“I am totalitarianism”
16. 9. 2017 / Muriel Blaive
French historian Muriel Blaive has been a victim of a series of
fairly incredible media attacks in the Czech right wing press in the
past few weeks for daring to suggest that the communist regime in
Czechoslovakia negotiated with the population and was very careful to
make sure that it did not cause the population to stage a revolution.
Here is her reaction to the media attacks.
Some people asked me if I had an English version of the article "I am totalitarianism". I just put it back together from the original Czech/English mixture and here it is.
Muriel Blaive
Václav Havel, in his essay Stories and Totalitarianism (1987) wrote: “Ideology, claiming to base its authority on history, becomes history's greatest enemy.” He spoke of course of the communist ideology. But today, it is anti-communism that claims to be based on the authority of history. It has an answer to everything and can never be faulted: the pre-1989 period was evil, and communism is to blame for everything, past and present. In this sense, anti-communism also functions like an ideology. So the real opposite of “communism” is not “anti-communism”: it is, as Havel correctly pointed it out, history. History is doubts, debate, dissent. It is the inverted pole of ideology.
Dobrý den,
