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Newsgroups: bit.listserv.slovak-l
Date:         Fri, 24 Jul 1992 21:07:58 EST
From:         HAMMERL@UCS.INDIANA.EDU
Subject:      Skvorecky article
X-To:         Slovak-L@UBVM.cc.buffalo.edu

	The following article was published on the op-ed
page of the New York Times (22 July, 1992, p. A1), and is
being distributed to the Slovak-L network.

	After the Velvet Revolution
		By
	Josef Skvorecky

Toronto.  Raymond Chandler's Captain Webber, in "The Lady in
the Lake," tells Phillip Marlowe:  Police business . . . is
a hell of a problem.  It's a good deal like politics.  It
asks for the highest type of men, and there's nothing in it
to attract the highest tyoe of men.  So we have to work with
what we get.
	What they got in Czechoslovakia, after the recent
elections, was described by Respekt, the pro-Velvet
Revolution weekly: a parliament "full of Gogolian little men
reminiscent of the times of normalization," that is, the
decades after the Russian invasion of 1968, when the
"parliament" was an assembly of faceless yes men.  The
resignation of Vaclav Havel this week sadly underlines the
ascendancy of these "little men."
	Gone are the joyful exceptions to Captain Webber's
gloomy view, the youngish men and women (a great number of
them) of integrity and unimpeachable past, former dissidents
of the Charter 77 movement.  They were replaced by old
hands, many of them dirtied by membership in the Communist
Party or the collaborationist shop-window parties of the
Communist era.
	They have replaced the dissidents at the moment when
the common state of the two nations, Czech and Slovak, is
about to fall apart.  When a Slovak woman dared to give
President Havel a bunch of flowers and was almost lynched by
a mob in the Slovak capital, it became clear to me that
something was rotten in Slovakia.
	As much as I hate to see two people who are so close
to each other historically and linguistically torn asunder,
I must say good riddance to the Slovak separatists.  Owing
to the ominous politics of the victorious Slovak party of
Vladimir Meciar, Slovakia has become a burden to the Czech
lands, economically, politically and morally.  The Czechs
will be better off without it.
	In the past two years, while Mr. Havel's people were
effecting the peaceful transition--never before tried in
history--from totalitarianism to democracy, these old hands
regrouped and, making the most of errors by the
unexperienced parliamentarians, ousted the children of the
Velvet Revolution from positions of influence.
	The pattern is always the same.  As Joseph Conrad
wrote: "The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and
devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin
a movement--but it away from them . . . Afterwards comes the
turn of all the pretentious intellectual failures of the
time."
	The demise of the Velvet Revolutionists was partly
the democrats' own fault.  Instead of pragmatically forming
a democratic coalition with the liberal Civic Democratic
Party, led by Vaclav Klaus, they splintered among various
groups, none of which received the necessary 5 percent of
votes.  Mr. Klaus's party won decisively, and most of its
supporters, though not Chartists, are not burdened with a
Communist past.  But the people who risked jail rather than
live with theh lie in the long years of Communist rule are
mostly gone.
	The Czech Communist Party, which won 14 percent of
the vote, stays put.  It is an unrepentant mafia of
Stalinists that never apologized to the nation for 40 years
of horror.  The affrontery of its spokesman was demonstrated
recently by its chairman, Jiri Svoboda.
	He recently asserted that Mr. Klaus's democratic
movement--not his own neo-Communist Party--was now
representative of Bolshevik thinking, since Mr. Klaus is
trying to establish a one-party rule.  That, of course, is
like saying that the U.S. is a one-party state because the
election winner appoints his people to government.  In
Czechoslovakia, however, any one-party rule is firmly
associated with the unlimited domination of the Communists,
unhindered by a real parliament and by real elections every
four years.
	Though Mr. Svoboda has claimed that his party has
radically changed its character, reports from Communist
meetings tell another story.  At one recent gathering, a
comrade said that 150,000 political prisoners were not so
many in a country of 14 million people.  He was rewarded by
thunderous applause.
	It is not surprising that the anti-Havel coalition
in the Czech republic consists of the extreme left (the Left
Bloc, including the Communists) and the extreme right (the
so-called Republican Party.)  Left-leaning Americans don't
like to hear this but Communists and fascists are two peas
in a pod, and the anti-Havel group is merely another
example.
	The decisive anti-Havel force, however, is Mr.
Meciar's party in Slovakia.  It is the tragedy of the
Slovaks that the only time in history they had an
"independent" state was during World War II as a Nazi
satellite.  With due respect to historical truth, it was
fascism with a somewhat human face.  Few members of the
banned opposition parties, including the Communists, were
persecuted.  Gustav Husak, the notorious Communist leader,
even held a government job then.  But the Slovak state
carried out the Nuremberg laws and deported its Jewish
citizens to Auschwitz.  The surviving members of that
state's political elite are the hard-core elements of the
World Congress of Slovaks, an influential separatist
organization based mainly in the U.S. and Canada.
	Mr. Meciar's party, as far as I know, does not have
official links to the Slovak Congress.  A smaller, wildly
anti-Semitic group has.  But Mr. Meciar shares that group's
basic tenets, including separatism.  The extremely loose
"federation" he suggests has no precedent and is
unacceptable to the Czechs.  They must refuse it, and thus
they will appear as wreckers of the common state.  Mr.
Meciar is a clever political wheeler-dealer, a former
prizefighter who is reckless and brutal.  He is also a
former Communist.
	It is, therefore, hardly surprising that more than
one-half of the ministers he appointed are former
Communists.  Neither is it surprising that one of Mr.
Meciar's main election promises is the abolishing of the
lustration law, passed by the outgoing Parliament, which
would exclude high Communists functionaries from public
office for five years.  Mr. Meciar has nominated for Slovak
Minister of Culture Dusan Slobodnik, a translator of
American fiction who has a somewhat sinister past.
	In May 1944, he joined the Hlinka Guards, as SS-like
organization of youth, and volunteered to be sent to an SS
training camp.  Cadets of this camp were involved in at
least one mass atrocity in Moravia.  In April 1945, Mr.
Slobodnik was arrested by the N.K.V.D. (forerunner of the
K.G.B.) and spent the next eight years in the Soviet Union.
There some journalists say, he became a K.G.B. agent.
	Mr. Slobodnik confirms most of these allegations but
asserts that he was in the SS camp involuntarily, that he
took part in no massacres and that he never was a K.G.B.
agent.  He may be telling the truth.  The point is that any
American politician with similar spots in his past would be
subject to merciless scrutiny by Senate committees.  Nobody,
however, seems to be scrutinizing Mr. Slobodnik.
	The ultimate irony is that all these Communists and
former Communists owe a debt to President Havel--and many
non-Communists are holding this against him.  His Velvet
Revolution may have prevented a much worse revolution, one
with bodies hanging from lampposts--no small achievement
after four decades of terrorist rule by the Communists.  The
comrades owe him a debt, but they have never been famous for
gratitude.  The only argument most of them understand is
precisely the argument of the lampposts.
	It seems to me that the battle for democracy in
Czechoslovakia is only beginning.
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