From: jzhang@SDCC3.UCSD.EDU
Newsgroups: soc.culture.china
Subject: _Paradise Lost_ and _Witch Hunt in Prague_
Date: 10 Apr 92 04:31:29 GMT

On April 9 and 16 issues of The New York Review of Books, there are
two detailed accounts of the situation in Czechoslovakia, which may
be of interest to netters concerned about social transformations in
Eastern Europe and China.  One of the articles is by Vaclav Havel,
entitled "Paradise Lost"; another is by Jeri Laber, entitled "Witch Hunt
in Prague" centering on the recently passed "lustration" law which
was opposed but signed by Havel. The following UPI news give a summary
of Havel's article.

-Zhenqin Li
------------

From: clarinews@clarinet.com (PETER S. GREEN)


	PRAGUE, Czechoslovakia (UPI) -- In a moving reflection published
Thursday in an American literary journal, Czechoslovak President Vaclav
Havel attacked the decline of morality and public order in his country,
but insisted he can still fulfill his self-appointed role as its moral
leader.
	In an article in the New York Review of Books, Havel decries what he
called ``an enormous and blinding explosion of every kind of human vice''
in Czechoslovakia.
	The article is partially excerpted from an earlier speech and a book
by Havel, but its appearance this week appears to reflect Havel's
continued concerns.
	The euphoria that followed the 1989 ``Velvet Revolution'' has been
replaced by a public outpouring of all the grievances built up during
four decades of communist rule.
	After blaming the communist regime he helped overthrow for quietly
encouraging ``a wide range of questionable or at least ambivalent human
tendences ... pressed to serve the ends of the totalitarian system,''
Havel then launched a broadside against modern life.
	``Society has freed itself, it is true, but in some ways it behaves
worse than when it was in chains,'' he wrote. He noted the skyrocketing
crime rate and what he called the ``familiar sewage'' that always
``wells up from the nether regions of the collective psyche'' during
hard times and overflows into the mass media.
	``But there are other, more serious and dangerous symptoms: hatred
among nationalities, suspicion, racism, even signs of fascism. Vicious
demagoguery, intrigue and deliberate lying, politicking, an
unrestrained, unheeding struggle for purely particular interests, a
hunger for power, unadulterated ambition, fanaticism of every
imagineable kind, new and unprecedented varieties of robbery, the rise
of different mafias, (and) the general lack of tolerance, understanding,
taste, moderation, reason.''
	``Many a once-feared communist is now an unscrupulous capitalist ...
laughing in the face of the same workers whose interests he once claimed
to defend,'' Havel continued.
	Still, he added, ``I am persuaded time and time again, that a huge
potential of good will is slumbering within our society.''
	He adds politicians have a duty to awaken that potential. Communism
was overthrown ``by life, by thought, by human dignity,'' he said, and
these same principles should be the guiding principles of a moral
politician.
	Last week, Havel told an interviewer that as long as he had some
support in both the Czech and Slovak halves of Czechoslovakia, he would
run for re-election when his term ends after the June 5-6 parliamentary
elections.
	Havel wrote that because he is not bound by a love for power, he has
been able as president to maintain the principles of moral behavior that
sustained him through his years as a dissident human rights activist,
including seven years in prison.
	``I still believe that politics in its very essence does not
necessarily require one to behave immorally,'' Havel wrote.
	But the president said in fact, he became aware of the difficulties
only a few weeks ago.
	The occasion was his signing, against his better judgment, of a law
on screening citizens for links to the communist-era secret police.
	Until then, he said, ``I did not really appreciate that the way of
truly moral politics is not simple, or easy.''