Fear no more the frown o' the great
John Zametica
OPEN LETTERS: SELECTED PROSE by Viclay Havel Faber, £17.50, pp. 415 There is a famous story about a meeting between Stalin and Bela Kun, the Hungari- an communist leader. Kun was trying his utmost to convey the great Hungarian love for the Soviet Leader. 'I could not care less', Stalin interrupted him abruptly, 'if the Hungarians love me. What I want to know is whether they fear me.' This illustrates rather well the guiding method of totalitarian regimes. To his great credit, fear was not something known to Vaclav Havel during his long years of dissident activity and imprisonment in com- munist Czechoslovakia. But millions of his fellow citizens succumbed to it. 'Fear is not the only building block in the present social structure', Havel wrote in 1975, 'nonethe- less, it is the main, the fundamental materi- al'. This is to him the self-evident explanation for the image of a totally unit- ed society giving total support to its gov- ernment. People's attempts to preserve what they have are driven by fear, making possible a social system offering scope, 'so openly and so brazenly', to unprincipled and spineless men, to born lackeys, in short to typical collaborators. But most people are collaborators in such a system, loath as they are to spend their days in ceaseless and futile conflict with authority. 'Despair leads to apathy, apathy to conformity, con- formity to routine performance.' This, Havel notes wrily, is then quoted as evid- nece of 'mass political involvement '.
Although he objects to being described as a professional anti-communist, Havel offers in his dissident prose some of the most devastating attacks on what he calls `If I was the sort who'd register his dog, wouldn't want a pit bull, would I?' the 'post-totalitarian system'. A passage from his The Power of the Powerless (1978) is worth quoting in full:
Government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of infomiation is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the pub- lic control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its develop- ment; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning inde- pendent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance.
The heart of Havel's dissidence is a very English horror of ideology. He was influ- enced in this by the moral philosophy of Jan Patocka, one of the forces behind the Charter 77 movement. Unlike the English, however, he does not distrust reason, as such. Rather, he worries about its potential to be used logically as an instrument of oppression. In a situation where the centre of power is identical with the centre of truth, ideology becomes 'almost a secu- larised religion'. Havel seizes on the spacious quality of ideology as a way of relating to the world: 'It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them.' The system pretends that the requirements of life determine its own requirements. The truth, in this world of appearances, is that the `system serves people only to the extent necessary to ensure that the people will serve it'. The result is a long-term violation, indeed self-violation, of society.
But Havel never allowed himself to be demoralised by his own analyses. Already in 1965 (in On Evasive Thinking) he argued that the nature of historical necessity would sooner or later propel everything good and positive to find its place. Ten years later (in Dear Dr Husak) he pointed to the recuper- ative quality in human society, however enfeebled, and to repression as a double- edged sword:
In trying to paralyse life . . . the authorities paralyse themselves and, in the long run, make themselves incapable of paralysing life.
That particular moment in the history of his country, of course, Havel himself did much to bring about. His main contact with the state had in the past been through its courts of law and prisons. He is now the head of state, an irony which he says does not surprise him, but which must surely delight him. He is, he says, a reluctant king. That is probably the reaction of the shy man that he is, but not necessarily the truth. All intellectuals are fascinated by political power. Those who have exercised it have on the whole done a good job. Long live the king.
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