise. The action of self-criticism was supported in every permitted organization. Upon the orders of their superiors, it was undergone by functionaries even at the lowest levels, factory foremen, and members of individual organizations or trade unions.

Artists (always suspected of kowtowing to some decadent trend) were also prompted to perform this ritual act, as were scientists, who were predisposed to being misled by the decadent science of the West. Even the leading party functionaries subjected themselves to self-criticism, usually when the dictator considered it necessary to strengthen his power. Even Stalin himself saved his career at its beginnings through self-criticism.

Self-criticism became a ritual that had nothing in common with critical self-reflection or even with examining the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the ideas one espoused or actions one performed.

The not-very-long history of the Communist movement abounds with the self-abuse of prominent people. The leaders of the movement recant yesterday’s assertions and repent of their previous deeds; writers apologize for their books; philosophers reject, in the name of the ingenious classics of Marxism, those other philosophers whom they recently praised as giants. Because the dictator sometimes changes his opinions, people often recant words spoken and deeds done when they were following orders. Their repentance is supposed to affirm the dictator’s infallibility, and therefore it is accepted. Whoever submits to it heads off his condemnation, but the suspicion clings to him, nevertheless, that in the depths of his soul he has remained a heretic; at the very least he was at one time susceptible to dangerous opinions or skepticism.

Condemned Communist politicians in the Soviet Union, along with those residing in lands conquered by it, even before they were placed before a court, performed self-criticism in which they recanted and pledged loyalty to the dictator and everything he advocated and carried out. Such self-debasement was merely a desperate attempt to save one’s life.

At the height of Stalin’s terror, the logic of penitence, as it was understood, resulted in the most perverse form of self-criticism. During the political trials in which the accused, subject to long torture, submissively admitted to deeds they had not performed and to crimes they had not committed, they themselves even asked for the harshest punishment. Because they had in the past conducted self-criticism and promised atonement, their new repentance was no longer mitigating, and they were hanged as a warning to all.

Without the ritualized act of self-criticism, however, it is difficult for the dictatorship to resist the onslaught of doubt and distrust until the moment finally arrives when the fallacious principles on which it was built are cast into doubt even by those who are paid to endorse and defend it.

(Secret Police)

In his History of France, André Maurois writes, Robespierre was all-powerful, and he was undone. For he lost all sense of proportion.

The three great European revolutions were bloody, and their leaders indeed lost all sense of proportion. Each of them captivated at least a part of his citizens with magnificent plans and promises for a new and better arrangement of society. Among them were followers and admirers in the intelligentsia, workers, and people from the countryside, as well as people from the streets, the rabble, informers, and unreserved administrators of the dictator’s will.

The dictators murdered their real and presumed opponents; they sent to death even their closest collaborators — Robespierre sent Danton and Hébert; Hitler sent Röhm; Stalin sent practically everyone who had helped him achieve power and perpetrate crimes. The number of victims during Nazism and the Bolshevik Revolution was much greater and the bloodshed worse than during the French Revolution.

Robespierre’s dictatorship lasted less than two years, and he died on the guillotine. Hitler’s lasted twelve years, until the moment when the führer, defeated in a war he had unleashed, committed suicide. Lenin’s and Stalin’s dictatorship endured for more than thirty-five years until each dictator, at the summit of well-organized ovations and all-encompassing adulation, had died, whether felled by a stroke or by a well-concealed murder.

What were the differences between Robespierre and these other dictators? Robespierre failed to organize the boisterous rabble, to bring the street completely into his service and under his control. He did not create a secret police force that would surround him with an impenetrable shield and would carry out his plans without bothering about the number of dead left behind.

The absolute power of the three modern dictators consisted precisely in the ruthless, illegitimate authority of a substantial police force and special guards whose activities were controlled to the very end by the dictators themselves.

In Russia, just as in Germany, such a police force existed even before the violent change of affairs. Because prerevolutionary Russia was swarming with agents attempting to overthrow the tsarist regime, the political police — called the Okhrana — was large, even by Russian standards, as well as efficient. It monitored revolutionaries not only at home but also if they ventured abroad to more democratic countries. Most scholars agree that the tsar’s Okhrana was the largest and most efficient secret police force of its time (it employed around fifteen thousand agents). As a result of its activities, hundreds of opponents of the tsarist regime spent part of their lives in prison or Siberian exile. On average, seventeen opponents of the tsar perished on the scaffold every year. Among them was Alexandr Ilyich Ulyanov — who planned an assassination of the tsar — the older brother of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, who later assumed the name Lenin. The leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, therefore, had a personal reason to detest the Okhrana, but he also recognized its usefulness for safeguarding the state. The architects had to guard vigilantly the postrevolutionary regime and at the same time condemn the police methods it employed. According to the classics of Marxism, all repressive roles of the state would cease to exist after the Socialist revolution. In his extensive study, The State and Revolution, Lenin attempts to lay out, with many citations from Marx and Engels, his opinion of the repressive role of the state after the revolution.

According to him, the consummation of the proletarian revolution would be the proletarian dictatorship, the political rule of the proletariat. Marxists, claims Lenin, will recognize that it will be necessary for the proletariat to smash the old bureaucratic apparatus, they will shatter it to its very foundations, they will destroy it to the very roots, and they will replace it with a new one.

*

The necessity of state terror was theoretically justified. And who better to effect long-term terror than a well-organized police force?

Later, after Lenin had seized power, he founded a political police force (first it was called Cheka — All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for the Suppression of Counterrevolution and Sabotage). Over the course of three years, under the command of the Polish Bolshevik Felix Dzerzhinsky, this revolutionary police organization, whose task was to liquidate political opponents and essentially everyone who somehow represented the previous regime, employed around a quarter of a million fanatics resolved to carry out the dictator’s will. The number of murdered exceeded ten thousand victims a month. At the same time, immediately after the revolution, the Cheka began organizing the first concentration camps. The Cheka was renamed and reorganized several times, but it continued to serve as a ruthless instrument of the dictatorship. During Stalin’s reign, the number of murdered grew along with the number of concentration camps. After World War II, according to the Soviet model and under the direct leadership of Soviet advisers, affiliated organizations were founded in all countries where Communists had taken power.

The Nazi dictatorship could avail itself of traditions established by the Bolsheviks and the Italian Fascists, and even the German tradition itself, which had its own semimilitary organizations and associations.

A few years before the Nazi takeover, Hitler had at his disposal a million-strong organization called the SA, led by the retired artillery captain Ernst Röhm. His fanatical disciple, Heinrich Himmler, commanded a much smaller, but more elite, body: the SS, which he planned to employ as the political police. From the beginning, the members of the SS carried out their orders with ruthless, blind obedience. They committed appalling crimes, from the torture of prisoners to inhuman medical experiments to mass murder in gas chambers.

One of the leading Nazis, Hermann Göring, had commanded an eighty-thousand-member corps of the Prussian police. He then established the gestapo, based on that model, one of the most efficient secret police forces in the world. In outright cruelty, it was not far behind the state police in the Soviet Union.

Because the Nazis were the only political party that commanded such large armed units with members willing to do anything, their coup took place incredibly smoothly and much more quickly than the Bolshevik coup (certainly the fact that it took place in the middle of peaceful Europe played a role). On the very first day of the takeover, the police arrested more than fifteen hundred Communist functionaries, who were on a previously drafted list; later they started arresting the functionaries of other political parties. Because there were so many of these and they couldn’t all be crammed into the existing prisons, on March 21, 1933—less than a month after the coup — Himmler established the first concentration camp not far from Dachau in an abandoned munitions factory. Originally it was intended only for five thousand people arrested for interrogation, but after a few years its population swelled to twelve thousand at a time.

The Nazis had been thoroughly prepared for the coup, so they easily seized absolute power in just a few weeks. Himmler’s SS units quickly penetrated the highest ranks of the secret police, which also assumed control over a growing number of concentration camps.

In terms of the number of victims, one cannot compare the terror of the first years of Nazi rule to the Bolshevik reign of terror. Nevertheless, the Nazi terror afflicted tens of thousands of German citizens and in the end culminated in the extermination of six million Jews.

During the brief period in Czechoslovakia between the end of the protectorate and the Communist coup in 1948, the Communist Party did not have its own (at least, not its own legal) armed contingent; however, a Communist named Václav Nosek headed the Ministry of the Interior.

Three days before the coup, members of the party quickly formed armed people’s militias. (This obviously illegal and unconstitutional action calls into question the claim by the Communist leaders that they achieved power legitimately.) Armed members of the Communist Party marching through Prague certainly influenced the quick transformation of a democratic society into a Soviet-style dictatorship.

The Communist journalist Rudolf Černý compiled President Antonín Novotný’s memoirs from a series of conversations. Here, the president and the highest representative of the Communist Party supposedly demonstrated unambiguously the necessity of police terror during the second half of the 1950s and most of the ’60s.

The new Communist government immediately removed from both the police and the army its real and probable opponents and replaced them with reliable members of the party. The changes primarily concerned State Security; the Soviet Union sent advisers who demanded the introduction of inquisitorial methods, which until then had been unthinkable, since the populace remembered all too well this practice by the gestapo. Some who survived questioning, and even some of the investigators, described how these interrogations were carried out. The accused were beaten, given electric shocks, deprived of water, and placed in unheated underground cells, and had their most sensitive parts burned. One of the most effective methods to break someone accused of an often nonexistent or absurd crime was to deprive him of rest.

Most of the important political prisoners were interrogated at the Ruzyně prison. The head of the interrogators there was Bohumil Doubek, who wrote about the methods employed: Therefore, it was determined that if there was supposed to be a certain result in the investigation, it [the interrogation] must be conducted at least fourteen to sixteen hours a day. The prisoner was allowed to rest from ten in the evening till six in the morning. If he arrives at his cell at midnight, he won’t fall asleep because he’s still agitated from the interrogation, and in the morning he must get up at six. Moreover, he can be woken at night by the guards. Because he has to stand during the interrogation, he is then physically and mentally exhausted, and it is not difficult for the interrogators to acquire the incriminating evidence because the accused is more acquiescent. The reality was even more drastic because the interrogated often had to walk the entire night in their cells; their feet would swell, and they often lost control over their own words owing to exhaustion.

The interrogations, conducted under the guidance of Soviet advisers, had only one goal: to compel the prisoner to confess to the accusation that had been prepared ahead of time: treason, espionage, sabotage, or another capital offense.

People broken by long and relentless torture were told repeatedly that they had no hope but to confess — then considered a mitigating circumstance — and admit to the most absurd crimes. The quickly “trained” judges and prosecutors, together with those who were willing to fulfill unquestioningly the orders of the new government, then sentenced the tortured prisoner to a long prison sentence or to death.

The investigators knew that the confessions had been coerced, that they lacked any real basis or were derived only from other confessions that had also been made under duress. Nevertheless, entire units of interrogators, without apparent hesitation, employed these methods, perfected during the Middle Ages. Just as in the Soviet Union, just as in Nazi Germany, the political police acted outrageously, not only with the awareness of the ruling power but also upon its orders, and the cynicism with which these deeds were carried out was stunning.

Primarily, the organization [CPC] exhorted all of its members to display perseverance during interrogation and, just like the leadership of the investigation and the leadership of the ministry, support the view that anyone who was arrested was an enemy of the state and must be convicted no matter what. Therefore, they were to assist the diligence and persistence of the investigative organs. For example, the organization also supported and oversaw a competition for the best interrogation time, which was rewarded with book prizes for those who achieved the best average interrogation times.

All this was made possible because the authorities abolished all basic civil rights; they raised repressive organs above the law, above judicial power. They adjudicated the status of those who had to take even the most absurd accusations seriously.

Over several years, almost 200,000 citizens died in concentration camps; 178 political prisoners were executed by Communists. State Security provided the material for the trials, which, like the Soviet trials, had nothing in common with actual judicial processes. State Security also determined the judgments and the punishment, although, especially in the case of the death penalty for prominent defendants, the recommendation had to be approved by the highest organ of the party.

At the same time, the secret police in all dictatorships is an essential component of power. After the Communist coup, the small unit of the National Security Corps became the most important security unit, which in the 1950s had five thousand permanent workers and employed the services of countless agents, petty informers, and denouncers. Even though State Security forces were also in charge of espionage, from the beginning their primary function, as determined by Lenin, was battling the internal enemy. Just after the coup, it was mostly democratic politicians, Western resistance fighters, and those with an inappropriate class origin (there were all sorts of those in our society) who were persecuted. But soon prominent Communists also were being victimized.

Although, after the death of Stalin, the most brutal repressions ceased, the secret State Security became more important for the perpetuation of totalitarian power. Fiendish terror was replaced by agents who monitored, overheard, and admonished. It was necessary to ensure participation in elections, rallies, and brigades; to know what people said in private, what kind of jokes they told; to ensure that legal organizations did not become cells of resistance (as happened in artistic circles in the 1960s); to know if any illegal organizations were being established, if anyone was listening to “seditious” foreign broadcasts, if people were meeting with foreigners or even foreign diplomats, if they were exchanging “harmful” literature. Even after the Soviet invasion in 1968, State Security did not commit murder; instead it compiled long lists of unreliable citizens who were not allowed to go abroad, whose children were not allowed to study. No one from their families could be accepted into any qualified position, especially not one of leadership. It was necessary, at least on occasion, to monitor them, acquire informers from their neighborhood, photograph them, repeatedly summon them for interrogation, search their apartments (sometimes in their presence, sometimes in their absence), install listening devices. State Security employees wrote anonymous, threatening letters and collected incriminating material that could be used in a political trial. Active opponents had their driver’s licenses revoked and their phones disconnected. At times, State Security bundled someone into an automobile, drove him out to a distant forest, threatened him, and dumped him as far as possible from any road or inhabited place. (The musicologist Ivan Medek, for example, was beaten unconscious in a forest and thrown into a ditch.)

The courts sometimes pretended to be real courts, and in some isolated cases they were not governed by the investigators. The fear of unfathomable repression combined with torture and the possible loss of life was lessening. The task of State Security was now to keep the citizens aware that if they refrained from any manifestations of resistance or protest, they could live in peace. He who protested, on the other hand, had only himself to blame for the loss of this peace.

In its own way, this work was more demanding than outright terror. It came as no surprise, therefore, that when State Security was dissolved after the fall of Communism, it had more than thirteen thousand employees, almost twice as many as during the years of Gottwald’s terror.

The Elite

The dictionary definition of “elite” refers to the French word élite, which means select, the best. The elite of society are individuals exceptional in education and morals; in the military, the bravest. It is worth noting that the definition, stemming back to the middle of the nineteenth century, mentions education, morals, and bravery, not ancestry or property, both of which at that time were seen as entitling one to be considered a member of society’s elite.

Of course, the concept of the elite was significantly influenced here by our National Revival. The property owners and the nobility belonged primarily to the German-speaking layers of society because revivalist thinkers, or simply Czech intellectuals, emphasized precisely these characteristics. However, in the Czech lands, just as in France at the time, those whom we called the cultural or spiritual elite enjoyed greater respect. Their members had neither power nor property but rather admiration and influence upon the behavior and thought of the people. (Let us recall the influence of Émile Zola on liberating the unjustly accused Alfred Dreyfus or Masaryk’s participation in the battle against the apologists for ritual murder in the case of Hilsner.)

The respect enjoyed by Czech writers in the second half of the nineteenth century is well known. The funeral of Karel Havlíček Borovský became a sort of national demonstration; the funeral of the second-rate poet Svatopluk Čech, whose versified works came out in dozens of editions, looked like that of a leading statesman or a national hero. The collected works of Jan Neruda and Jaroslav Vrchlický, just like the History of the Czech Nation in Bohemia and Moravia by František Palacký, stood in the bookcases of both intellectuals and commoners. Manifestos published and signed by Czech writers at various key moments in history often changed, or at least influenced, the course of events. At the very last moment, Vilém Mrštík’s polemical essay “Bestia triumfans” roused the public and helped save historic parts of Prague from “modernization” (read: demolition). In May 1917, more than two hundred writers signed the “Manifesto of Czech Writers.” They demanded that Czech representatives in the Viennese Imperial Council fight for the self-determination of the Czech nation, the renewal of constitutional rights, and amnesty for political prisoners. The language of the document seems today inconceivably presumptuous.

We turn to you, to the delegation of the Czech nation, who well know that we Czech writers, figures who are in our public lives active and well known, have not only the right, but also the duty to speak for the majority of the Czech cultural and spiritual world, even for the nation, which cannot speak for itself.

In Prague’s parks and squares and on the walls of buildings we can see statues and busts — not of politicians, nobles, or generals, but primarily of artists, scholars, and writers.

During the First Republic (1918–1938), this respect for writers continued. Several writers received more acclaim than members of other elites, for example, in the realms of finance and power. Even the president of the republic, Masaryk, who enjoyed extraordinary respect, was a representative of the spiritual elite and was characterized by the aforementioned characteristics: education, morality, and bravery. Masaryk also never severed his relationships with representatives of the cultural elite, the “Friday Men” in the home of Karel Čapek, where he met with the foremost Czech writers and journalists.

At the end of the First Republic, Czech writers composed and published the passionate and insistent manifesto, “We Remain Faithful,” in which they asked society to defend democracy, freedom, and the integrity of the nation despite professional and class differences.

Besides the cultural elites, power, political, and military elites were beginning to arise in our free country (although before the Nazi occupation, many of their members emigrated). Even though it is often pointed out that in the modern period, Czechs have never defended their country with military force, it cannot be claimed that they did not fight. Czech officers, primarily airmen, formed units with the help of the allies and were integrated into the armed forces fighting against Nazi Germany.

Such activity is worthy of esteem if only because these forces were made up exclusively of volunteers who had chosen to take part in battle for the freedom of their nation.

Members of our army abroad also participated in the mission to remove one of the most powerful and influential men in the Nazi Reich, Reinhard Heydrich.

Even at home during the first months of occupation, there arose illegal resistance organizations composed of democratic politicians, citizens dedicated to democracy, members of Sokol (the youth sport and gymnastic organization), and officers of the former Czechoslovak army (they were joined by the Communist resistance after the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union). The gestapo (with the help of many Czech informers) uncovered most of these organizations, and their members were sent to concentration camps or executed.

With the rise of cinematography during the First Republic, celebrities — that is, those who enjoyed the respect and admiration of society without the need of education, morality, or bravery — started to appear next to the cultural elite.

The Nazi regime, which certainly did believe that persons it elevated would be well liked, did not object to the cult of Czech celebrities as long as they were loyal to the Nazis and if, when outbreaks of discontent threatened, they brought people consoling diversion.

The Communist regime, which soon took the place of the Nazis, like every totalitarian regime, considered morality, independent intelligence, or unapproved bravery unwelcome. Like all riffraff, the Communists hated the elite with a vengeance. Consciously and unconsciously, they tried not only to degrade their cultural influence but also to humiliate them. They were willing to pardon only those who submitted unconditionally to the party. Over the course of a few months, they also removed from schools (primarily the universities) all professional organizations, especially those that enjoyed any kind of natural authority.

Part of the elite, especially the political elite, managed to flee the country, as did at least some of those who were respected for their property or for their business success. Most intellectuals, however, stayed behind. The remaining political elite was replaced by the new Communist pseudoelite. Lack of education was given precedence over education, immorality over morality, and acquiescence over bravery. The primary virtues were supposed to be proletarian origin and class consciousness.

The misfortune among the Czechs and Slovaks was that, after the rule of the Nazis, who had murdered part of the Czech elite and deprived the rest of a voice, a new elite did not have time to establish itself. Those returning after the war, which included soldiers and airmen who had fought with armies abroad against Nazism, were imprisoned by the Communists or executed. Those who remained free were at least partially blocked from public work, and most were able to acquire only menial jobs.

The Communists tried to replace people who had achieved natural authority through their activities (the Communists had removed them precisely for this reason) with people they endowed with artificial authority. Loyal party members, who lacked even a college degree, received university titles; others were named lawyers or chief justices; second-rate artists or those who disowned their previous work and were willing to be propagandists received the title of Worthy or National Artist.

Even though the Communists quickly enthroned terror, affecting part of the cultural elite, it cannot be denied that a considerable number of the elite failed. Those who sold out and consoled themselves with the thought that they were spokesmen for the nation (and also National Artists) were mistaken. They were spokesmen for and servants of only a felonious power. On the other hand, the Communists, having acquired at least a few members of the cultural elite during those first years, never fully trusted them.

Many of those who failed gradually came to understand the wretched role they had been assigned and laboriously tried to win back some of their natural authority. This meant that they had to come into conflict with the current government.

Throughout the rule of communism — perhaps with the exception of the brief Prague Spring — this conflict never ended.

During the period of Soviet occupation, the cultural elite, in their battle with the illegitimate occupying power, acquired the credence and natural authority they had lost. (This applies not only to the activity of artists and intellectuals who had been officially repudiated but also to protest singers and artists from the so-called small theaters.) This went on despite the fact that the government did all it could to defile, discredit, and undermine this natural authority; it tried to elevate the false elite and especially the so-called celebrities, whose popularity and apparent significance were strengthened by their appearance on television. As long as they did not try to resist the government, the celebrities had unrestricted freedom.

For four decades, natural authority was banished to the underground or to the very edge of cultural activity, banished from the entire country or at least surrounded by official and therefore formidable silence, and the false elite were forced upon society. All of this could not be prevented from influencing the majority of society — the decline of morality and even the distrust of intellectuals, which persisted not only during communism, but long after the Communists had ceased to rule.