Welcome to Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good, I'm Spencer Critchley. A short episode this time, with some thoughts about memory and freedom, as we risk obliviously repeating catastrophic mistakes others have already made. This episode is also available as a video on YouTube. Just search there for Dastardly Cleverness. You can find links and a transcript at dastardlycleverness.com. I hope you like it.
Most of us in the US have been spared the necessity of knowing history, and instead we've been able to live as if the world was created at our birth. But people in Central and Eastern Europe have already been trammeled by the history that has just now caught up with us. They've been trying to warn us about it for decades. Back in 1979, Czech writer Milan Kundera warned what it’ s like to live under what he called a “President of Forgetting,” the Soviet-controlled Gustáv Husák.
Husák knew that in order for Czechs to believe in totalitarianism as their future, they had to forget their history. This is from Kundera’ s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: “If Franz Kafka is the prophet of a world without memory, Gustáv Husák is its builder… You begin to liquidate a people… by taking away its memory. You destroy its books, its culture, its history. And then others write other books for it, give another culture to it, invent another history for it.
Then the people slowly begins to forget what it is and what it was. The world at large forgets it still faster…” Our President of Forgetting is every bit as hostile to history as Husák was. He invents an alternative “great America” — one that no one who believes in the founding vision of America can ever call great. And in one of history’s notorious rhymes, our President of Forgetting is also obedient to a Russian dictator.
The distinction between them, without much of a difference, is that Husák answered to a communist Russian dictator, while Donald Trump is ever so eager to please a fascist Russian dictator. And yet Trump commands the loyalty of tens of millions of Americans, who are descended from a generation willing to die free rather than live under fascism.
The Polish writer Csezlaw Milosz watched friends — highly educated, apparently free-thinking friends — embrace authoritarian rule, under both Nazi and communist occupation. In The Captive Mind, Milosz describes how it happened, one convenient step after another: “One compromise leads to a second, and a third, until at last, though everything one says may be perfectly logical, it no longer has anything in common with the flesh
and blood of living people.” Because forgetting is easy and remembering can be very hard, people will cooperate in their oppression, and even assist in the oppression of their neighbors. Václav Havel watched it happen, as an author, poet, playwright, and resister, before he became the first president of a free Czechoslovakia.
In his essay “The Power of the Powerless,” he describes how a “ posttotalitarian” system succeeds by simply training people to accept pervasive dishonesty — how many of us do that every day? Havel writes: “Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie.
It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.” To keep freedom alive, Havel tells us, we must continue to live truthfully. Even when that isn’ t allowed, we can find small parts of our lives where it’ s possible, and try to make them bigger. We can — and must — remember what freedom is like, and remind each other, day by day.
As Kundera wrote, also in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against oblivions.”