Live not the lie

Dec 21, 2011 Editorial

Vaclav Havel, who ushered in the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia in 1989, ending four decades of communist totalitarian rule, died last Sunday. His death was not much remarked on in our country, but it should have been. Havel’s iconoclastic, but powerfully evocative, analyses on the bases of dictatorial rule offered a beacon of hope to many Guyanese at a time that their country could also be placed on a more even keel.
Unfortunately the cautions of Havel were not heeded and the structures of authoritarianism remain stubbornly rooted in many facets of national life; not the least being politics. His motto was “live not the lie” and it was derived from his conclusion that under the dictatorship, citizens were reduced to living a lie. Everyone, the ruler and the ruled, knew everything was founded on lies but no one wanted to bell the cat. Havel was one that did and in so doing led his country to free itself from much of the contradictions that still plague our country.
In his 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless,” Havel showed how the totalitarian state could be overthrown. He first analysed the system to move beyond “name calling”: “The profound difference between our system – in terms of the nature of power- and what we traditionally understand by dictatorship, a difference I hope is clear even from this quite superficial comparison, has caused me to search for some term appropriate for our system, purely for the purposes of this essay. If I refer to it henceforth as a “post-totalitarian” system, I am fully aware that this is perhaps not the most precise term, but I am unable to think of a better one. I do not wish to imply by the prefix “post” that the system is no longer totalitarian; on the contrary, I mean that it is totalitarian in a way fundamentally different from classical dictatorships, different from totalitarianism as we usually understand it.”
Havel posited that an ordinary citizen is conditioned to, “conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides them behind the facade of something high. And that something is ideology. Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something supra-personal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves.”
In a most powerful peroration, Havel identified the life of lies that must be transcended by ordinary citizens if we are ever to become really free: “The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on.
This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance.
Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.”

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