EUROPEAN ALLIANCE OF ACADEMIES
WHEN FREEDOM DIES CENTIMETRE BY CENTIMETRE
16
In times of an economic pragmatism that reduces democracy to “business”, do we have to – as I often hear in Europe today – redefine human rights? Fortunately, human destinies are not guided by the contrivances of politicians or historians. Society is an enigmatic beast with many faces and hidden potentialities. In my view, people are evidently troubled by the question: What am I to do with my life; how am I to come to terms with and endure my existential, ethical, and civic dilemmas? I spent almost three years in China, where the worst manifestations of capitalism and communism have “wedded”, and the economy is whirring away sweetly – but without human rights. In an era of neoliberalism, many quickly forget such concepts as human rights, democracy, and freedom of expression, not even bothered when the Internet is censored. Where money speaks, is truth silent? The importance of culture and art came home to me in China.
Radka Denemarková
Europe is lugging around the unresolved traumas and stigmatisations of past centuries. For years, the continent has been shaped solely by a web of the burdens from the past, remnants of past injustices, distributions of power, collective guilt, and collective victimhood. Populism is a political stance that adapts to the feelings, prejudices, and fears prevalent among a population, exploiting them to define a political agenda that promises quick and easy solutions to all problems. And the underlying populist sentiment found in many countries around the world today – be it in traditional or newly emerging democracies – is fanned by demagogues and exploited mercilessly. But Europe also has other traditions. As far as the Czech Republic is concerned, I find it hard today to imagine a time when Charter 77, founded by Václav Havel, did not exist. Such a notion conjures up the feeling of a moral vacuum and a total relativity of values. Charter 77 was the first significant act of solidarity in the communist era, and it was the beginning of a civic engagement that brought with it an atmosphere of equality, solidarity, belonging, community, and self-sacrificing commitment to mutual support. But all this was wiped out in 1989, made as if it had never existed. Anyone who has lived as Russia’s vassal in a socialist country and in an occupied regime seems unable to live in any other world. The former “party comrades” are today trying to establish capitalism “with a socialist face” in Bohemia: The elect and the oligarchs are triumphing without contest, and free competition and the rule of law do not exist (just as it was common practice in socialism to wipe the enemy off the board with political persecution). The old mentality has also survived into the present: It is not the gifted and able who are encouraged, but those with lesser talents, on the condition that they excel only in allegiances and ruthlessness. In general, one could say that the Czech Republic physically survived incarceration – six years of National Socialist and forty years of Communist rule – but returned psychologically to the free world as a wreck, with the ability to satisfy
