CENSORSHIP & STATE-OWNED CITIZENS
Konrád, George
We are pleased to print the first English translation of this essay by the distinguished Hungarian novelist, author of The Case Worker, The City Builder, and The Loser. —EDS. Hungary lost her...
...Why allow ourselves to be at the mercy of those who wield power...
...In a way, my secretive notetakers are in a better position than that future literary historian...
...The more forgetful I become, the more I count on his thoroughness...
...In 1795 some of Hungary's finest intellectuals had their heads chopped of by censorship because they dared to put forward the notion, in their illegally circulated, "samizdat" pamphlets, that censorship as such was passe.* It isn't, it seems, even today, for in 1982 I could not get this little essay published in Budapest...
...This moment usually marks the beginning of a new era...
...Since there are no private publishing firms, there are no private authors either, only authors of unpublished manuscripts...
...There are independent-minded people, however, who enjoy being what they are...
...Not even carefully devised harassment can break their spirits, even though the state machinery would love to see them sullen, would like them to feel out of sorts and prove with their sour faces that it's not advisable to defy the state...
...He doesn't come up with too many new ideas, and he doesn't want you to badger him with new ideas either...
...In these parts you don't have to be successful to have friends...
...Censorship is made strong by our fears...
...Any state-owned man with a vision will, during the course of his career, try to perfect the art of tightening and of relaxing censorship...
...This new type of citizen will say and do nothing for which he might lose his state-given job, or which might incur the displeasure of officials of state security...
...party supremacy that cannot be challenged...
...Why should he feel ashamed...
...State culture is censorship in practice that becomes, after a while, part of one's character makeup...
...The state-owned man is not ashamed of submitting in a disciplined manner to censorship, and will utter his platitudes only with permission from above...
...today it's negative and defensive...
...Let's act as though we were voluntarily giving up our freedoms, they said, and then winked: we'll steal it back bit by bit anyway...
...Prove that my pessimism is unfounded, I say to them...
...Without my grasshopper ways you couldn't be antlike in your industry...
...daily reports from the labyrinths of officialdom engage his political fantasies and passions...
...But no matter how committed a state employee he becomes, once in a while he will entertain thoughts that contradict state-sanctioned notions of reality...
...Centralized control is not a demon but merely a form, one that has never been more malleable...
...After the Second World War we turned from a German to a Russian sphere of interest...
...There is no convincing counterargument, only the insignificance of secretive works, which share just one secret: censorship...
...you accept the presence of party headquarters above you and it, in turn, will accept you...
...There was always a great power nearby that kept occupying troops on our soil in peacetime and held our people under its sway with the surefire arguments of superior force...
...His job is to pretend there is no censorship...
...Then, from the safety of commemorative programs, he could look out at his audience even after his death...
...It's the primary tool of the system, without which the system cannot exist...
...Placed in quarantine, he becomes an unaffiliated— and very nervous—individual who views his isolation not as the natural confines of his independence but as a kind of impairment...
...Someone speaks and we know exactly what he holds back...
...He has learned from experience that if he wants to live in peace he must lie, or at least not say in public what he is used to saying privately...
...It has no intention of challenging state ownership of the means of production, but because it is interested in workers' rights, not just efficient management, it would like to open the state's decision-making powers to the scrutiny of the producing communities...
...The names that have a popular ring are not the ones made famous by official trendsetters but those of steadfast people who put up with the vicissitudes of changing times, who endure neglect, poverty, harassment, and through it all manage to keep their sanity...
...Please commit to paper my chitchats, my telephone conversations, I feel like telling him...
...It's faces turned dull by fear and overadjustment...
...I no longer submit my writings for publication...
...It's not that bad to live under censorship...
...Another time perhaps, another place, someone says in a resigned drawl...
...they are up against it as much as the more submissive citizens who have learned to close their eyes to certain things...
...We begin to talk—so we can do that, too...
...But all of this is mere fantasizing, of course...
...It would be crazy, an act of self-punishment, to denounce ourselves...
...The utopia of a society that adheres to the social contract has made its appearance in Central Europe, as has a voluntary, grass-roots solidarity that places self-rule above all other virtues...
...Censorship is not just repression and retribution, not just an enemy stronghold that we professional truth-sayers make assaults on, but the mode of operation of our hearts and minds, the content of our dreams, the inventory of our ideas...
...He can be recognized from afar, in strange surroundings —he looks exactly like a Central European state-owned man...
...The state can't exclude anyone from this community...
...If he expresses them, he arouses suspicion...
...The Polish awakening gave proof to an existing reality...
...The husband censors his wife, she censors him, and both of them work on their child who is already tired from having been censored by the teacher...
...It doesn't happen too often that an entire society decides: come what may, it will not lie any more...
...With slow and persistent labor, society kept widening the circle of permitted partial truths...
...Censorship chills and enfeebles, it slows me down and sticks to my skin as I plow through it endlessly...
...A child is a future state official, an old man is a retired state official...
...The only way to guard against censorship is to ignore it...
...Translated from the Hungarian by IVAN SANDERS 455...
...asks the censored mind...
...The state-owned man who is on his way to liberation learns that speaking the truth creates a climate of truth and once he starts, others follow suit...
...Honest relationships mean much more than statistical proof of unprecedented growth...
...another asks...
...but then, at least, let society have the freedom to lead its own life...
...it simply wants to place it under societal control...
...Most of his fellow citizens consider him a romantic, a utopian dreamer with a warped sense of reality, who can't see where he lives and runs his head against a brick wall—serves him right if he winds up with a cracked skull...
...Yet censorship is never some distant authority, it's you, always you...
...It's not the faces of new officeholders but the revitalized faces of non-officeholders that spell the beginnings of autonomy...
...The official intellectuals' compensation is knowing that this world is theirs, with all its secret intrigues and scheming, with its handpicked favorites jockeying for vacant positions, with its excitement over who'll be the new boss, whose star is rising, whose is on the decline...
...when hearing the first-person plural, you count yourself in...
...The chief censor might, as a personal favor, allow a stubborn author to publish something that a suspicious and dogmatic subordinate already rejected...
...we'll pass them on to others somehow...
...What the writer can't do is see and talk straight, for that a state-owned man can never afford to do...
...citizens make their living in state-run enterprises, few * The reference is to an ill-fated conspiracy of Hungarian Jacobins, led by IgnAc Martinovics...
...those based on equality are incorrect and "antisocialist...
...The Central European democratic movement is a novel phenomenon...
...The lower-ranking officials shift the onus of decision-making onto their superiors...
...And it's not official recognition that determines human worth (and not financial success either, since the cult of measurable wealth in our moderately rational societies still seems suspicious and queer rather than respectable...
...It isn't enough if players in the political arena are replaced...
...Our societies agreed to eliminate closed state cultures quietly, step by step, and replace them with invitingly open cultures of their own...
...instead of taking lessons in autonomy we still attend schools run by censors...
...I do not feel like defending, or mourning, sentences marked for deletion...
...people's power" that has been brazenly handed over to a political bureaucracy that abuses this power as a matter of course, since it is not subject to any sort of control...
...Above a certain rate of frequency, the speed with which independent initiatives spread tends to accelerate...
...People who have given thought to suicide find themselves holding each other's hand a little longer...
...The powers that be cannot describe in legal terms what must not be said...
...When I tell him they do, he seems a little disappointed and says good-bye in a hurry...
...you may even play up its intimate goings-on, but you mustn't disturb the structure itself...
...But we are still fenced in...
...For there does come a magic moment when suddenly there are enough peo449 ple who have had it with grumbling hopelessness...
...proper emphasis is placed on the contest between free expression and censorship...
...this way they can make it to the top once more...
...Thoughts excluded from the official organs of communication find their way into the medium of informal conversation, are transferred, that is, from the public to the private sphere...
...Nowadays the state-owned man no longer must be afraid of purges...
...No one's telling you what to do...
...Before long, however, a reform movement would emerge and then, inevitably, what the reformers were never prepared for: an adventure turned bloody revolution...
...we'll say what's on our minds anyway...
...he asks...
...Now society has regained its strength and the censors are weighed down by ennui...
...In this region the need for autonomy appears to have enflamed the entire organism...
...Everything about him is statelike: his spine, his subconscious, his quivering knee, his crumpled face, his narrowing lips, his eyes, in which there is little wonderment and much suspicion...
...The work can be pessimistic, that's permitted nowadays— the state-owned man is frequently pessimistic...
...I have to think of it even when I don't want to...
...Autonomy here is not something that emanates from the top—it exists deep inside the society...
...In any given period the elite of our country, the majority of this elite at any rate, considered cooperation with the occupiers the more reasonable alternative...
...People who are subject to punishment dissemble and play dumb irresistibly, with artistic fervor, lest the criminal investigators find out everything about them...
...He writes he is being observed," they write...
...compared to them we are hypocritical and cynical...
...One mustn't blab about long-standing inner constraints in front of hostile outsid452 ers...
...Thus on our inner stage the dialogue between censorship and anti-censorship will not break off...
...What's more, we don't want to exchange a censored culture for a culture of dispensability...
...He does have his own ethics—after all, there are all sorts of ways in which he can exercise his share of state power...
...The state-owned citizen may ease his conscience by helping those who erred to get back into officialdom's good graces...
...What you have is a society of men and women censored by, and beholden to, the state...
...The prestige that goes with independent behavior cannot be undermined...
...Depression is the official state disease...
...We cling to each other in the warm, dim light...
...I believe that more and more independentminded citizens will shed their statist uniforms...
...I see and hear myself as an outsider would, I become my own spy...
...But luckily, the lessons learned from succeeding generations keep settling on one another, understanding is breaking down moral bounds...
...There is talk of it constantly: whose work didn't make it, what got through, who got by...
...if he gets a little nauseous he ought to choose an illness for himself, commit suicide, but never ought he to rebel against his role...
...For doing his duty...
...In such an atmosphere many works are born about which it's hard to say whether or not they are publishable...
...The transformation may be gradual or speedy...
...The civilization created by these citizens is an enduring historical reality with a long past, and doubtless a long future too, since it keeps turning out new versions of its pride and joy: the state-owned man, in whose name the state turns thumbs down on a tolerant, pluralist society...
...I sense expectancy in the air, subtle conspiracies, knowing exchanges of signals...
...I am steeped in censorship even as I am struggling against it...
...Subordinate relationships are correct and therefore "socialist in spirit...
...It's never really necessary, or very elegant, to reveal everything all at once...
...Under Stalin you were a rebel if you felt sad or spoke of pain...
...If I am a realist I must describe censorship, this perennial infancy, this self-perpetuating lie, this mist of fear through which we can no longer see the thing itself...
...It is this abstract father whose loyal and abstract son he must be...
...a bureaucratic fate need not be irrational any more...
...We are poisoned by it, though it might just be our natural element, our health, our only morality...
...I am made to feel its heavier atmospheric pressure...
...Not a day goes by without my having to listen to something concerning censorship...
...On faces peering out of stateinspired roles, you will find a whole community of half-concealed, informal, affectionate allies, a convergence of unofficial sympathies...
...Putting it more kindly: he is confused, misguided, an extremist...
...If there is censorship it's very important to know what sort of people the censors are—we can go on discussing them endlessly...
...they are my contemporaries and are engaged in actual fieldwork...
...he steers clear of extremes, his words are soft, unctuous, conspiratorial...
...The state leaves room even for some opposition— and why not...
...They go out of their way to teach their children that it is wrong, an act of folly, to say what you think...
...He knows exactly what he mustn't say and this makes him predictable, transparent...
...Anywhere else he'd be considered perfectly normal, but when he is among the stateowned, or when he is particularly despondent, he feels like a misfit...
...They climb up to the attic of this house, rummage in the dust, wait around for hours in their cars, listen to all that futile talk—they work hard for their morsel of information...
...He wonders, sub specie aeternitatis, whether to stab that idiot X. in the back or join his entourage, since Y. is an even bigger ass...
...If an independent private economy barely exists, how are those in the opposition supposed to make ends meet...
...Translator...
...The state-owned man derives from the state...
...Each institution in society is part of the hierarchy...
...When this stage is reached, people begin to talk about it, study it, violate it, ridicule it...
...1A1hat is happening already is that society is gaining in strength...
...Thirty years ago the censors were strong and society, harried, beleaguered, was weak...
...With new economic policies and toned-down television messages they still reach into our brains, but they do it gently now, with an expert touch...
...We may despise it but still we flaunt it...
...Today's censor is no longer obsessed...
...The official intelligentsia enjoys quite a bit of security...
...the spectators too want to have their say...
...There is an ear up there that hears my every sigh...
...Is there anyone alive in whose mind censorship could not find an ally, an instigator...
...The stateapproved writer submits his work to the state publishing house...
...Here rational arguments always succumbed before brute force—this is the difference between us and people in the West...
...it offers ambition usable pathways, it provides self-importance with means of expression, anxiety with a thousand causes...
...If they rob me of my secrets, if I am banned, what else could I do but identify, openly, without pretense, with that in me which is forbidden...
...If the state employee becomes too conceited he may break the officially sanctioned rules of the game and lose the good will of his superiors...
...There are always good friends on the scene who persuade potential dissidents to come to their senses and stick to the rules...
...Censorship is an integral part of the political structure of "state socialism," as well as of the state-owned individual's personality...
...We seek in the solidarity of autonomous existences the resolve not just to reach a political goal but to join an ongoing, never-ending struggle...
...its members' careful choice of words bespeaks aesthetic discrimination...
...During the Stalinist years censorship was positive, aggressive...
...I like to think that with their files and cassettes they are working at the behest of some future literary critic...
...it's not subject to changes in the political or economic climate...
...The important thing is to be able to defer to a common and only intuitively perceptible, statemanipulated superego...
...At the same time, I do not claim that milder forms of censorship are any less dreary...
...it's the state that makes him tick...
...You may extend the boundaries of the state culture, and fit in ideas that are rather alien to it...
...Let them tap our telephones...
...Clearly there are various ways of disciplining a 451 refractory citizen—from cutting down his privileges and restricting him professionally to charging him formally with a crime...
...This is the price—indeed the beauty—of his survival...
...If so, I can only wish that my stateappointed secretary will be sufficiently diligent...
...We are reassured by our gentleness, our hesitancy, our resignation...
...It's not a hard lesson to learn: in official places you look concerned...
...But only in very tiny bits, said the radical minority...
...Can we really be certain that what is true is good and what is not true is bad...
...The democratic movement is aimed not against a particular segment of society but against censorship itself...
...The independent-minded citizen is surely a piece of work of a higher order than the most advanced available technology...
...In place of completed works we get exchanges of gossip and petty backbiting...
...What the state culture shielded him from most is about to happen: he discovers that there are other ways to live, other alternatives, and it's not hopeless to ponder them...
...We are looking for a new self-image because our existing identities, we suddenly realize, are confusing and distorted...
...Why should we reduce an open-ended riddle to a single solution...
...It's a moral contagion, a revolution, like the change in Poland, after which the devising of oracular language to get around censorship must seem like a needless and rather queer mental exertion...
...Where somebody quits the censorship game whose cardinal rule is that you don't let on it exists, others are encouraged to do the same...
...There are people who are interested in my work...
...What is more, agreement among the great powers made certain that even the more intimate aspects of our daily lives would be governed by a dreary military status quo...
...Playing our respective roles we step in front of the curtain—the audience is posterity...
...He feels the warmth of dissident solidarity and begins to respect independent thinkers everywhere, who, because their knowledge of the terrain is up-todate, are always cheerfully alert, always in shape...
...they'd like to know how my mind operates—they're real readers...
...The censors have more work than they can handle, their vigilance flags—before they know it they, too, are seduced by an unfettered thought and let it slip through their fingers...
...But I am afraid that this dandy opportunity to demonstrate the openness of Hungarian intellectual life will be allowed to slip by unnoticed...
...Each historical period had its share of crushed armed rebellions, its own struggles for national and societal sovereignty...
...Greetings, tiny microphone, concealed up there in the ceiling of my village hideaway...
...the culture it cre450 ated, thanks in part to the talents of liberal reformers, is more interesting, more variegated than any in recent memory...
...I should like to ask the Hungarian censorship authorities to refute what will follow below by publishing it in any Hungarian periodical and appending to it a few rebuttals by the most formidable champions of their ideology...
...Political democracy is achieved when even dissidents who don't get a penny from the state can make a living...
...There are so many other approaches and moods, the reluctant writer is told...
...Someone like me is your reason for being...
...Let them ban our thoughts...
...I run into an acquaintance on the street...
...Many a fine mind, destined for greater achievements, studiously avoids the depths and the heights...
...The state-owned man is no worse than a regular citizen, only different...
...Even after finding cover in the small community of similarly punished citizens, he feels a certain nostalgia for the state-approved reality he left behind, for he feels that it is the true reality, and his own, in the hours of extreme anxiety, seems no more than an oppressive illusion...
...Only politically are these chiefs more reliable, which means simply that they are ready to enforce any and all directives that come from above...
...n "state socialism," the formal separation between state and society breaks down...
...At long last society is beginning to learn how to defend itself from oppressive state power and, what's more, is learning to control itself as well...
...State power strips me bare: I try to profit from it...
...we are dreamers, secret connivers...
...No job...
...He guards his incognito with cool formality...
...The chief controllers will gently subdue those guilty of none-too-serious intellectual breaches, and permit them to find a place again in the hierarchy —perhaps on a lower level...
...chances are neither of us is...
...What's valued right now is not private gain but intelligent teamwork, the creative use of power, the free exchange of ideas between consenting adults...
...We are slowly coming out of a torpor brought on by alcohol, oversedation, overeating...
...The relationship between manager and underling, but also between doctor and patient, pupil and schoolteacher, becomes a course in censorship...
...The dissenters themselves are permeated by the state...
...Hands reach out of the state pyramid toward these prodigal sons and pull them back into the system...
...We Central Europeans are sleeping beauties who are finally being roused from our slumber...
...As citizens become more aware, more sophisticated, they will find it intolerable that because of a clumsy organizational structure and slow-witted management, they have to work harder than their colleagues on the other side of the Iron Curtain to achieve the same results...
...If this is how the majority sees him, he, too, will be inclined to believe something is wrong with him...
...People in the West are freer than we are...
...With a little understanding of human psychology, punishment can be meted out judiciously, as needed, so that the perpetrator of verbal crimes, the slanderer, the speaker of blunt truths will take fright and in a fit of selfcriticism beg for forgiveness...
...when they grow bold it becomes frightened...
...Its aim is not to achieve power through political parties and other power bases but to develop ways of defending society from excessive state power...
...This dialogue is Beckettian right now, perhaps it will become Chekhovian, and some day—who knows?—it may even be Shakespearean...
...in a society that begins not to be afraid, it loses its strength...
...A hunger for communication is spreading across Central Europe...
...When people are afraid of it, it is secure...
...448 lives remain outside state control—there is virtually no neutral ground...
...Self-rule is the greatest societal need in Central Europe today...
...The dankness cuts through me—I, too, have grown heavy with fatigue...
...The state-owned man helps others become what he is...
...Let the government remain in place and have, 454 for all we care, the legitimacy of a monarchy...
...An old friend comes up to me, smiles, proffers his hand, then, somewhat flustered, hurries away...
...Since the state-owned man is the model or norm, the autonomous man is the deviant...
...Meaningful communications are being taken more seriously...
...For as long as I can remember, living under censorship has not been much fun...
...Depressions here seem gloomier, the yearnings for freedom more romantic, the swings from despair to hope more abrupt...
...Everyone knows that recommendations and condemnations issued by the official propaganda are always greeted with suspicion...
...The nation-state is capable of nationalizing everything within its boundaries, including the interior monologues of passersby on the street...
...The state-owned citizen is political even if he is apolitical...
...It's as if in a conspiracy of emotions even our dreams and nightmares joined forces, as if we were pregnant with our own doubles, whom we were trying to pick out from the vast unknown...
...It's an authentic, unsquelchable Central European movement, brought about, if unwittingly, by "state socialism" itself...
...If he should err, and not be stubborn about his error, his peers will bail him out, and with a maternal gesture help him return to the fold...
...We don't wish to respect any abridgment of freedom, even if compliance means exemption from another kind of restriction...
...our consolation is that we are less lonely...
...He will be permitted to make liberal concessions if in key questions he proves to be unbending...
...But do listen to them more carefully: behind the pretentious academicaesthetic lingo, rabbit souls shudder...
...And the object of this course is general stupidity —to discourage people from thinking...
...Hitting the keys of a typewriter or talking into a recorder under it can be a terrific challenge...
...I lounge about and dillydally, and this justifies major expenditures by a reputable organization...
...It's this lively oral tradition that lends our culture its unique character...
...When the selection process is undemocratic, the leaders are invariably duller than their subordinates...
...now you are suspect if you smile...
...We are all subject to punishment, and we would all like to escape detection...
...But in return he expects his author to support him unconditionally when he has it out with the other high-ranking censors...
...By the time he grows old, the state-owned man becomes—in his sleep as well as during his waking hours— an obedient, well-behaved child...
...The state-owned individual is never bored...
...the space around us got bigger...
...We move our limbs—what do you know, they can be moved...
...under the hard shell of statist rule a new kind of society has reached maturity...
...I believe that censorship in Central Europe is past the peak of its power...
...What other choice does he have...
...They think I am dangerous, I think they are...
...They screen their words with quiet dignity, like a Confucian monk, wisely keeping back much of what they know...
...It takes a long time for the outcast to realize that reality is always where he happens to be...
...I am a banned, blacklisted writer...
...I am being observed," I write...
...The all-powerful state surrounds our soft, amorphous lives and gives them shape...
...Today the desire to redefine man is felt more profoundly in Central Europe...
...the number of independentminded people, the channels of uncensored communication keep growing...
...Censorship is reality and also the essence of reality...
...They leave you alone...
...it's eyes telling you: ill-conceived, ill-advised, ill-timed...
...Why should it be shameful to trick a superior force...
...The be-all and end-all of the state-owned citizen is his state-granted job, which he might lose, or at least be made to fear that he might...
...We found out, for example, that as important as meat was for the workers, freedom was even more important...
...Open solidarity is tantamount to a revolution against censorship...
...but if he swallows them too often, he will get sick or go crazy...
...At that time you were told what to say...
...If he does, then he deserves to be called a first-rate state-sponsored man, and be seen on television making statements and reminiscing, and doing it much more solemnly and dully than he would in a private gathering...
...In response, the state-owned citizen experiences dramatically his own schizophrenia, and can no longer withdraw into his comfortable stupor...
...In our part of the world imperial interests were always deemed more important than the principles of popular rule and representative government...
...It doesn't wish to overthrow Communist party rule...
...The counterculture holds on to official rejects...
...what it is, in fact, is a slow wearing away...
...judgments are based on an invisible system of evaluations, on decisions reached by the family council of a parallel culture, which doesn't even have to convene to make its sentiments known...
...let it rule by the will of a party that, though it offers a great many advantages to its members, can't even entice one-tenth of the adult population to join its ranks...
...We have what to fear and what to wish for...
...If anything he is sluggish and listless...
...The official favorite should love the cloying medium of statist paternalism...
...Parents and children pay tribute daily on the altar of censorship for it is responsible, after all, for family happiness, the vacations abroad, the security of their cozy mousehole...
...If the number of these independentminded citizens keeps growing, a countermodel emerges, which has its own attraction, its own magic...
...In a statist society the government official represents the norm, the person who counts on being promoted, who would rather be in the hub of things than on the sidelines...
...Even the way people commit adultery or enjoy their vacations, the way they joke and deliver speeches identifies them as state-owned men and women...
...It is irritated most when it's pinned down...
...Let him give voice to his moral struggles, and let him, above all, take his job to be his calling and prove his mettle with unremitting zeal...
...We recognize censorship in our neuroses, in our alarmed reaction to forthrightness, in our sentimental conversations, which invariably justify our cowardice with some high-minded argument...
...Why, then you can think of the craziest things...
...In Central Europe we have less respect for fashionable novelties than for values that endure, for recognition that's constant...
...As the state is stronger, it gives its citizens greater leeway, so a moderate free-thinker in a mature "state-socialist" society can be as selfsatisfied as a marcher in a victory parade...
...Censorship can be found in the awkward movements of bodies, in the ungainliness of clothes, in the sluggishness of thoughts, the timidity of the imagination, in humor turned sour, in the hind thoughts wheezing through spoken words...
...Hungary lost her independence four and a half centuries ago and has not regained it since...
...We learn to appreciate the advantages of geopolitical emergencies: instead of valuing superior external strength, we set store by what's below and inside us...
...you get used to it, says an inner voice...
...Truth and lies together create a civilization, and truth blooms when locked in battle with untruth...
...We wish for a society where autonomy is the secret poetry in every human heart...
...if it doesn't disturb the state spirit too much, it gets published...
...The local overlords, approved above and abroad, perpetuated a system of dependent relationships and ruled over an intimidated (and, after a while, plainly timid) society that sulked and grumbled to show its dissatisfaction, and began cultivating the symbols of its glorious past and overblown national myths...
...His approach to things is never in keeping with the larger interests of the state, thus he is either guilty or insane...
...A perfect symbiosis...
...Today's censorship doesn't require that you be enthusiastic about everything...
...The entire state culture, from the nurseries on up to the academies, is bent on convincing us that true freedom can be found only within the fold...
...Alas, dear reader, they are very dreary indeed...
...453 How to liberate itself from censorship and self-censorship is an adventure for Central Europe...
...Here dishonorable as well as decent men and women learn to lie expertly, conscientiously—for the sake of their families, their profession, their country...
...We have long grown accustomed to chiefs who are less bright than their hardworking assistants...
...In order for this to seem natural, tough censorship rules are needed that regulate not only literary discourse but the flow of informal conversation as well...
...Their serenity is unshakable, and they exercise their freedom as though that were their main occupation...
...therefore censorship must always operate in an intimate semidarkness...
...Over the past few centuries the cycles of numbness, compromise, reform, revolution were repeated at more or less regular intervals...
...Anyone working for the organs of communication, for instance, will become state-owned that much quicker, for if he doesn't, he loses ground, is cut off...
...Just how many overrefined minds are here, all in a heap, who cannot speak without resorting to riddles and indirections...
...Not getting published...
...what it demands is not power but a counterweight to power—it wants effective self-rule for real communities, and this makes it different from Communist as well as liberal and even social democratic rule...
...In a totalitarian situation censorship can never be formalized...
...With an air of gravity or with exaggerated levity, he teaches those around him to respect the interests of the state, or at least to go through the motions...
...This should be especially obvious since we have learned that without political democracy there can be no economic democracy, only a faltering, wasteful, debt-ridden would-be economy...
...we are only too familiar with each other's helplessness...
...now you're only advised what not to say...
...Censorship is present even when the subject at hand has nothing to do with politics...
...This is the beginning of the end for him...
...The state is secure enough to let police operations be preventive rather than punitive...
...Or putting it more severely: he is antisocial, a mental case...
...Nobody will think ill of you if you feel helpless...
...Who would have predicted in the spring of 1980 that in Poland, within the space of a single month, millions would shake off their apathy and refuse to accept as natural an absurd state of affairs: rule by bunglers that's safeguarded by the police...
...put me in the archives so that I could consider myself a significant enough part of the system...
...It sharpens our sensibilities, tunes our ears...
Vol. 30 • September 1983 • No. 4
