Jaromír Plíšek

“...If you know the Biblical book of Daniel, there’s a king there called Nebuchadnezzar, and from time to time throughout his reign he would declare that whenever the trumpets were to sound throughout the land, that his people should come and bow before a statue of the king made of gold and silver. And whoever would not bow, he would be thrown into the fiery furnace... Read the Book of Daniel, it’s a nice book, and it fits perfectly to the working principle of a totalitarian regime. The elections under Communism weren’t election at all, but just this sounding of trumpets, when all the citizens of the state were to go bow before the statue. There was no one to elect, all the representatives and functionaries had been chosen long before somewhere within the Communist Party. And the people were merely to show loyalty to the regime by coming there, refusing to go behind the screen to hide who they voted for, but instead to manifest, so to say, by taking the envelope that they gave you, which contained the right names and the right parties, in actual fact there was just one, and by putting it into the ballot box before the eyes of the committee - they would tick the box that ‘František Vonásek remains loyal.’ The turnout was 99,9 per cent, and those who dared to not go to the elections, those were individual people and they were asking, pardon my Czech, for a shitload of trouble, that was almost like running someone over with a car, the Communists were capable of locking you up for that under some pretence or other.”

“These small problems started building up, and my military service was coming to an end, and I remember that one day I said to myself: I’ll go to the elections. I don’t have the strength any more, seeing how things are here. They’d lock me up, they’d find some excuse to stand me before a military tribunal for sedition, they’d find some excuse. So I agreed to myself to have the following stance: I wouldn’t try to make excuses, I wouldn’t tell myself it didn’t matter, that there was no difference. There was a difference, and it did matter. But I’ll go because I’m afraid. And if someone asks me why I went, I’ll tell that it’s because I’m afraid, I won’t make any pretences.”

“Nowadays, I can see one critical issue, which is that I think that the societies to the north-west of us (Germany, Holland, Sweden) contain a certain tendency towards correctness and transparency, I don’t want to idealise it, but I’m speaking from my own experience, even when dealing with governments officials. And then there’s another kind of mentality, which I’ve given the working title ‘South-east-I-don’t-know-what’, which has its own charm, but it isn’t correct or transparent, and it’s based on clan structures. And human societies generally seem to tend towards such clan structures. And the downside of these clan structures is that they disadvantage the weaker members of society... And when I look at things from this schematic perspective, then I see that the Communists formed a kind of clan, and then put into Section 4 of the constitution that this clan will rule forever, they propped it up with some ideology, and that was that. And now we freed ourselves from that, and this one Communist clan has been replaced by multiple power clans, all those connections between political parties and economic entities, and government officials are in a muddle with all this... And what I’d really like is for this society to come to some kind of understanding that what we’re building here after the fall of Communism, the direction we’re headed, is a society which keeps to laws and correct rules, that if someone drives a car and he’s drunk and he runs someone over, then it doesn’t matter if he’s member of parliament or a common man, it doesn’t matter if he belongs to this or that clan, or if his name’s Janoušek, for example [referring to a recent prominent case when a Mr Janoušek with powerful connections ran over a woman while apparently drunk and avoided being punished for it - trans.]. And that there’s a law that punishes such deeds. And that it should be inconceivable for it to matter what connections the person has or which political party he’s in or how much money he has. And my experience is that people like talking about it, that they think we live in such a society, that we want to live in such a society and that we’re working to create it, but it happens to them, everyone gladly uses whatever connections he’s got. Regardless of what the law states, what the civil service law is like, the public tenders law... when society in general accepts that tenders are awarded to friends and that the ‘clever’ ones know how to distribute public funding to their advantage, then it hardly even matters what the law states because if society doesn’t have the will to keep the rules no matter who it affects... Sorry for ending my reflection on totality in this way, but I feel it’s practically the most important thing at the moment, so we’re not dispirited in our journey towards that correctly organised society, where the same law is applied regardless of party membership and social status. And what’s making me nervous in the last two years, since our new president took up office, to be precise, is that I have the feeling it’s getting worse. Not just that things are the way they are now, that we’re not closer to the ‘North-west’ mentally, but that we’re slowly moving back in the direction that we wanted to escape from.”

“Of course, I remember Palach’s days, they were... sad. After taking that breath. As a growing boy I mostly remember the emotional side of the matter, first that breath of air in sixty-eight, and then having it all crushed, the way people resigned themselves to it, acquiesced, bent their backs and lost all their spark. I think that was one of the worst things to ever happen to devastate our society. I can’t compare it with the Fifties, I don’t remember those. The brutality wasn’t physical, but it was bad mentally.”