Comrade Teacher
The totalitarian regime that stretched from the Soviet invasion in 1968 till the Czechoslovak regime collapsed in 1989 evolved from the indiscriminate brutal suppression of dissenting voices to a more strategically refined regime that was equally corrupt and insidious.
It was called “normalization”.
Normalization was the official term adopted by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia to justify large-scale party purges among societal elites, and jumpstarting censorship and oppression against the public, and I grew up at the tail end of it.
By the time I arrived on the scene, the horrors of the show trials and executions of the 50s, the soul crushing secret police tactics of the late 60s and early 70s, were replaced by the moral decline and apathy placated by consumerism of the late 70’s and 80s. Compared to the 60s and 70s, the regime had to a large extent mastered the balance between providing limited material comfort and oppression. To outsiders, the regime had lost its cartoon character-like quality of ultimate evil. The horrors were now mostly hidden. While people still continued to disappear, or be imprisoned, the majority of the oppression was through the continuous re-education and propaganda.
The triumph of the late stage of normalization was mastering Havel’s “greengrocers' world of superficiality and lie. In the well-known essay titled “Power of the powerless” Havel describes a greengrocer who puts up a poster in his window with a slogan “Workers of the world, unite!”. He does not do it because he personally believed in the ideals communicated by the slogan, he primarily did it to ward off harassment. He pays very little attention to the meaning of the slogan, it is self-preservation, a signal of “leave me alone to live my life”. Since the secret police had a firm grip over day to day personal interactions and opinions that contradicted the official propaganda, most people lived their lives to ward off harassment. Everyone understood that depending on the gravity of the transgressions against the regime, your livelihood, well-earned place at a university, or any chances for promotion may be in serious jeopardy. The regime rested on an elaborate system of committees that were staffed by party sympathizers and acted as crucial gatekeepers often unqualified to assess the very issues they were set out to resolve. In the majority of the cases, however, the committees had very little purpose beyond harassment and the assessment of political fitness of individuals to be able to qualify for perks or even basic social benefits.
And, if that “Workers of the world, unite!” poster phenomenon sounds a good deal like what we now call euphemistically “virtue signalling”, I think you might be onto something.
Since 2014 I have, among other echoes, observed a worryingly high uptick in the levels of censorship in the West, and an overall decline of public discourse. I also noticed the proliferation of Havel’s greengrocers among us. Increasingly, in the conversations with my friends, the issue of self-censorship comes up. “It is not worth it”: they say. “It will blow over”. Yet it is becoming increasingly clear that these proclamations are to soothe their seeping worry that things, the world do not seem to be alright. I always sense a great discomfort and a good deal of hesitation from them when I occasionally raise the issue that things are serious enough for me to draw parallels with the Communism I grew up with.
And I think I understand why. “Communism” and “Totalitarianism” in the minds of my peers in the West isn’t the Normalization I grew up with. Their Communism has gulag archipelagoes, and prison camps. It has organized state level informants led by an all knowing centralized party bureaucracy. The normalization is totalitarianism too, it’s just totalitarianism at its most mature and in many ways subtle in its oppression.
It’s not being able to express political views at a kitchen table without the fear of being ostracized from your family or friends, or unable to raise a reasonable question in the workplace for the fear of harassment from colleagues or of a loss of employment. The constant disorientation when language and words are being reshaped rapidly under your feet, purposefully redefining reality and obfuscating their original meaning. Totalitarianism, once mature, decentralizes and normalizes oppression, such that it is in the very fabric of society itself.
And I fear it is more and more pervasive today, and in order to talk about it we need to get past the cartoon Communism of Cold War consciousness. The buzz words have changed, the technology of propaganda has changed, yet daily experiences of many people can be convincingly compared between then and now.
Life, Divided
I was about six years old when I remember forming my first political memories. It was first grade and I was very excited to start school. I loved my first grade teacher. She was a warm person, who clearly enjoyed teaching us. At home we always talked about her as “Ms. Teacher” (a typical Czech construction of the address) but at school I had to address her as “Comrade Teacher”. It was my first political lesson of a life under a totalitarian regime. It is a lesson of the divided life. We say things at home and we say things publicly.
Comrade teacher was reserved for all teachers at school. It was the first word that I learned that was stripped of its proper meaning. Comrade in the daily parlance was devoid of comradery. It was to demolish hierarchy, the unacceptable legacy of the pre-communist order where status was deemed to be marked by class. In the extremes, it was used with added emphasis to assert superiority of the person evoking the term as it was daring the “hesitant subjects'', the “unconverted” to submit to the term and, of course, the power of the communist party, regime and its disciples.
Ultimately, however, very few truly believed the meaning of the word as originally intended in the late stages of normalization. Those who used the term as a source of power did not intend to extend comradery and kinship to their fellow citizens. In fact, they sought the opposite. Others went through the motion of accepting what is with a great deal of apathy. The majority, however, used the prescribed language out of fear, to prevent harassment, and avoid potential consequences to themselves, their careers, and their loved ones. HIdden sarcasm and snark permeated the everyday use of the word.
Growing up as a child under such a regime, I did not understand the full context of what was happening. At the time, I did not think comrade carried any special meaning. My memories are mostly snapshots of people I observed around me and their reactions to one another as they grappled with the reality of living in a lie. Yet, when comrade was abruptly purged from the lexicon right after the Velvet revolution of 1989 with the same speed as it was introduced in the 50s, I did feel a sense of relief. It was not the word itself that I was particularly resentful of, or had emotional reaction to. It was the visceral, stomach clenching tension the use of the word created around my loved ones.
As a parent I begin to grapple with the realities and difficulties of the divided life my own parents had to deal with. I am only now able to understand some of the trade-offs that were endemic to such life. Much of the parenting style in the public was in the name of “steering” away from politically laden content. I remember that my choices for school presentation of books or performance of a song in front of a class were sometimes steered by my parents towards more “neutral content”. Thankfully, because of the widespread censorship, neutral content was in great supply. Artists took notes. Some of the most talented of them devoted much of their public writing to fairy tales and composing songs for children.
The ever present neutral/apolitical content, however, represents artificial truncation of reality and the true diversity of the human experience. It is the outcome of trade-offs between what one considers bearable and unbearable. It was the ultimate battle of integrity. These constant trade offs, however, may easily inundate individuals to conform to the lie they live in. The main aspect of normalization that is often overlooked is that such repeated trade-offs between bearable and unbearable make you lose sight of the baseline truth, the line in the sand, that you drew in the beginning. Or worse yet, you simply stop caring and apathy sets in. The normalization of a lie is a slow and deliberate process through which the regime transforms reality: one individual at a time, one decision at a time. The mechanism at work is like turning pages without the ability to go back to remind yourself who you were because the book has been rewritten multiple times in the meantime.
It is for the first time since I left my home country to live in the West 20 years ago that I find myself drawing a line in the sand to remind myself of the baseline truth. For the first time since childhood I get the same visceral stomach clenching tension when I keep my mouth shut in situations where words and reality are twisted in pursuit of a clear political agenda and the well-being of individuals is being compromised.
So, I start this column to remind myself of those times, to collect my memories and to remember the line I drew in the sand. It is crucial that we draw parallels with the current discourse rather than dismiss any comparisons as unnecessary drama. I find that the personal accounts of how late stage oppressive regimes exert their influence over individuals is nearly absent nowadays and such accounts are urgently needed. At the same time, the importance of understanding the way reality is routinely misshapen through language, (in)competent bureaucracies, and harassment cannot be overstated. It is incremental, it is insidious and can easily be overlooked. With children of my own I see glimpses of the tough choices my parents had to make seeping into my life. I hear my friends often retort that things are and cannot be anywhere as bad as they were under the oppressive regime I grew up in. Perhaps not. At least not yet. But I also know that by no fault of their own they do not have a full understanding of what life was like and that things were complicated. They often fail to realize that for the majority of the people under normalization life was perfectly tolerable, while the regime’s disciples, hustlers, grifters and believers were hard at work rewriting the everyday reality with the help of the citizens: one decision at a time.