Keynote by Michael Žantovský at Prague Spring 50

IANR Media Author

04/11/2018 Added

30 Plays

Description

Keynote by Michael Žantovský at Prague Spring 50. https://praguespring50.unl.edu/speakers#michael-zantovsky

Searchable Transcript

Search:

[00:00:11.660]Good afternoon.
[00:00:15.930]Ambassador Kmonicek warned you earlier on
[00:00:20.440]about how boring ambassadorial speeches can be.
[00:00:24.830]Well you've heard nothing yet.
[00:00:26.541](laughing)
[00:00:28.900]Ambassador, chancellor, ladies and gentlemen,
[00:00:32.720]for some reason, the history of the Czech nation
[00:00:35.120]and if its many triumphs and tribulations
[00:00:38.800]is haunted by the number eight.
[00:00:42.100]The year 1618 marked the beginning of the 30 Years' War,
[00:00:45.840]which cemented the 300 years of Austrian dominance
[00:00:49.800]and Catholic religion over the lands of the Czech Kingdom.
[00:00:54.050]The year 1848, just as much as elsewhere in Europe,
[00:00:58.700]embodied the hopes for the national renaissance
[00:01:01.830]and Republican sentiment
[00:01:04.160]whose failure led to a first massive wave
[00:01:07.510]of Czech immigration to the United States.
[00:01:11.300]1938 was the year of the Munich Crisis,
[00:01:14.740]which deprived Czechoslovakia of its young independence
[00:01:18.660]and set the world on a course for the horrors
[00:01:21.810]of the Second World War.
[00:01:23.520]And 10 years later, in 1948, the communists took power
[00:01:29.040]in Czechoslovakia, and the Iron Curtain descended
[00:01:32.980]over the continent for another 40 years.
[00:01:36.550]You may have noticed though, that I omitted deliberately
[00:01:40.910]two major number eight anniversaries
[00:01:43.940]both falling on this year.
[00:01:46.210]100 years ago, independent Czechoslovakia
[00:01:49.650]came into being in large part thanks to the efforts
[00:01:52.540]of Tomas Garrigue Masaryk
[00:01:54.410]and the support he obtained from many Czech Americans
[00:01:57.180]and from President Woodrow Wilson.
[00:01:59.858]Incidentally, it is also 100 years ago
[00:02:04.550]that a novel by an alumna of this university, Willa Cather,
[00:02:09.660]about the struggles of a family of Czech immigrants
[00:02:13.140]to Nebraska, My Antonia, was published to great acclaim.
[00:02:20.050]Then there are the events of 50 years ago
[00:02:22.720]that brought us all here today,
[00:02:24.700]thanks to the enthusiasm and the vision
[00:02:26.850]of Professor Lasur Mariana Capkova and the collaborators
[00:02:30.070]at the University of Nebraska, in Lincoln.
[00:02:33.452]I suppose that the intention has been
[00:02:36.080]not just to remember and celebrate the anniversary,
[00:02:39.330]but rather try to make sense of the events
[00:02:42.700]that transpired then.
[00:02:45.190]And it is not easy.
[00:02:47.630]The Prague Spring of 1968,
[00:02:50.880]and for that method that whole year,
[00:02:55.210]resembled an attack of manic depressive psychosis.
[00:03:00.130]You remember that I'm a psychologist.
[00:03:02.006](laughing)
[00:03:03.280]After all, it was just one of the many events
[00:03:06.270]of an annus mirabilis, a year of wonders,
[00:03:10.160]remarkable in equal degree for the rapid onrush
[00:03:13.830]of hopes and euphoria as for the sudden plunge
[00:03:18.490]into despair and hopelessness for the psychedelic mirages,
[00:03:23.360]expressions of unbounded love, and fits of wanton violence.
[00:03:28.220]All of which engulfed alternately,
[00:03:31.260]and sometimes simultaneously, Paris, Berlin,
[00:03:35.490]Chicago, Warsaw, Belgrade, Los Angeles,
[00:03:39.210]Prague, and other cities.
[00:03:41.620]Almost as if Clio, the daughter of Zeus,
[00:03:45.900]and Mnemosyne, head goddess of memory, had one too many.
[00:03:50.426](laughing)
[00:03:51.460]Or at least that is how you felt if you just stand 19,
[00:03:55.230]like I was then, and never experience anything else
[00:03:59.280]than totalitarian communism with its very limited
[00:04:02.420]range of colors, emotions and opportunities.
[00:04:06.580]And then all of a sudden a world of limitless,
[00:04:10.190]and sometimes endless discussions,
[00:04:12.730]romantic adventures, and unlimited opportunities
[00:04:16.000]open before you only to shut down again
[00:04:19.123]with a clank of the armored hatches
[00:04:21.270]on the turrets of the Soviet tanks.
[00:04:25.070]Surely the contours of history
[00:04:26.990]are always sharper looking back
[00:04:28.780]than when it is actually happening.
[00:04:31.400]In reality, the Prague Spring was not born overnight
[00:04:34.980]on the night of the 6th of January 1968,
[00:04:37.900]with the departure of the Stalinist Czechoslovak leader,
[00:04:41.260]Antonin Novotny, from the top post of the party hierarchy,
[00:04:45.050]and his replacement by the little known
[00:04:47.070]Slovak apparatchik, Alexander Dubcek.
[00:04:50.490]It was, had been germinating through the long end
[00:04:54.690]of the winter of Stalinism from the end of the 1950s,
[00:04:59.370]and through the whole following decade.
[00:05:01.910]It sprang the first bud and blossoms
[00:05:04.600]of non-conformist thinking, daring theater,
[00:05:08.630]obscene dance figures of rock and roll,
[00:05:11.740]innovative movies, and independent journalism.
[00:05:15.320]Many of which withered and died in the frost
[00:05:18.150]of the official disapproval, only to be succeeded
[00:05:21.920]by others more numerous and more daring still.
[00:05:26.690]It could be discerned in the fits of second thoughts
[00:05:30.080]and apostasy, and many sometime loyal and stilled
[00:05:33.840]comsummal carders, much as the pubertetex teenagers
[00:05:39.010]or passion surprises reasonable man
[00:05:41.350]in the crisis of the middle age.
[00:05:44.250]The milestones on this road to where the mirage of freedom
[00:05:48.440]turned out to be events of a supremely non-political nature,
[00:05:53.170]such as the first scientific conference
[00:05:56.360]of literary scholars on Franz Kafka,
[00:06:00.160]a non-person for the regime until then, in Liblitz in 1963.
[00:06:05.720]The first film musical about forbidden teenage love
[00:06:10.020]starts in Na Chmelu, Love Harvests in Summer, 1964.
[00:06:15.840]Milos Forman's Concourse, or Audition in English,
[00:06:20.072](speaking in foreign language), Loves of a Blonde in 1965,
[00:06:25.220]and other films of the Czech new wave.
[00:06:28.550]The first night in the theater on the battle straight
[00:06:31.790]of (speaking in foreign language), the Garden Party.
[00:06:35.610]In 1963, the first produced play by the until then,
[00:06:39.510]unknown playwright, Vaclav Havel,
[00:06:42.640]which was in its time, only a path of a major offensive
[00:06:46.800]of so-called small theaters,
[00:06:49.570]with names like (speaking in foreign language), and others.
[00:06:53.170]And off-Broadway, or off-off-Broadway type of movement
[00:06:57.070]of nonconformist theater artists.
[00:06:59.910]It was the unexpected public reaction
[00:07:03.480]against the severance by Czechoslovakia of diplomatic ties
[00:07:07.080]with Israel following the June 1967 Six-Days War.
[00:07:11.950]The scandalous disobedience of leading
[00:07:14.780]Czech and Slovak writers at the first congress
[00:07:17.820]of the Union of Czechslovak writers
[00:07:20.230]at the end of the same month,
[00:07:22.320]and the growing resistance of Slovak politicians
[00:07:25.600]and intellectuals against the insensitive Pragocentric
[00:07:30.030]policies of President and Party Secretary Novotny,
[00:07:34.210]which exploded with full force at the October 1967 meeting
[00:07:39.780]of the Center Committee of the Communist Party,
[00:07:42.500]and led eventually to the removal of Novotny
[00:07:45.230]and his replacement by Dubcek two months later.
[00:07:48.530]There was an intermezzo of a meeting
[00:07:52.280]of the Central Committee two days before Christmas,
[00:07:55.440]which Secretary Novotny facing inevitable censure,
[00:07:59.250]famously adjourned by declaring that the lady comrades
[00:08:04.670]had to go Christmas shopping.
[00:08:06.546](laughing)
[00:08:08.260]After that, the Prague Spring blossomed with 1,000 flowers.
[00:08:13.370]Eight months, for that was all it lasted,
[00:08:15.980]it was too short a time to bring about practical results
[00:08:19.550]of the new more liberal approach of the Dubcek-led team,
[00:08:23.660]which spent most of its energy
[00:08:25.300]in the struggle with the determined rear guard action
[00:08:28.050]of the conservatives in the party.
[00:08:30.710]The relaxation at the end of February of censorship
[00:08:34.300]brought about a flood of revelations about
[00:08:36.680]the Stalinist Trials, the interference of the Soviet Union,
[00:08:40.560]and the internal affairs of Czechoslovakia,
[00:08:43.600]and the dubious past of some of the leading
[00:08:46.180]Communist bureaucrats, represented together
[00:08:49.580]with the significant opening of the borders
[00:08:51.940]for the travel of Czechoslovak cities (mumbling)
[00:08:55.260]the headiest ships of freedom.
[00:08:58.320]The complete demolition of censorship
[00:09:00.070]by the National Assembly at the end of June
[00:09:02.650]only acknowledged the reality
[00:09:04.350]already existing on the ground.
[00:09:07.190]Many, though not all of the victims
[00:09:10.020]of communist injustice, were rehabilitated.
[00:09:13.740]Many hitherto forbidden works published,
[00:09:17.270]and some until then undreamt of products
[00:09:20.070]appear in the stores signaling the reemergence
[00:09:24.020]of a modicum of market mechanisms.
[00:09:27.290]But that was largely all.
[00:09:29.270]The more fundamental changes, including amendments
[00:09:32.170]to the constitution to introduce a federal system
[00:09:35.160]for the country inhabited by two related
[00:09:37.410]but different nations, the Czechs and the Slovaks,
[00:09:40.670]and to allow for a more pluralist society,
[00:09:44.950]were expected to take place following the congress
[00:09:47.930]of the Communist Party at the end of the year.
[00:09:51.880]Such fundamental changes, which never acquired more than
[00:09:55.860]the vaguest of shapes, however died premature deaths
[00:10:00.490]during the night of 20th August, 1968,
[00:10:04.970]under the tracks of the Soviet tanks,
[00:10:07.690]demonstrating the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine,
[00:10:10.937]under which a threat to socialism in one of the countries
[00:10:14.980]of the Socialist camp, meant a threat to socialism as such.
[00:10:20.440]Ironically, Brezhnev was absolutely right.
[00:10:24.280]Since the beginning, the reforms in Czechoslovakia
[00:10:28.030]came under the increasing pressure
[00:10:30.540]from the non-Communist part of the society,
[00:10:33.500]which was unwilling to be mollified with cosmetic changes,
[00:10:37.420]but rather demanded more and more energetically,
[00:10:41.020]full civic liberties.
[00:10:43.080]Doing away with the constitutionally enshrined dictatorship
[00:10:46.450]of a single political party,
[00:10:48.590]the freedom of decision on foreign policy questions,
[00:10:52.039]and the removal of the command monopoly
[00:10:54.930]by the state of the economy.
[00:10:57.835]It was not hard to imagine that where Czechoslovakia
[00:11:00.840]to win such a degree of freedom,
[00:11:02.920]people in the other Communist countries,
[00:11:05.310]and in the end, even the citizens of the Soviet Union
[00:11:08.450]would demand the same.
[00:11:12.380]When the drama petered out several weeks later,
[00:11:15.630]when the futile resistance of ordinary
[00:11:18.080]Czech and Slovak citizens in the streets
[00:11:20.730]and on the barricade ceased,
[00:11:22.880]and when the Communist leadership
[00:11:24.530]forcibly kidnapped to Moscow,
[00:11:26.900]accepted with a single honorable acception
[00:11:30.010]of Frantisek Kriegel, a humiliating capitulation
[00:11:33.570]to the Soviet demands.
[00:11:35.270]And when subsequently, the policy of the so-called
[00:11:39.310]normalization not only did away with the modest achievements
[00:11:43.470]of the reform process, but embarked on the road of purges,
[00:11:47.860]persecution, and mistreatment of its opponents
[00:11:51.440]to suffocate even the smallest gems
[00:11:54.230]of the potential relapse of the democratic infection.
[00:11:58.210]There remained of the whole Prague Spring,
[00:12:01.320]a single but crucial lessons.
[00:12:04.290]On this, I may differ a little with Ambassador Kmonicek,
[00:12:08.580]but I was there.
[00:12:09.850](laughing)
[00:12:11.810]The Communist system was unreformable.
[00:12:15.070]Any attempt at its partial reform
[00:12:17.370]led either to its suppression by force,
[00:12:20.320]or to the inevitable collapse of the whole system.
[00:12:24.210]Human liberty could not coexist with a political system
[00:12:27.810]that organizes society and its future
[00:12:30.710]according to a preconceived plan.
[00:12:33.870]The final proof of this lesson in practice
[00:12:36.940]was presented, though unwittingly,
[00:12:39.540]20 years later by Mikhail Gorbachev.
[00:12:42.901]The germination and internalization of this awareness
[00:12:46.300]in the long twilight of the Czechoslovak normalization
[00:12:50.360]was to play an invariable role
[00:12:52.770]in the Velvet Revolution of November 1989,
[00:12:55.970]and similar revolutionary events
[00:12:57.770]in all the European Communist countries.
[00:13:00.570]Quite often, human progress is born
[00:13:03.410]not so much out of victories, as out of defeats.
[00:13:07.504]At the same time, it may sometimes take quite long
[00:13:10.440]before this happens.
[00:13:12.000]In the events, the collaborators in the Czechoslovak
[00:13:14.830]political leadership taking courage
[00:13:16.780]from the presence of a massive occupying force,
[00:13:20.040]immediately set about dismantling the meager achievements
[00:13:23.390]of the reform process.
[00:13:25.270]In nine months, using as a pretext
[00:13:28.040]the spontaneous celebrations in the streets
[00:13:32.120]following the World Cup victory of the Czechoslovak
[00:13:34.770]ice hockey team over the officially unbeatable Soviet Union,
[00:13:39.210]something that the Corn Huskers should understand...
[00:13:42.013](laughing)
[00:13:43.060]Dubcek forever hesitating between courage and loyalty
[00:13:47.220]to the Party and the Soviets was fired
[00:13:50.840]and replaced by another Slovak, Gustav Husak,
[00:13:54.100]a ruthless opportunist who started to tighten the screws,
[00:13:57.920]and himself a former political prisoner,
[00:14:00.750]to persecute and jail political opponents.
[00:14:04.450]The purges within the Communist Party
[00:14:06.960]cost several tens of thousands of comrades
[00:14:10.060]their membership card.
[00:14:12.240]And purges within and outside the party
[00:14:15.020]cost hundreds of thousands of people their jobs.
[00:14:18.680]Any sign of resistance or unorthodoxy
[00:14:21.310]was mercilessly suppressed.
[00:14:23.620]In two years, the most reformist Communist regime
[00:14:27.080]in central and eastern Europe became once again
[00:14:30.110]the bastian of neo-Stalinism,
[00:14:33.200]the biafra of the spirit in the words of the French writer,
[00:14:37.260]Louis Aragon, once himself, a loyal Communist Party member.
[00:14:42.100]The whole system wound down
[00:14:43.740]to its lowest common denominator,
[00:14:45.680]be it in culture, arts, education or economy.
[00:14:49.230]All movements stopped and was replaced by a ghostly silence.
[00:14:53.800]It was as Vaclav Havel remark
[00:14:55.980]in his 1975 letter to Gustav Husak,
[00:14:59.650]which ushered in the era of descent
[00:15:02.020]the quiet of a graveyard.
[00:15:05.050]But the lesson of August 1968
[00:15:07.420]about the fundamental incompatibility
[00:15:09.950]of communism with freedom persisted
[00:15:13.060]and kept undermining any attempt of the system
[00:15:16.050]at recovering a modicum of legitimacy,
[00:15:19.660]let alone respectability.
[00:15:21.918]One after another, the Communist Parties
[00:15:24.590]in the west of Europe broke off from the Soviet hegemon
[00:15:28.440]and attempted to practice a watered down version
[00:15:31.270]of the creed called Eurocommunisim,
[00:15:34.780]though eventually they too, went under.
[00:15:37.890]In an ironic admission of their failure,
[00:15:40.790]the Czechoslovak Communists internalized the lesson
[00:15:43.550]in a pompous 1970 document called
[00:15:47.380]Lessons from the 1968 Crisis Development,
[00:15:51.300]admitting among other things, and I will quote,
[00:15:54.420]in 1968, the Communist Party gradually ceased to be
[00:15:57.980]the command center of the Socialist system.
[00:16:00.890]The daring and the aggressivity of the counterrevolution
[00:16:04.520]increased while the possibility of suppressing it
[00:16:08.440]by means of domestic politics and force
[00:16:11.600]gradually weakened, and eventually disappeared, unquote.
[00:16:16.700]The lesson was equally internalized
[00:16:18.740]by the small group of people around Vaclav Havel
[00:16:21.810]and by some of the recently purged Communist intellectuals.
[00:16:26.190]In a form of political jiu-jitsu, they started appealing
[00:16:30.910]to the government to practice its own constitution loss
[00:16:34.720]and international commitments,
[00:16:36.730]notably, the 1975 final act of the Helsinki Conference
[00:16:41.080]on security and cooperation in Europe,
[00:16:44.040]in which 35 countries,
[00:16:45.700]including the United States and the Soviet Union
[00:16:48.240]undertook to observe the human rights standards
[00:16:50.700]contained in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
[00:16:54.570]Thus originated the Charter 77
[00:16:56.980]Human Rights Initiative in Czechoslovakia,
[00:17:00.170]the Workers' Defense Committee, later renamed to
[00:17:02.620]Committee of Social Self Defense in Poland,
[00:17:05.960]and other such initiatives throughout the Communist bloc.
[00:17:09.390]Although the system responded with persecution,
[00:17:13.240]beatings, forced exile just intensives of several years,
[00:17:17.070]and in 1981, even the introduction of
[00:17:21.850]the Marshall Law in Poland to suppress
[00:17:24.990]the Solidarnosc movement, it was never again able
[00:17:28.700]to put the gin back into the bottle.
[00:17:31.660]When in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power
[00:17:35.370]following a secession of walking dead
[00:17:38.490]at the helm of the Soviet leadership,
[00:17:41.410]he was facing a fatal dilemma.
[00:17:44.360]Either to reassert the orthodoxy of
[00:17:46.870]the Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism and see
[00:17:49.777]the economy collapse as a result of the inefficiencies,
[00:17:53.490]the absurdities, and the wastefulness
[00:17:55.900]of the command economy, which was at the time,
[00:17:59.090]waging a losing arms race competition
[00:18:01.260]with the United States.
[00:18:03.280]Or to relax the reins on the society
[00:18:05.880]in the hope of bringing the economy back
[00:18:08.470]and risk the collapse of the whole political edifice.
[00:18:12.040]He chose the latter option, on occasion,
[00:18:14.110]citing the model of the Prague Spring of 1968,
[00:18:18.080]and saw the inevitable happen.
[00:18:21.580]20 years after the invasion,
[00:18:23.680]the writing was on the Berlin Wall.
[00:18:26.410]On the anniversary, 21st of August,
[00:18:30.436]10,000 people were marching down the Wenceslas Square
[00:18:34.870]singing the national anthem, and braving police truncheons,
[00:18:38.610]and German shepherd dogs.
[00:18:41.298]On the 28th of October, the 70th anniversary
[00:18:44.840]of free and independent Czechoslovakia, they did it again,
[00:18:48.860]and again, and again.
[00:18:51.220]In Poland, after almost the decade of Marshall Law regime,
[00:18:55.350]the Solidarnosc was resurgent,
[00:18:57.490]entering talks with the government about sharing power.
[00:19:01.370]The Neues Forum in Germany organized public meetings
[00:19:04.350]in Leipzig and other big cities
[00:19:06.950]in the face of police violence.
[00:19:11.410]And the Soviet Union itself was falling
[00:19:13.520]to the fall of perestroika and glasnost.
[00:19:17.020]Unprecedented, though limited reforms
[00:19:20.580]somewhat resembling the Prague Spring.
[00:19:23.210]It was now only a question of time,
[00:19:25.910]though we did not know it at the time.
[00:19:29.600]The next year, the whole totalitarian edifice
[00:19:32.800]in the central and eastern Europe
[00:19:34.290]crumbled with astonishing speed,
[00:19:36.930]and with the exception of Romania,
[00:19:39.520]even more astonishing absence of violence.
[00:19:42.790]Unlike with other revolutions,
[00:19:45.430]implosion was probably a better term
[00:19:47.500]to describe it than explosion.
[00:19:50.820]Roundtable talks between the government and the opposition,
[00:19:53.760]followed by half-open elections in Poland,
[00:19:57.560]the breach of the Iron Curtain
[00:19:59.210]attained by East German discontents
[00:20:01.250]with the help of the Hungarian Government
[00:20:03.650]and the people of Prague,
[00:20:05.490]the fall of the Berlin Wall on the 9th of November,
[00:20:09.320]and the eruption of the Velvet Revolution
[00:20:11.460]on the improbable date of 17th of November,
[00:20:15.990]spectacularly preempting the plans of the opposition,
[00:20:19.070]and perhaps even of the government
[00:20:21.140]for a final confrontation on the 10th of December
[00:20:25.380]all led to the quick capitulation
[00:20:27.660]of the Communist Governments,
[00:20:29.310]and the equally quick replacement
[00:20:31.580]by a mixture of dissidents,
[00:20:34.150]reformists and pragmatic bureaucrats.
[00:20:37.891]There was yet another lesson to be drawn
[00:20:39.980]from the events of the Prague Spring 20 years back.
[00:20:43.320]The opposition loosely organized around the civic forum
[00:20:46.470]in the Czech part of the country
[00:20:47.940]and the public against violence in Slovakia,
[00:20:51.730]was a diverse collection of Liberal Democrats,
[00:20:54.500]former Communist Reformists, religious activists,
[00:20:57.750]and young radicals bred by the underground,
[00:21:02.170]largely copying the composition of Charter 77
[00:21:05.200]as the largest and most influential opposition group.
[00:21:09.190]Once the revolution prevailed, the question of the future
[00:21:12.700]that few people had been seriously entertaining
[00:21:15.590]because of the prevailing consensus
[00:21:17.530]that there was not much of a future to be had,
[00:21:20.390]began to loom large.
[00:21:22.620]A small, but well-organized group of Reformists
[00:21:26.590]centered around a movement of Socialist renaissance,
[00:21:30.270]called Obroda, renaissance,
[00:21:33.010]explicitly advocated an approach
[00:21:35.260]based on the policies of the Prague Spring,
[00:21:37.890]with a liberalized political and economic system
[00:21:41.100]generally adhering to the Socialist principles.
[00:21:44.830]In this, they could rely on the support
[00:21:47.780]never properly gauged, but set an existing
[00:21:51.030]of many of the Czechoslovak citizens who found it hard
[00:21:54.870]after 40 years of Communism to imagine a future
[00:21:58.600]that was radically different.
[00:22:01.010]A larger part of the civic forum though,
[00:22:03.680]drew on the 12 years of the Charter 77 struggle
[00:22:07.080]for human rights and civic freedoms.
[00:22:09.650]Advocating a road that would be wide open in many directions
[00:22:14.390]based on the free exercise of the people's will.
[00:22:19.700]As often happens, this debate became personified
[00:22:23.420]around the two plausible candidates
[00:22:25.450]for the presidency to replace
[00:22:27.690]the utterly discredited and despised Gustav Husak.
[00:22:31.370]Of the two, Alexander Dubcek,
[00:22:33.580]the leader of the Prague Spring, was the better known,
[00:22:37.030]domestically and internationally.
[00:22:39.380]He was generally liked as a decent and modest man,
[00:22:43.080]praised for his humane and democratic instincts,
[00:22:46.610]and criticized for his weakness, compromises,
[00:22:49.560]and ultimate capitulation.
[00:22:52.430]The other man was Vaclav Havel,
[00:22:54.710]an intellectual with no government experience,
[00:22:57.650]but at the same time, a man who had won
[00:22:59.960]an enormous moral credit, which he earned the hard way
[00:23:03.980]through 20 years of principled opposition
[00:23:06.260]to the communist arrogance, injustice and abuse of power,
[00:23:10.310]and five years in a communist prison.
[00:23:13.290]In the end, it was a no contest,
[00:23:16.610]suggesting that the difference went deeper
[00:23:18.900]than the personal qualities of the two men.
[00:23:21.810]To the leaders and activists of the civic forum in Prague,
[00:23:24.900]as well as the public against violence in Bratislava,
[00:23:28.260]and indeed to anyone with eyes to see,
[00:23:31.270]it was clear that Alexander Dubcek
[00:23:33.980]for all his decency and niceness, was a man of the past,
[00:23:38.170]representing a symbolic return to 1968.
[00:23:41.866]And the endless discussion about the compatibility
[00:23:45.070]of a pluralist political system
[00:23:47.170]with the leading role of the Communist Party,
[00:23:49.820]and that of a command state economy
[00:23:52.533]with private property and the rules of the market,
[00:23:56.090]while Havel was a man of an uncertain,
[00:24:00.610]but irresistibly tempting future of a free and open society.
[00:24:05.400]For all the problems, arguments and challenges
[00:24:08.040]that were to come, the choice has been largely vindicated
[00:24:12.140]by the developments of the last 28 years.
[00:24:15.690]Now it would be tempting to finish on this positive,
[00:24:19.820]perhaps even slightly complacent note,
[00:24:23.010]but there may be another lesson to be drawn.
[00:24:26.620]What had been achieved by the revolutions
[00:24:28.640]in central and eastern Europe,
[00:24:30.370]with the support of Democrats in the west,
[00:24:32.970]seemed at the time, so definite and so irreversible
[00:24:37.890]that it tempted at least one talented American politologist
[00:24:42.170]to write a not entirely well considered piece
[00:24:45.270]on the end of history, indicating that liberal democracy
[00:24:49.190]was the final stage of political evolution of societies.
[00:24:53.650]Not only do we now know better
[00:24:55.760]thanks to the enemies of democracy around the world,
[00:24:59.160]but liberal democracy itself is being questioned
[00:25:02.550]by an increasing number of people in our own society
[00:25:06.520]in our midst who point out at its real or imagined flaws,
[00:25:11.110]such as inefficiency, corruption,
[00:25:15.320]inability to effectively defend our values,
[00:25:18.000]traditions, and culture against the forces
[00:25:21.290]of the global society and of the fake news world.
[00:25:25.612]There are voices questioning the usefulness
[00:25:28.290]of traditional political rules,
[00:25:30.670]constitutional checks and balances,
[00:25:33.420]representative democracy and division of power
[00:25:37.010]offering quick fixes, instead.
[00:25:40.210]There are even voices questioning the concepts of history,
[00:25:43.470]memory, and the truth itself,
[00:25:46.420]including the truth about our own past.
[00:25:50.410]But as George Santayana famously said,
[00:25:54.080]those who cannot remember the past
[00:25:56.080]are condemned to repeat it, and that is also why
[00:26:00.030]events like this are so important.
[00:26:02.310]Thank you very much.
[00:26:03.711](applause)
[00:26:14.920]Thank you for your speech.
[00:26:17.880]I have a question...
[00:26:22.290]That relates to the end of your speech.
[00:26:26.300]You are...
[00:26:29.780]The end of your speech sounded like sort of a warning,
[00:26:33.930]or yeah, was a warning.
[00:26:39.030]Kind of a comment on current situation in Czech Republic,
[00:26:45.490]where there are, let's say...
[00:26:51.750]Rising political forces that are trying to...
[00:27:01.490]Undermine democratic values,
[00:27:05.260]or that's what I understood you kind of wanted to say.
[00:27:13.320]Well I wonder, how do you...
[00:27:19.262]How would you explain this sort of a change?
[00:27:24.510]Why does that happens?
[00:27:31.086]Yes.
[00:27:32.960]By the way, let me introduce Petra Hulova,
[00:27:37.040]a popular Czech writer.
[00:27:42.355]The question is well phrased.
[00:27:52.856]What I meant to say was a warning
[00:27:57.530]not only directed at my own country,
[00:28:00.740]although I don't hide.
[00:28:03.400]I'm rather concerned about some things
[00:28:08.270]going on there recently.
[00:28:13.470]It applies to most of the continent we live on, Europe,
[00:28:20.090]and to most of the European countries.
[00:28:22.650]If you look at every single election
[00:28:29.970]in the last two or three years,
[00:28:33.300]the number of votes for parties
[00:28:36.850]that are sometimes called populous,
[00:28:38.880]sometimes called anti-systemic, is invariably rising.
[00:28:45.998]It's a lesson that is not well understood
[00:28:48.990]because it's been overshadowed by events
[00:28:53.380]like the victory of President Macron in France.
[00:28:59.570]The fact that in Germany, the grand coalition
[00:29:04.050]is going to continue, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:29:10.410]In doing so, it obscures the fact that the number of people
[00:29:16.210]voting for Front Nationale,
[00:29:19.700]front for the alternative for Germany,
[00:29:23.130]and other of the anti-systemic parties
[00:29:25.290]is continually rising.
[00:29:29.007]Nowhere is this more evident than in central Europe,
[00:29:32.910]and some of the events recently in Hungary,
[00:29:37.610]in Poland, and lately in Slovakia,
[00:29:40.920]also point to a shared consent.
[00:29:46.780]I want to be a polite guest, but I...
[00:29:51.864](laughing)
[00:29:53.326]I have some suspicion
[00:29:57.290]that some of this is going on
[00:29:59.560]in this great country, as well.
[00:30:01.885](laughing)
[00:30:03.870]Why is this happening?
[00:30:07.460]I have a favorite, one of my favorite cartoons
[00:30:13.270]is a cartoon, 40 years old,
[00:30:19.090]about a character named Pogo.
[00:30:24.430]Pogo goes around and looks for all kinds of mischief,
[00:30:30.010]and enemies, and finally comes back and says,
[00:30:35.940]we have found the enemy, and the enemy is us.
[00:30:40.860]That strikes me as being very true.
[00:30:44.950]I think that we have been much too complacent
[00:30:51.340]in the democratic west over the last 20, 30 years,
[00:30:57.300]since the changes in 1989.
[00:31:00.690]I think we did not...
[00:31:04.920]For a time, we almost denied the existence
[00:31:10.960]of the category of an enemy as if no enemies ever existed.
[00:31:19.416]They do exist.
[00:31:22.597]We have been, I think, much too tolerant
[00:31:26.934]of corruption and political backroom dealing,
[00:31:32.570]and things of that kind.
[00:31:36.440]That people I think, quite justifiably, react against.
[00:31:44.110]For me, that's one of the factors.
[00:31:46.160]The other factor is the process of globalization,
[00:31:49.720]which has been quite often identified as a culprit.
[00:31:58.341]Which may have to do with the fact that although
[00:32:02.136]our media, our governments, our politicians
[00:32:07.540]are all living in the world
[00:32:13.400]of a global society these days
[00:32:15.860]because of global trade flows, and investment flows,
[00:32:20.880]and other such things that determine the success
[00:32:27.110]of a society, of an economy,
[00:32:29.350]most individual people still live in a local society.
[00:32:34.910]They don't spend every day worrying about
[00:32:42.310]climate change, and Ebola,
[00:32:44.890]and other global threats like this,
[00:32:51.560]but worry about how to get by train or bus to the next town,
[00:32:59.940]how to keep their job in a local factory,
[00:33:02.900]and how to get a decent education for their kids.
[00:33:07.964]Many of them apparently feel that the politicians
[00:33:12.989]have given them up, that they've forgotten about them,
[00:33:17.440]that they worry about Ebola, and climate change,
[00:33:22.558]and not worry about them.
[00:33:27.990]The sad, and last, and the most complex factor
[00:33:30.545]that I'm only beginning to try to understand,
[00:33:36.800]not to understand, to try to understand,
[00:33:40.414]is what happened to global information flows,
[00:33:45.680]and the verifiability...
[00:33:54.290]What happens with hundreds of millions people,
[00:34:00.020]more than a billion people on the Facebook
[00:34:05.380]who have a problem differentiating between
[00:34:09.650]what is actually true and correct,
[00:34:12.050]and what is not true and correct.
[00:34:20.000]For a long time, this seemed like something
[00:34:26.070]every major change brings about.
[00:34:30.085]The chaos of what an Austrian economist
[00:34:36.080]Schumacher called, creative destruction.
[00:34:40.620]More recently, some of it looks...
[00:34:46.139]To be in part, deliberate, and designed.
[00:34:56.150]The latest of these stories
[00:34:58.296]that we are trying to make sense out of
[00:35:02.230]is the story of the British company
[00:35:05.780]named Cambridge Analytica
[00:35:08.510]that apparently tampered with individual data,
[00:35:17.750]and electoral processes in said countries,
[00:35:25.700]possibly on behalf of,
[00:35:28.250]or with the support of Russian companies.
[00:35:34.545]There's one of the designers of,
[00:35:40.150]programmers of the company who was interviewed
[00:35:42.924]about this recently, introduced me to a new concept,
[00:35:47.830]which he called the concept of information dominance.
[00:35:51.360]Meaning that with the data they have at their disposal,
[00:35:57.610]they are able to bombard an individual
[00:36:02.380]with massive amounts of information, true or false,
[00:36:08.640]that will basically determine what they think about
[00:36:12.948]an event or about a process.
[00:36:14.910]That's what's called information dominance,
[00:36:17.810]and that's Orwellian for me, very, very scary.
[00:36:24.725]I apologize for taking so long with the answers. (laughs)
[00:36:29.960]Hello.
[00:36:30.793]I have a light-heartedly serious question.
[00:36:35.470]I was intrigued by your integration of the number eight
[00:36:39.960]across continents, literature, events that are historical.
[00:36:47.140]I happen to know a little bit about the fact that
[00:36:50.010]number eight is really important for the Chinese
[00:36:52.920]because it's linked with the idea of fortune.
[00:36:56.170]In Biblical studies, the number eight has relevance
[00:36:59.830]because it's linked to regeneration and resurrection.
[00:37:05.490]As you think in terms of social psychology
[00:37:08.640]about the relevance of number eight in the future,
[00:37:13.540]my question is, where is eight going to occur again?
[00:37:18.040]What can you predict about it?
[00:37:20.280]For the University of Nebraska-Lincoln,
[00:37:23.950]a big number that's coming up for us is 150
[00:37:28.030]because the university is celebrating 150 years.
[00:37:33.730]And 25, we have a 25 year plan in the works,
[00:37:37.530]but for you it's eight, which has its own kind of magic.
[00:37:42.200]So I'm wondering, what is the next important eight?
[00:37:48.140]Look.
[00:37:49.432](laughing)
[00:37:52.547]I've been educated as scientist, and I try to remain one.
[00:37:57.260]I mean, descriptively, there's no question
[00:38:00.510]that the number eight occurs disproportionately often
[00:38:09.010]in Czech history, but I'm far from drawing
[00:38:12.840]any major conclusions from that.
[00:38:17.950]The science of numbers exists in many cultures.
[00:38:25.750]And the problem with it is that it sometimes means
[00:38:31.280]different things for different people.
[00:38:34.310]In Hebrew, gematria, or in Judaism,
[00:38:40.470]the science of numbers assigns a number
[00:38:45.830]to every Hebrew letter, et cetera.
[00:38:51.390]Number 13, which for most of us in the west
[00:38:56.370]is such an unfortunate number,
[00:38:59.420]that many people avoid the 13th floor in the elevators,
[00:39:06.550]means life in Hebrew, HaShem.
[00:39:10.786]It's one of the luckiest numbers you can draw.
[00:39:16.880]I don't see a universal message there, I'm sorry.
[00:39:20.453](laughing)
[00:39:36.260]Thank you.
[00:39:37.830]My question is now 50 years after 1968,
[00:39:43.710]what is a perhaps better way to say it,
[00:39:48.400]how is the legacy of Prague Spring perceived
[00:39:53.420]in the Czech lands and in Slovakia?
[00:40:01.090]It's hard to say.
[00:40:05.560]One thing that struck me is that
[00:40:11.876]compared to this grand event
[00:40:14.610]organized at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln,
[00:40:19.160]there is no such event I know of
[00:40:23.010]that has been organized, or is planned for
[00:40:28.355]in the Czech Republic or in Slovakia.
[00:40:35.070]Again, largely because it probably meant
[00:40:40.330]different things for different people,
[00:40:47.670]it has had somewhat more positive meaning
[00:40:50.440]for Slovakia than for us in the Czech lands
[00:40:54.080]because Slovakia at least won one durable concession
[00:41:01.330]during 1968, and it was the federalization of the country,
[00:41:04.850]that after 1989 they used to bring about
[00:41:11.750]the Slovak independence.
[00:41:19.090]For many people, it's not so relevant as it used to be.
[00:41:23.790]It is very relevant for the people of my generation
[00:41:27.440]because for us, for me, but for every peer I had,
[00:41:34.560]the 1968 and August 21 was the most crucial day in my life.
[00:41:43.336]Certainly one of the two or three crucial days in my life,
[00:41:47.970]because that was the day when we could stop thinking
[00:41:53.320]and worrying about whether socialism was good,
[00:41:55.870]or whether it was possible, or whether it was reformable.
[00:42:00.600]It was over.
[00:42:01.650]For us, it was a settled question, once and for all.
[00:42:05.551]I think we were able to avoid after 1989,
[00:42:10.820]some of the mistakes other countries were making,
[00:42:15.627]largely because of this.
[00:42:18.260]But for my children's generation, the...
[00:42:27.490]Significance of 1968 is almost nil.
[00:42:34.048]We realized it in the Vaclav Havel Library
[00:42:37.080]when we planned a series of events for this eight year,
[00:42:50.022]and we discovered that some of our prospective speakers
[00:42:55.260]or audiences were not much interested.
[00:42:59.490]And some even said, why do you go on about 1968?
[00:43:06.063]It's 50 years ago.
[00:43:08.730]As it were.
[00:43:10.540]I mean, I think it was an important milestone.
[00:43:13.640]I think it did play its role.
[00:43:16.100]I think it will remain a part of the...
[00:43:23.940]Modern Czech history, but you can't ask of people
[00:43:30.466]to see it or understand it
[00:43:35.670]as a momentous milestone like I do,
[00:43:41.083]when they did not experience it.
[00:44:01.210]I recall that this is also
[00:44:02.850]the anniversary of Tomas Masaryk,
[00:44:06.240]as the president of the first republic.
[00:44:08.970]And yet I don't recall hearing very much about him
[00:44:12.590]in the Prague Spring, and the events of that time,
[00:44:16.010]and what led up to them.
[00:44:18.300]So I'm curious whether Masaryk
[00:44:20.270]and his philosophical thinking had much impact
[00:44:23.060]on the Prague Spring.
[00:44:24.610]And then how would Masaryk be evaluated today at 100?
[00:44:29.200]I'm thinking here of Zdenek David,
[00:44:30.960]my historian friend who's been writing a book for years now
[00:44:34.740]on the philosophy of Masaryk.
[00:44:40.400]Well, I think it's helpful
[00:44:44.030]if you think of the Prague Spring
[00:44:50.340]as a play of two acts with an intermission,
[00:44:57.820]the second of which never took place.
[00:45:05.917]The process was started by the Reformist Communists.
[00:45:12.890]It couldn't have been started by anyone else.
[00:45:16.030]They had to make some concessions
[00:45:18.950]for the discussion to start.
[00:45:23.145]For some time, they controlled
[00:45:29.600]the topics of the discussion, and the topics
[00:45:33.440]all revolved around socialism this, socialism that.
[00:45:40.560]And is it possible to have an opposition in socialism,
[00:45:45.670]and is it possible to have private property
[00:45:48.940]in a socialist country, and to what extent
[00:45:53.030]do the market rules and market laws apply,
[00:45:58.343]et cetera, et cetera?
[00:46:01.972]And they were largely the ones that had been heard.
[00:46:08.200]They were not the only ones.
[00:46:10.180]There was a smaller group of people
[00:46:16.040]who never adhered to the socialist orthodoxy,
[00:46:22.937]and who were much more directly linked to the pre-war,
[00:46:30.070]Democratic Czechoslovakia.
[00:46:35.400]They did invoke Masaryk, and his whole legacy.
[00:46:42.910]But they were people like Vaclav Havel,
[00:46:46.260]and others of his ilk, and what is notable
[00:46:53.870]is that Havel was not a prominent voice
[00:46:59.850]in the Prague Spring process.
[00:47:02.720]He was influential among non-communist writers.
[00:47:10.630]And intellectuals, he started the circle
[00:47:13.060]of non-communist writers, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:47:16.300]But he did not give any grand statements
[00:47:19.560]at the public meetings and in the media.
[00:47:26.980]In reality, he really became an activist
[00:47:32.030]following the invasion, not before the invasion.
[00:47:37.770]What I mean is that if the process was allowed to continue,
[00:47:43.740]there would have certainly been the second act
[00:47:46.940]with a discussion about not just social democracy,
[00:47:52.360]or socialism with a human face, but about democracy period.
[00:47:58.133]And on this, Masaryk would be as influential as ever,
[00:48:03.690]and he certainly continues to be influential
[00:48:09.910]in the debates we had after 1989.
[00:48:13.100]The current Czech Constitution is in part,
[00:48:16.930]shaped after the Czechoslovak Constitution of 1920,
[00:48:25.257]which was in significant part, Masaryk's work.
[00:48:32.830]The strong affiliation
[00:48:37.800]that the Czechs have felt, and still feel,
[00:48:43.300]for this country for the United States,
[00:48:45.760]of course has to do with the foundation of Czechoslovakia
[00:48:49.830]and Masaryk's role in it during the First World War.
[00:48:55.480]Even our...
[00:49:00.430]Better than standard, by European standards,
[00:49:04.360]relationship, is Israel.
[00:49:07.000]It's to a large part, Masaryk's legacy
[00:49:13.490]because he was the first European head of state
[00:49:16.550]who went to the British mandate Palestine
[00:49:20.360]to express his support for a Jewish homeland.
[00:49:28.200]He is an influence, but he was not to my memory,
[00:49:33.180]and I see at least three other eye witnesses
[00:49:40.950]here in this room of that time.
[00:49:44.270]I don't remember that Masaryk's name was often invoked
[00:49:48.680]in the first seven months of 1968.
[00:50:07.549]Okay, you must be getting hungry,
[00:50:08.980]so maybe one last question.
[00:50:13.570]Well maybe this will be
[00:50:14.403]an appropriate one.
[00:50:15.950]I want to ask you about Czechness,
[00:50:18.760]the spirit of being Czech.
[00:50:21.460]Especially for people who are not specialists
[00:50:23.180]in Czech history.
[00:50:24.530]And as a modern world historian myself,
[00:50:26.340]I just can't resist noting the extraordinary degree
[00:50:30.580]of impact that the very small number of people
[00:50:34.520]who live in the Czech lands have had,
[00:50:36.900]especially in the last 50 years, on major encouragement
[00:50:40.550]at a global level of liberal democracy.
[00:50:43.740]Here in the Prague Spring in 1968,
[00:50:46.590]again in 1977 with the founding of Charter 77,
[00:50:49.760]the pursuit of human rights within the Soviet bloc,
[00:50:52.730]and again with the Velvet Revolution in the late 1980s.
[00:50:55.350]It's an extraordinary record for a small number of people
[00:50:59.500]that they have given to a world
[00:51:01.210]that needed that kind of encouragement,
[00:51:02.770]and we may be, as you've already suggested,
[00:51:04.870]again at a time in history where clouds are darkening
[00:51:08.160]for liberal democracy in some ways,
[00:51:09.810]and it looks like we could use some help again.
[00:51:12.840]Is it possible that there is something about
[00:51:14.980]the Czech people that we may hear from them again?
[00:51:19.070]Well...
[00:51:22.540]I'm very cautious about answering questions of this kind.
[00:51:29.680]These are relevant question.
[00:51:31.370]I mean, there is, if you look at Czech history
[00:51:36.880]over the last 100 years,
[00:51:39.540]there is a note of Czech exceptionalism.
[00:51:47.168]In Czech letters...
[00:51:51.290]In political thinking, and in foreign policy questions.
[00:51:58.034]It almost certainly stems from Masaryk himself.
[00:52:04.100]After all, it was Masaryk who wrote that the Czech question
[00:52:07.440]is either a global question or it is not a question at all.
[00:52:13.610]In 1968, actually it...
[00:52:18.770]Found an expression five months after the invasion
[00:52:25.300]in December 1968, in a rather remarkable exchange
[00:52:30.930]between two foremost Czech writers,
[00:52:33.690]Milan Kundera and Vaclav Havel.
[00:52:39.150]And it was an exchange on Czech destiny.
[00:52:42.970]In this debate, it was actually Kundera
[00:52:46.640]who argued that the Czechs,
[00:52:50.850]or Czechs and Slovaks at that time,
[00:52:53.310]had a specific mission, specific relevance
[00:53:02.760]because of what happened in 1968
[00:53:05.900]for the future of the world,
[00:53:11.430]and a contribution to make,
[00:53:14.070]and that indeed, we were an exceptional nation.
[00:53:19.690]To which Havel, ever a skeptic, said,
[00:53:24.460]but you know, what did we really plan to achieve?
[00:53:30.350]I mean, to win pluralist democracy?
[00:53:34.890]Big deal.
[00:53:37.940]What special contribution we were able to make?
[00:53:45.330]In the end, he basically argued that
[00:53:49.050]we are people like any other,
[00:53:51.760]and that there are mostly, that it's mostly
[00:53:56.225]up to each individual to make a contribution
[00:54:03.770]to play a role.
[00:54:06.336]And in this, he saw some kind of Czech destiny,
[00:54:12.410]but he was strongly against mythologizing
[00:54:15.730]the period of 1968,
[00:54:20.396]and Czech destiny as the future savior
[00:54:27.326]of Europe or the world.
[00:54:28.220]We're not much of a savior nation.
[00:54:30.770]We have in our history, we have had I think,
[00:54:34.060]more heretics than we had saints.
[00:54:35.904](laughing)
[00:54:38.320]Thank you very much.
[00:54:39.621](applause)

The screen size you are trying to search captions on is too small!

You can always jump over to MediaHub and check it out there.

Comments

0 Comments

Keynote by Michael Žantovský at Prague Spring 50

Description

Searchable Transcript

Comments icon comment

Related Channels

Comments