Charter 77

Musical intro Twisted Sister, “We’re Not Gonna Take It” Queen, “I Wanna Break Free”

Prague Spring, Normalization, Musical Underground. Where are we now?

• failed: reforming the system from within doesn’t work.

• 1968 invasion: opposing the regime with force is impossible.

• We need a third way, which is something that Havel (as we’ve seen) outlines in “Power of the Powerless,” but this idea took a long while to come into being.

• Normalization as “Biafra of the soul” (Louis Aragon).

- Normalization was instituted in the early 1970s and was described at the time as the “Biafra of the soul/spirit.” Biafra was a breakaway Nigeria republic from 1967-1970, and this rupture led to a civil war in which millions died from violence and starvation.

- Aragon is saying that the Soviet invasion and Czechoslovak normalization was a kind of violence to the spirit of Prague Spring, the murdering of the nation’s cultural soul – and this was not easy to rebound from.

- So we will be…

• Circling back to “Power” (in a hermeneutic way).

- Not – I hope! – a vicious circle, but what we can call a hermeneutic circle: Wikipedia defines this term as referring to a process whereby “one’s understanding of a text as a whole is established by reference to the individual parts and one’s understanding of each individual part by reference to the whole. Neither the whole text nor any individual part can be understood without reference to one another and hence, the circle.”

1 - Our “text” is the culture of dissent in in the 1960s through the late 1980s, so we circle back from whole to parts to whole hermeneutically.

- Havel’s text (1978) can be read as a justification for Charter (1977), as an analysis of the context in which an organization like Charter can make sense and can become an effective way to confront the regime: not as a political opposition, but as an organization that focuses on process.

- Today’s talk on as both real and imagined cultural space overlaps with our discussion of the musical underground: we complete the basic story of Czechoslovak dissent in connecting the one with the other. Let’s see how this can be done.

Setting the stage for the “third way”

• The trial of the Plastics (and others) led to a coalition.

- As we mentioned in Tuesday’s class, the trial of the Plastics (and others related to the musical underground) served a catalyst for conceptualizing a different way of confronting the post- totalitarian regime.

- The trial was used by Havel to prompt creation of the Charter, which Havel referred to as a

“citizens’ initiative” (or at least that was the intent).

- Havel took the opportunity that the regime’s persecution of members of the musical undergound afforded to put together a coalition of people from distinct sociopolitical currents who might not agree on much of anything specific but who could all agree that these musicians shouldn’t be persecuted.

- Ivan Jirous (Magor) and Havel joined forces: the leader of the musical underground scene and the leading dissident intellectual.

2 - These were two spheres that didn’t really overlap at the time and part of overcoming the

“biafra of the soul” in Czechoslovak society was to remedy that.

• Who was in the coalition? The members of that coalition included:

• (1) Reform communists.

- That is, those who had been purged from the party after the invasion (eg, Zdenek Mlynar, chief architect of the state’s reform proposal, which was in May 1968 manifesto titledd

“Towards a Democratic Reorganization of Society.” He was an early signatory of the Charter – and he eventually emigrates to Vienna).

- After the Soviet invasion and as part of “normalizing” the country, the Party purged tens of thousands of members after 1969, and a large bloc of Charter signatories came from here.

- These were people who knew the system, had once been idealists, but had become disillusioned; they were the biggest block of Charter signatories.

- They were mostly still committed to leftist politics, but they could agree that the current system hadn’t been working for a long time and needed to be fundamentally reformed.

• (2) Intellectual dissidents.

- That is, people like Havel who had never been members of the Party; some others here included, in the Czech context, a small but active group of Catholic intellectuals (the Catholic element was stronger in Slovakia; cf. in this regard Tomas Halik, who was a secretly ordained priest in Czechoslovakia and who did not sign the Charter but went on to great post-1989 prominence).

- These people were not necessarily leftists politically speaking: they could, however, agree with the reform communists that the system needed to be fundamentally changed.

3 • (3) Members of the musical underground (eg, Ivan Jirous/Magor).

- Until Havel brought them together, the members of the first two groups and the third group really didn’t have much of anything in common with each other.

- There was a generational divide, and also a divide in terms of cultural tastes and educational background.

- They were from radically different spheres of life.

- But there was also a strong philosophical overlap (commonalities in thinking), which Havel recognized immediately and sought to exploit.

- The Charter movement reframed a lot of what had already been written about in the underground (for example, in Jirous’ manifesto “A Report on the Third Czech Musical

Revival”), but took this line of thinking in a less vulgar – less confrontational and more philosophical/sophisticated – direction. It made these ideas more acceptable to a broader public, especially to intellectuals.

- In this way…

• The Charter was about consensus and about process.

- It was about politics but about politics in what we have labeled a “communicative” – and not an “instrumental” – sense.

- Havel set about uniting those opposed to the regime from across the political spectrum and this union would not be – could not have been! – a political opposition in any traditional sense of the word.

- Its central mission was rather to guarantee and protect .

- The Charter’s concerns were therefore: legislation/law (and here we think of the Jazz

Section), human rights, events outside Czechoslovakia related to human rights (eg, the

4 Chernobyl explosion in April 1986), the international peace movement and anti-nuclear movement.

- The initial Charter proclamation characterizes the group as “a loose, informal and open association of people of various shades of opinion, faiths and professions, united by the will to strive individually and collectively to promote in our own country and throughout the world respect for the civic and human rights embodied in the UN Universal Declaration of Human

Rights and accorded to all by the International Covenants and the Final Act of the

Conference.”

- This was its actual intent, and not merely camouflage for a political opposition.

- One of the original spokespeople for the Charter said that “the essence of the Charter is a call to full and active citizenship”; its mission was “to examine whether or not the laws and regulations to which a state is committed are being put into practice.”

How might we understand the Charter in contemporary terms?

(1) We might think of it as an NGO. What’s an NGO? Eg, a “watchdog” organization, independent of government that serves as a check on concentrated power (in the government, in industry, in collusion between the two). That is, it was a classic entity (a cornerstone) of civil society in a democracy. One of its purposes was to serve as a kernel of that kind of society within an authoritarian context.

(2) We might also understand the Charter as an attempt to answer the trillion dollar question that still plagues the post-1989 modern consumer-industrial, democratic world: ie, How do we restore (or maybe really create for the first time) a general sense of political agency?

5 - For reformist Communists, this was more about how do we restore the original idealism of the Party and overcome the indifference and cynicism that had replaced it?

- For others, it may have been a question more like what we’d ask today: how do we get people to think about more than their own comfortable lives? How do we get them to stop listening to

Karel Gott and watching escapist TV shows in order to take responsibility for fixing the mess of the society that they live in? That is, how do we get the greengrocer to stop hanging up the ideological sign in his shop window, or at least think about what it means when he does so?

- How, in other words, do we somehow convince the powerless that they are actually powerful?

- We are still asking this question; we have not found an answer. Modern political parties in the

US have various inauthentic answers to it: databases of voter profiles that lead to targeted mailings (regular and virtual) that try to rile up the party base over this or that issue in order to get them to give money for TV ads and ultimately to bring them to the polls, but these are ultimately degenerate or inauthentic ways of answering the question. How do we restore a sense of political agency – politics as an active form of caring for the community – in an authentic, non-manipulative way?

- Another way we might think of the Charter – and, indeed, also the musical underground – is as a symbolic space or imagined community. And this way of characterizing the brings as to

Havel’s essay on the trial.

Havel’s “The Trial” as imagined cultural space of dissent

• Musical underground as cultural space

6 - Maybe you didn’t go to the concerts or listen to the music, but you knew others who did or you knew that it existed.

- You could “participate” in the underground as a cultural space; you could identify with it.

• The Charter acts the same way.

- Even if you didn’t sign the Charter – and very few people did! – its impact in the culture-at- large was much greater.

- It wasn’t just a “symbol” of resistance to the regime – or rather we need to understand that symbols (symbolic spaces) are potentially quite powerful.

- They aren’t mere abstractions.

- They can matter in significant ways if people identify with them strongly and invest themselves in them, if only from afar.

- A symbolic space that works this way can serve as a locus for a movement.

- In fact, you could argue that without symbolic identification of this sort, an actual movement is impossible. If we think of the trajectory of dissent, then identifying with a symbolic space or imagined community is a personal act (perhaps also an interpersonal one if you and a bunch of your friends are all on board) that takes a step down the trajectory toward involvement in a cultural (and perhaps political) movement.

• Havel’s “The Trial” attempts to create just such a space

- That is, it attempts to frame the story of the Plastics in a way that would prove attractive to lots of different people.

- Havel contributes to the myth of the musical underground: the Plastics were innocent/pure representatives of youth culture, politically naïve, who just want to make music, and the regime

7 brutally suppressed them for that. The essay is a way of creating a neutral meeting ground for hippie youths and intellectuals.

- Let me be clear: it’s not that Havel’s framing was entirely wrong – there’s a lot in it that’s true – but that it is a rhetorical reshaping of the events surrounding the Plastics that becomes a seductive formulation, a mythological space with surprising power. A cultural meme, if you will that is more than just one concrete event with all the messy details that concrete events tend to have. So…

• The Charter becomes, in Jonathan Bolton’s terms, “a kind of story-telling that helped forge identities.”

- The Charter (and again I cite Bolton) “had more to do with a sense of activity, an assertion of autonomy, a taking control of one’s fate, than with any articulated allegiance to human rights.”

- It should be easy for us to think about similar symbolic spaces in contemporary American culture (our campaigns against bullying or for gun control, Black Lives Matter, #itgetsbetter,

#metoo), and how the same things play out here as they played out in mid-1970s

Czechoslovakia.

- Another example (perhaps in a degenerate sense?) might be sports teams: the Badgers or

Patroits Nation. One point here is that human beings long to be part of something bigger than themselves: we crave a fuller sense of identity than mere personal identity provides. We are fundamentally social creatures (so a “life in truth” really can’t be just a “life in one’s own personal truth”.

- All of this, however, raises a question:

• Was the Charter political?

8 - It’s hard to answer this question without first making clear what we mean by “political” (and maybe that’s the point).

- It was not political in a conventional sense, but it did operate in that fuzzy boundary between cultural/political that we see in the trajectory of dissent.

- Is it political to ask that the state respect its own laws and the principles of international accords that it has signed onto? What does it mean to be political? What is politics?

- This is a question that we are constantly fighting over in contemporary America, too. (Is asking for gun control after a mass shooting “politicizing” the tragedy and shouldn’t we just stick to “thoughts and prayers”?)

- One thing is, however, certain: that…

The Charter combined Bolton’s two of the three narratives of dissent

• It was grounded in the of 1975.

- There were two clauses in final agreement that related to political freedoms and human rights: these were known as the International Covenants on Human Rights. This created a standard by which an individual nation or government could be measured and fall short; all signatories of the Helsinki Accords had to also agree to respect these in their home states.

- These were made part of the Czechoslovak legal code – very quietly by the regime – in

November 1976. There was, of course, a flagrant discrepancy between the legal code that contained them and the reality on the ground in Czechoslovakia, and Charter was created partly to point that out. The Chartists understood this discrepancy as a challenge: to expose the regime’s hypocrisy, to activate the public’s interest in this discrepancy.

9 - One of the original signatories of the Charter described this as the regime’s Achilles heel, which is why the regime reacted to the formation of the Charter with near hysteria.

• It was also a kind of functioning parallel polis.

- It was a community of like-minded individuals working together to get things done. It was a ground-floor organization in a potentially nascent civil society.

• It was not, however, composed of “ordinary” people.

- It was an elite organization, even with the addition of the musical underground.

- In Czechoslovakia, it was a small group of intellectuals and artists – but the symbolic cultural space that they created had significance beyond the group (for East Central Europe as a whole and also beyond).

- For various reasons that the story will prompt us to think about, the movement in

Czechoslovakia remained confined to a small segment of society until very late in the game.

Philosopher of the Charter: Jan Patocka.

- He was also one of its original signatories and spokespeople, although he hesitated a long time before agreeing.

- He became, along with Havel, one of the Charter’s original spokespeople (one of the main faces of the organization at the outset).

• Patocka was the driving force behind a moral conception of the Charter.

- He wrote: “From the Charter we may expect a new spiritual orientation to enter our life – an orientation toward basic human rights, towards morality in political and private life. The

Charter will not stop reminding us – or people abroad – no matter what risk such activities entail.”

10 - Another quote from Patocka with regard to why the Charter was founded – and how it relates to emerging from the “biafra of the spirit” that characterized Czechoslovakia during the early

1970s:

• “Passivity only makes the situation worse. The greater the fear and servility, the more brazen the authorities become. Only when the authorities are convinced that injustice and discrimination will not be ignored, will they lessen the pressure.”

- As we have mentioned, Patocka became a martyr for the Charter, dying after an intense police interrogation in March 1977.

PICTURES

How did the Charter work?

• Spokespersons.

- There were three spokespeople who rotated and these bore the brunt of the regime’s attention.

(Why do you think there were three?)

• Three original spokespeople: Havel, Patocka, Jiri Hajek (reform communist, foreign minister in Dubcek’s 1968 government).

• Other spokespeople that we’ve encountered: Jiri Dienstbier (stoker), Marta Kubisova

(singer) – both in Garton Ash’s Magic Lantern account.

• Documentation and debates.

- That is, reports on arrests and interrogations, on public life in general to keep a record of the period.

11 - Each official Charter document was numbered and catalogued. Other materials – open letters, communiqués, declarations – were also issued but not numbered. During its first decade,

Charter 77 issued over 300 numbered documents.

- Debates and meeting that were part of the “second culture” or “parallel polis”: we could think of part of the Charter’s activity as a training ground for post-regime political leaders, which indeed became the case. Many Charter signatories are the same people who rose to prominence in and then the post-1989 government (at least in its early incarnation).

- Charter called itself a “working human society,” but in practice only a small minority of

Chartists did the work and the “passive majority” had little influence on its activities.

• Distribution.

- How was the Charter – and the documents associated with it – distributed?

- They had no access to TV or the media, but they did have an extensive network and were able to smuggle documents out of the country and have them published abroad.

- The dramatic story of how the original document got to the signatories.

- cf. H. Gordon Skilling. Samizdat and an Independent Society in Central and Eastern Europe.

Offshoot of Charter:

VONS (April 1978)

• Committee for the Unjustly Persecuted (VONS is the Czech acronym).

- It was established as off-shoot of the Charter by a group of Charter signatories.

• It distanced itself carefully from the Charter: it wasn’t an official part of the Charter but it also wasn’t completely separate (same people).

12 • Its aims:

- It closely followed the cases of people who were being harassed by the regime,

- It wanted to help them with legal representation and material support.

- It sent representatives to their trials to document them.

- It documented harassment and made it openly known (they smuggled reports abroad to BBC,

Voice of America, etc.).

- Havel is one co-founder, and in 1979 he and several others are put on trial and given prison sentences of varying lengths: Havel’s lasts until 1983.

• VONS represented a more radical wing of the Charter.

- Some in Charter didn’t want to confront the regime so directly, which is why it was an off- shoot of the organization.

The Charter gave rise rather quickly to the:

Anti-Charter (late January 1977)

This was…

• The regime’s formal response to the Charter.

- It forced artists, musicians, actors, and other cultural/intellectual figures to formally declare their support for socialism; if they hesitated, they lost the right to practice their professions.

Karel Gott was an enthusiastic supporter of the Anti-Charter!

• It was not officially called the “Anti-Charter.”

- In fact the Charter was not mentioned at all, but everyone in the cultural/intellectual elite knew what the anti-charter was about.

13 - It does explicitly invoke the human rights clauses in the Helsinki Accords and makes the claim that it is the state – not the “traitors” (those who signed the Charter) – that is intent on enforcing them.

- In addition to the anti-charter…

• The regime also launched a mass media campaign and a campaign of harassment against Charter signatories.

- As we’ve said, this campaign was more difficult for those signatories who were not based in

Prague and not well-known in the West.

- Chartists in fact discouraged people who had a lot to lose from signing. They even had a list of signatories that were to remain unpublished: people who wished to sign but who, for various reasons, did not want to become the center of the regime’s attention.

- The Charter at the start accommodated this form of personal dissent, but then decided to stop doing it: the unpublished signatures were vulnerable to police seizure (and this did happen) and also the Charter was supposed to be a public document, so unpublished signatures didn’t make any sense in that respect (although it did make some personal sense for those who signed in this way).

• The regime’s hysterical response promoted Charter as a symbolic space.

- That is, their overreaction backfired.

PICTURES

One thing we should note:

Language of the Charter

Bolton has described it as:

14 • Bolton: “earnest, methodical, plodding.”

- … and “full of nebulous thoughts.”

- There is “hardly a striking rhetorical device or colorful turn of phrase in the whole text; the prevailing tone is studied emotionlessness with little pathos, anger or excitement.”

• This was intentional.

- The Charter’s ethic of solidarity is encoded in its legalistic style.

- Bolton again: “the point was to fashion a neutral language in which violations of international pacts could be articulated without strained melodrama, and without smuggling in any ideological commitments that might dissuade signatories.”

- The text of the document contents itself with a negative delineation of what the Charter is not: ie, not a base for political opposition, not even a formal organization.

- The positive program is in the third-to-last paragraph and is formal and noncommittal.

- But still – for all its faults – it had a huge impact: for first time in Czechoslovakia, dissent had a name and the word Chartist (side by side with “dissident”!) entered the vocabulary. (And if something doesn’t have a name, then it doesn’t really exist, does it?)

- It excited people not because of the text but because of the document: the signing ritual and the symbolic (and literal) joining of a community committed to doing things differently.

- It gave people hope for change.

Summing up and the Charter post-1989

• Charter as mythological/imagined space.

- As a political opposition, it was absurd: only 243 original signatories and not even several thousand by the end of the 1980s.

15 - It had neither people nor weapons.

- It did have a strong international presence. It was a locus of “dissent” from a Western perspective.

- But it was also a space that people could feel an affinity for, participate in from a safe distance. It was an idea whose time had come. In a certain respect, then, the pen was actually mightier than the sword (or the tank).

• Charter as “performative democracy” and nascent civil society.

- It tried to hold the regime accountable for its commitments.

- It involved people personally standing up for a better society and putting their own personal security and comfort on the line to “vouch” for that.

- We might think of this in terms of theatre: Charter didn’t have “power” in any pragmatic sense, but it had the power to enact, through its efforts, what a better society ought to look like; it showed people, at least in a small way, what was possible.

• Bolton’s summary of Charter’s significance.

- “The Charter shaped a moral appeal, proposed a unitary identity, defended itself against the new levels of persecution it had evoked, led to major new initiatives in samizdat publishing, and fostered new contacts (some friendly, some frictional) among a wildly diverse group of individuals. It remapped the landscape of protest, creating a world of ideas and practices that no future opposition could ignore.”

• Charter segues into Civic Forum in the late 1980s.

- Many signatories take leading roles in the Civic Forum.

- After 1989, the Civic Forum does gradually become a political organization in the conventional sense of the word, which causes it to break apart.

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Next week

• There will be a quiz on Tuesday: the intersecting stories of the musical underground and

Charter 77.

• Next Tuesday: two one-act plays by Havel, “Audience” and “Unveiling.”

- Look at How to Read a Play first.

- Look at the guide questions!

- Remember that these are absurdist (in a special way): expect the situation to deviate from an unexpected norm at some point in each play.

• Wednesday’s discussion: two fables from Slavenka Drakulic’s book A Guided Tour through the Museum of Communism.

• Next Thursday: our first guest speaker! Delia Popescu on “power” in Havel and beyond.

- There is a reading for this lecture that has been posted to Canvas on the guest speaker page.

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