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In memory of Jan Palach By Roger Scruton In 1969, when Czech student Jan Palach set fire to himself on Wenceslas Square, I was beginning my studies in philosophy at Cambridge University. I had observed the Prague Spring -- the momentary thaw in the icy wastes of communism -- with puzzlement. My student friends and I were surprised and troubled when Soviet armies invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968 and brought the thaw to an end. The news of Palach's death affected me hardly more than the self-immolation of Buddhist monks in Vietnam. I pitied the young man, but I pitied his country more because it had no resource in the face of armed invasion other than this lonely and seemingly futile gesture. Ten years later I visited Prague for the first time, having been asked by a colleague to speak at a private seminar. I walked through Prague's haunting streets -- surely the most beautiful in Europe -- with a mixture of fear and exhilaration. I was about to commit a crime -- not the first in my life, but the first of which I approved. Prague was silent. The few people in the streets seemed intent on official business. Party slogans and symbols hung from every building. I eventually found myself in a room full of the battered remnant of Prague's intelligentsia -- old professors in their shabby waistcoats, long-haired poets, fresh-faced students who had been denied admission to university for their parents' political "crimes," priests and religious people in plain clothes, novelists and theologians, a would-be rabbi, and even a psychoanalyst. And in all of them I saw the same marks of suffering tempered by hope. The value of memory This was my first encounter with "dissidents": the people who, to my astonishment, would be the first democratically elected leaders of post-communist Czechoslovakia. I felt toward them an immediate affinity. Nothing was of such importance for my audience, I discovered, as the survival of their national culture. Deprived of material and professional advancement, their days were filled with a forced meditation on their country and its past. Forbidden to publish, they were acutely conscious of the value of memory. Their lives were an exercise in what Plato calls anamnesis: the bringing to consciousness of forgotten things. Following this visit I joined together with friends and colleagues to set up the underground university, which would provide dissidents and their children an avenue to the learning that they sought. During the years that followed, I came to understand not only communism and its insidious war on the human spirit, but also the meaning of Palach's gesture, and its importance to those who still congregated at the place that had been his grave before the authorities ordered his body to be dug up and burned. And I came to understand the purity of Palach's character and motives, and how even the greatest material force is helpless before the person who is prepared, as Jan Patocka once said, to sacrifice his life for its meaning. Palach had been my near contemporary, brought up by loyal patriots who had seen their country annexed by the Nazis without a shot fired. After two and a half years of liberty, the Palachs had watched as Czechoslovakia was annexed again, this time by the Communists, in a coup that was just as resented, and just as little opposed. This young idealist read widely in the history and literature of his country. When Czechoslovakia was once again invaded and once again annexed without a shot, he concluded that it would always be thus, so long as no one was prepared to make the supreme sacrifice on which the identity of a nation depends. Unlike most people who draw this conclusion, he recognized that it was addressed personally to himself. He took leave of his mother and fiancee, and went with his bucket of gasoline to Wenceslas Square. Palach's legacy Palach's death awoke the Czechs to their past, to the historical ties which bind them, and to the spiritual realities which the Communists had unceasingly denied. His influence was to be observed in a new and nationwide spirit of resistance, which soon found expression in Charter 77. And it was to be observed in the dissidents who gathered to meet me 10 years later, and who had resolved, despite everything that they lost by doing so, to devote themselves to teaching what was forbidden, to learning what was useful, and to working, as Palach had wished, for a national revival and a restoration of the law. Ten years later those people formed the government of their country. But today, in a world of sensations and scandals, it seems that no one has time for the past. A new generation has arisen, habituated to the brave new world of sound bites, pop music and newscasts. This generation does not read or explore the remains of vanished things. Moreover, those who have undergone the experience of communism are loath to dwell on it. The genius of the communists was to make people complicitous in their own humiliation, so that they become both agent and victim in the collective crime. Palach's mother was told that she must join the Communist Party if her sons were to go to university, and so, in bitterness, she joined. Others became spies and informers. Few can tell a tale to their children in which they played a heroic part. In remembering Jan Palach, we remember not to forget. Through his sacrifice, Palach showed precisely what people lose when they cease to answer to the past: namely, their future. -- The author is a writer and philosopher who lives in England. This piece was adapted from a speech he gave in London at an event commemorating the 30th anniversary of Jan Palach's death. |
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The Prague Post Online contains a selection of articles that have been printed in The Prague Post, a weekly newspaper published in the Czech Republic. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited.