We have something else in common, Mr. President, and that is our past in our respective police states. To put it less grandly: our prisons, that shortage of space amply made up for by an abundance of time, which, sooner or later, renders one, regardless of one's temperament, rather contemplative. You spent more time in yours, of course, than
Published in The New York Review of Books in response to a lecture by Mr. Havel that appeared in the May 27, 1993, issue of that publication.
I in mine, though I started in mine long before the Prague Spring. Yet in spite of my nearly patriotic belief that the hopelessness ofsome urine-reeking cement hole in the bowels of Russia awakens one to the arbitrariness of existence faster than what I once pictured as a clean, stuccoed solitary in civilized Prague, as contemplative beings, I think, we might be quite even.
In short, we were pen pals long before I conceived of this letter. But I conceived ofit not because of the literalness of my mind, or because our present circumstances are quite different from those of the past (nothing can be more natural than that, and one is not obliged to remain a writer forever: not any more so than to stay a prisoner). I've decided to write this letter because a while ago I read the text of one of your most recent speeches, whose conclusions about the past, the present, and the future were so different from mine that I thought one of us must be wrong. And it is precisely because the present and the future—and not just your own or your country's but the global one—were involved that I decided to make this an open letter to you. Had the issue been only the past, I wouldn't have written you this letter at all, or if I had, I'd have marked it "'Personal."
The speech of yours that I read was printed in The New York Review of Books and its title was "The Post-Communist Nightmare." You begin by reminiscing about a time when you would be avoided in the street by your friends and acquaintances, since in those days you were on dangerous terms with the state and under police surveillance. You proceed to explain the reasons for their avoiding you and suggest, in the usual, grudge-free manner for which you are justly famous, that to those friends and acquaintances you constituted an inconvenience; and "inconveniences"—you cite the conventional wisdom—"are best avoided." Then for most of your speech you describe the post-Communist reality (in Eastern Europe and by implication in the Balkans) and equate the deportment of the democratic world vis-a-vis that reality to avoiding an inconvenience.
It is a wonderful speech, with a great many wonderful insights and a convincing conclusion; but let me go to your starting point. It occurs to me, Mr. President, that your famous civility benefited your hindsight here rather poorly. Are you so sure you were avoided by those people then and there for reasons of embarrassment and fear of "potential persecution" only, and not because you were, given the seeming stability of the system, written off by them? Are you sure that at least some of them didn't simply regard you as a marked, doomed man on whom it would be foolish to waste much time? Don't you think that instead of, or as well as, being inconvenient (as you insist), you were also a convenient example of the wrong deportment and thus a source of considerable moral comfort, the way the sick are for the healthy majority? Haven't you imagined them saying to their wives in the evening, "I saw Havel today in the street. He's had it." Or do I misjudge the Czech character?
That they were proven wrong and you right matters little. They wrote you off in the first place because even by the standards of our half of the century you were not a martyr. Besides, don't we all harbor a certain measure ofguilt, totally unrelated to the state, of course, but nonetheless palpable? So whenever the arm of the state reaches us, we regard it vaguely as our comeuppance, as a touch of the blunt but nevertheless expected tool of Providence. That's, frankly, the main raison d'etre behind the institution of police, plain- clothed or uniformed, or at least behind our general inability to resist an arrest. One may be perfectly convinced that the state is wrong, but one is seldom confident of one's o^ virtue. Not to mention that it is the same arm that locks one up and sets one free. That's why one is seldom surprised at being avoided when one gets released, and doesn't expect a universal embrace.
Such expectations, under such circumstances, would be disappointed, because nobody wants to be reminded of the murky complexity of the relations between guilt and getting one's comeuppance, and in a police state providing such a reminder is what heroic deportment is largely about. It alienates one from others, as any emphasis on virtue does; not to mention that a hero is always best observed from a distance. In no small measure, Mr. President, you were avoided by the people you've mentioned precisely because for them you were a sort of test tube of virtue confronting evil, and they didn't interfere with the experiment, since they had their doubts about both. As such, you again were a convenience, because in the police state absolutes compromise each other since they engender each other. Haven't you imagined those prudent people saying to their wives in the evening: "I saw Havel today in the street. He's too good to be true." Or do I misjudge the Czech character again?
That they were proven wrong and you right, I repeat, matters little. They wrote you off at the time because they were guided by the same relativism and self-interest that I suppose helps them to make a go of it now, under the new dispensation. And as a healthy majority, they no doubt had a significant part in your velvet revolution, which, after all, asserts, the way democracy always does, precisely self- interest. If such is the case, and I'm afraid it is, they've paid you back for their excessive prudence, and you preside now over a society which is more theirs than yours.
There is nothing wrong with that. Besides, things might easily have gone the other way: for you, that is; not for them (the revolution was so velvet because the tyranny itself by that time was more woolen than ironclad—otherwise I wouldn't have this privilege of commenting upon your speech). So all I'm trying to suggest is that by introducing the notion of inconvenience you quite possibly misspoke, for self-interest is always exercised at the expense of others, whether it's done by individuals or by nations. A better notion would be the vulgarity of the human heart, Mr. President; but then you wouldn't be able to bring your speech to a ringing conclusion. Certain things come with a pulpit, though one should resist them, writer or no writer. As I am not faced with your task, I'd like to take your argument now where, I think, it could perhaps have gone. I wonder ifyou'll disagree with the result.
"For long decades," your next paragraph begins, "the chief nightmare of the democratic world was Communism. Today —three years after it began to collapse like an avalanche—it would seem as though another nightmare has replaced it: post-Communism." Then you describe in considerable detail the existing modes of the democratic world's response to the ecological, economic, political, and social catastrophes unraveling where previously one perceived a smooth cloth. You liken these responses to those toward your "inconvenience" and suggest that such a position leads "to a turning away from reality, and ultimately, to resigning oneself to it. It leads to appeasement, even to collaboration. The consequences of such a position may even be suicidal."
It is here, Mr. President, that I think your metaphor fails you. For neither the Communist nor the post- Communist nightmare amounts to an inconvenience, since it helped, helps, and for quite some time will help the democratic world to externalize evil. And not the democratic world only. To quite a few of us who lived in that nightmare, and especially those who fought it, its presence was a source of considerable moral comfort. For one who fights or resists evil almost automatically perceives oneself as good and skips self-analysis. So perhaps it's time—for us and for the world at large, democratic or not—to scrub the term "Communism" from the human reality of Eastern Europe so one can recognize that reality for what it was and is: a mirror.