Charter 77 Turns 30

by emptywheel

Some of you may not know that my graduate work included a significant chunk of work on Czech feuilletons, from the earliest classics from the poet Jan Neruda (he's the guy Pablo Neruda borrowed his name from) to the samizdat feuilletons that were an important part of dissident culture preceding the Velvet Revolution. The National Security Archive put together an online briefing book for the thirtieth anniversary of Charter 77, which reminded me of some of the things the dissidents behind the Charter were trying to do.

This image comes from a passage of the Charter that I did some close work on--or rather, I did some work on the follow-up, after the initial idealistic period gave way to a period of some conflict between the members of the Charter as to how they should lead, and how they should mobilize to bring change in the oppressive regime of Czechoslovakia. [btw, if you click through, the pictures more clearly show what samizdat from this era looks like--documents typed on crappy translucent onion-skin paper where the globules of ink from the typewriter almost look like braille.] The longer passage from which this is taken reads:

Charter 77 is 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 for the respecting of civic and human rights in our own country and throughout the world -- rights accorded to all men by the two mentioned international covenants, by the Final Act of the Helsinki conference and by numerous other international documents opposing war, violence and social or spiritual oppression, and which are comprehensively laid down in the U.N. Universal Charter of Human Rights.

Charter 77 springs from a background of friendship and solidarity among people who share our concern for those ideals that have inspired, and continue to inspire, their lives and their work.

Charter 77 is not an organization; it has no rules, permanent bodies or formal membership. It embraces everyone who agrees with its ideas and participates in its work. It does not form the basis for any oppositional political activity. Like many similar citizen initiatives in various countries, West and East, it seeks to promote the general public interest.

It does not aim, then, to set out its own platform of political or social reform or change, but within its own field of impact to conduct a constructive dialogue with the political and state authorities, particularly by drawing attention to individual cases where human and civic frights are violated, to document such grievances and suggest remedies, to make proposals of a more general character calculated to reinforce such rights and machinery for protecting them, to act as an intermediary in situations of conflict which may lead to violations of rights, and so forth.

The Charter was a collective affirmation--each member voiced their support of the movement, but there was no attempt to make that mean anything more than it was, vocal support for the principles espoused, individuals voicing something in a collectivity. At the time, in Czechoslovakia, simply supporting the notion that the government should abide by the laws it claimed to abide by (in this case, the Helsinki Accords) was a radical, dangerous thing.

What I studied closely was the conflict, a year and half later, as the persecution of those involved in the movement increased. After the writer Jiri Grusa got sent to jail for publishing a novel in samizdat,
a heated debate broke out over whether the movement should focus on an "active minority" engaging in heroic acts (this side of the debate was led by Vaclav Havel) or whether it should focus on encouraging the "passive minority" to engage in smaller, less showy acts that would serve to bridge the "minority" to a larger group of people (this side of the debate was led by Ludvik Vaculik). It got pretty nasty between the two sides, because some thought Vaculik was criticizing the more active leaders of the movement (read, Havel) as showboaters. Vaculik made a pitch to celebrate the things ordinary people  did to resist the regime's efforts to turn them into "empty figures."

Under such circumstances, each piece of honestly done work, each display of incorruptibility, each gesture of good will straying from cold routine, each step or look without a mask, has the value of a heroic act.

Grusa, writing angrily in response, accused Vaculik of cheapening the value of heroic acts, even accused him of using the language found in Rude Pravo, the party newspaper.

It almost looks petty from this distance, the same kind of petty fight that we get into today, between better known activists and those who work more modestly in obscurity to oppose the Administration. But what I loved about it (and went on at some length in dissertation jargon I'll spare you) was that as these members of the "active minority" were fighting among themselves, a trickle of "ordinary people" started contributing to the debate. Since the "active minority" as so busy talking about them, the "passive minority," it sparked them to become active, no longer passive. One of them, one of only two women who participated in this debate, described what was happening in her own contribution--as more and more people thought about their own action, the group of them would accumulate into a crowd.

And those few simple people who perhaps by getting the feuilleton, which by inducing them to reflect and perhaps even to desire "to courageously adhere to good norms as acceptable sacrifice" [she's quoting Vaculik here], those few simple people will have the value of an accumulating gathering.

It was this kind of act--a person who did not consider herself an intellectual, beginning to participate in these debates, to voice her own beliefs--that would, indeed, accelerate later in the 1980s into a dynamic civic organization.

A toast, then, to Charter 77. Perhaps against its founders' better judgments, it actually did serve as a way to inspire crowds of ordinary people to speak up and through that, to make a real difference.

Comments

[SH]

Bad WMD?

[alabama]

Very interesting, and very moving, emptywheel!

I remember when the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, visiting Praque in 1982 to meet with Charter 77, only to be busted on a drug charge when he was heading back to Paris (the drugs having been planted in his suitcase, of course, by the Czech secret police). Once in prison, Derrida got word to his wife, who got word to François Mitterand, who sent word, through the French ambassador to Prague, that France would break off all diplomatic relations with Czechoslovakia if Derrida weren't immediately released. Needless to say, the Czech authorities were perplexed, surprised, and impressed by Derrida's political standing (it seems that they'd never heard of the guy). So they dropped charges, released him, and put him on the first available plane to Paris.

This is not a positive story. When this is what it takes to push back against the secret police, the situation is not very friendly (Derrida mentions, at several points, that he shared a cell with a young gypsy who wasn't as lucky as he was).

[emptywheel]

AFAIK, the gypsies are still unlucky, to this day.

[creeper]

Fascinating.

It seems impossible that there's a comparison between what was happening in Czechoslovakia then and what is happening in the United States today. But it's not. We live in a police state only marginally better than the Czechs.

[emptywheel]

creeper

We're not yet close. The day I have my own interrogator (I just re-read how Vaculik's interrogator was one of the most sympathetic people to him during this time), then we will be.

The problem is we're so damn much more powerful. Which means while we American may have loads more freedom than your average Czech dissident, the little things our country does have much graver repercussions.

[QuickSilver]

Gypsies -- or Roma, as they are correctly called -- are enjoined against speaking of certain traditions and orthodoxies, which makes it very difficult for them to speak out about what's happened to them. Imagine if Jews were enjoined by their faith against writing books, or talking about their traditions.... If such were the case, what would our overall understanding of the Holocaust be? Very different, to be sure.

The ethnic cleansing of Roma during the Yugoslavian civil war is, frankly, a story yet to be told.

[kim]

EW, do you like spy novels? Have any favorites (Alan Furst)? This culture/history/politics/journalism stuff (sorry, feuilletons) you studied is pretty interesting.

[Ardant]

ew - Since we are in the feuilleton subject here, could you expand on them (or are they just what they seem to be when I Wiki the subject?) and why did it become a matter of interest to you? I've been wondering about this for the last 1 1/2 years I have been reading your posts and for the first time saw the word feuilleton. I know you've mentioned in previous posts that you have discussed the subject before. Maybe just a link? Anything would be appreciated. Also, is your dissertation posted somewhere? Thanks.

[Jeff]

Great post. What, by the way, is "it" here, since, I take it, it's the holy grail of democracy:

Since the "active minority" as so busy talking about them, the "passive minority," it sparked them to become active, no longer passive.

[emptywheel]

kim

Haven't read many novels of any kind of late. Gave up fiction, really, when I left academics.

Ardant

The project started as a comparison of Czech and Argentine literature--the importance of bothin politics, and some similar features, had been compared in post-modern criticisms, but no one really looked at WHY they might be similar (particularly since Argentine/Polish or Chilean/Czech might make more sense). But the feuilleton (or something just like it) plays a similarly important role in both cultures--going back to efforts to instill liberalism in the 19th century and continuing into the 1920s and 30s (as both were marginally members of the "developed" world of the day) and the struggles with authoritarianism in the later 20th century. The function the feuilleton played in each is not unique, but there is arguably a "feuilletonesque" side to the literature of each country.

I threw in the French side of things because the French (unlike the Germans) have (or had, when I was still in the game) really shitty scholarship on the feuilleton. For example, while some contemporaneously attributed much of the political activity leading up to 1848 in France to the serialized novels that appeared in feuilletons, the French divorced that practice from the feuilleton essay that had been a response to Napoleonic censorship (and effectively invented literary modernism as a way to strip literature of its political power). But there can be a real continuity there, which places the serial novels the French now consider shit in the culture of "critique" that they greatly celebrate.

The project was great because it gets into the role of literary (playful) speech in political discourse, the role of media (newspapers) in proliferating certain discursive practices globally, and the role of certain kinds of (common) language in engaging new classes of people into the reading sphere.

There--probably more than you want to know!

Jeff

THe "it" in this case is probably direct address to the "normal man," an inclusion in the circulation of this discussion, and the imperative to DO something (copy over samizdat). But that's overly simplistic admittedly.

[emptywheel]

And Ardant

To me, the best example of feuilletonesque literature is Karel Capek's War with the Newts (there's actually an even better Capek novel, Factory of the Absolute, but there is no good English translation). Newts was published in the feuilleton section of the newspaper, but it also replicates the kind of fragmentation and and indirect argumentation and language you see in both feuilleton novels and essays.

[Rayne]

Fascinating, EW. Have a jillion questions -- none of which I expect you to answer, purely rhetorical. Why was the feuilleton more popular in some cultures than others? Did the history of pamphleteering in some countries and cultures make the feuilleton unnecessary or redundant for political purposes? Were there any economic factors that encouraged the feuilleton in some cultures? And how much has blogging and internet-mediated self-publishing replaced the feuilleton?

Great stuff, the kind of subject that really needs a couple of beers and a slow evening.

[emptywheel]

The feuilleton didn't exist in Anglo-American culture. I would argue that that's because the issues often worked out in the feuilleton were worked out in English culture in the 1600s (yes, pamphleteers, but at that point, it was often vague what genre something was). Then, the places that adopted feuilletons per se (most of continental Europe and Latin America) were adopting the French newspaper style. This was partly because France was considered the cultural center of the civilized (European) world at the time, whereas England was the economic/industrial center, so people adopted the French way on cultural issues. But it's also because, as people just started forming newspapers in the 19th C, they went with the successful business model, and in many places, the feuilleton was the thing that drove newspaper sales (and of course this became more true when newspapers serialized novels). One more thing that made the feuilleton important as a source of "liberal" (definite scarequotes here) thought was that in places with repression, the feuilleton offered a place where you could escape censorship or a way to make money in exile.

One more thing--I said there was no feuilleton in Anglo-American culture. Partly because of that and partly because the literary sphere developed differently in England, English serialized novels were done differently than other most countries, at least up until Thackery. The English serialized long chunks in monthly discrete volumes that consisted entirely of cultural content. Whereas the French (and those that followed it) serialized novels in the daily press, right at the bottom of the front page under the "news." FOr novels with a political content at all, of course, this created a dramatically different dynamic.

I don't think blogs have replaced feuilletons. I think this cultural/political/conversational form recurs in culture in forms appropriate to the media age. There are still feuilletons out there (the closest thing in the US was SF's Herb Coen, though the Russians always considered Art Buchwald feuilletonesque). But the blog does serve the same purpose, sure.

[margaret]

Emptywheel, I like what you related about the position taken by Vaculik that everyday people could perform "heroic" acts in small ways, to reinforce their moral and political outlook, and to affect change. In that way, blogs and the responses to blogs are our way of doing the same thing. There is no doubt that blogs helped the Democrats to win this Fall. Now, their work is cut out for them to save the Republic and repair the damage done to the Constitution by the 109th Congress, David Addington, the AT and George Bush.

[Rayne]

they went with the successful business model --

This is the reason that I think would have justified English-language papers pursuing the feuilleton, but as you said, perhaps the kinds of social issues in question had been addressed earlier in English-language countries (this will make me crack open Guns, Germs and Steel, along with The Power of Babel in regard to the dependency of movement of ideas by language).

No wonder at all you have had such a field day with research on the Plame outing. You were equipped and trained far better than the average bear!!

[Ardant]

ew - thank you for your comments. You are so sweet.

[emptywheel]

Rayne

Only it wasn't dependent on language. I've had friends who work in Japanese literature argue that the Japanese adopted the French model (though perhaps via the Germans). Ditto slavicists.

One other difference, though, between the Anglo-American and the rest: taxation and censorship laws. It'd be hard to do the differences justice in short form, but such things had really concrete effects on teh form of the newspaper.

[Rayne]

Definitely more than two beers and a comments forum needed to address this.

We're having a form of chicken-or-the-egg discussion. The concept I've been studying for several years now is memetics; there is knowledge that appears to disperse differently in both rate and uptake based on the culture and in turn language in which the knowledge is generated and conveyed. I'm thinking of The Geography of Thought, in particular; some philosophies and ideologies succeed in some cultures, with culture also differentiated by language (hence a probable factor in Middle Eastern response to American/English democracy).

Purely rhetorical questions again: Are English-language countries, possibly some Germanic, Nordic as well, more likely to create a society in which the kind of taxation and censorship laws are conducive to a particular kind of expression, because of the manner in which the concepts are understood and implemented? Is there a shift again across countries and cultures that have a more matriarchal hierarchy of power or more egalitarian power structure -- for instance, the Finnish-Swedish cultures and their early adoption of Freedom of Information Laws. Adam Smith wrote of similar concepts in regards to FOI as his predecesor Anders Chydenius of Finland; Chydenius may have been influenced culturally by concepts that originated much earlier in Asia. Did FOI as a meme "skip" Russia and Slavic countries? Did western emphasis on mercantilism pervert the use of language and ideas evolved through language, in such a way that information became owned rather than shared? Did the feuilleton thrive where it was not only needed to subvert authority that did not subscribe to FOI, but where it could not be fully co-opted as a commercial enterprise?

Gonna' need a case of beer. Maybe a pony keg.

[Gary]

OT - EW, do you think that David Corn could be the guy that Novak gave his infamous "Wilson's an asshole" speech to?

The VF article mentions in passing that Corn knew Wilson.

Not that it matters in the great scheme of things, just one extra brushstroke on the canvas.

[Mimikatz]

But the new iPod phone is coming out!

Our culture has become so sidetracked on "cool stuff" that it is a wonder so many people still talk and act politics. (At least some of them use cool stuff to do it.)

Great post, ew.

Kim: Find the novels of Charles McCarry. "The Last Supper" is a great Cold War spy novel. For Vietnam, "The Tears of Autumn" is the best spy novel ever written, period.

[kim]

Thanks mimikatz, they sound good. I'll look 'em up!

[seesdifferent]

ew did you see Waas' at National Journal today; he has some Grand Jury testimony supposedly. As usual, I think this must be Libby's lawyers doing the leaking. Go get em.
seesdifferent