THE PEDAGOGY OF
SUFFERING AND THE LESSON OF FREEDOM
On 9 February 1945
a young captain of the Red Army artillery is arrested following the
interception of his conversations with a friend and sentenced to eight years
in prison for "disrespectful remarks on comrade Stalin”. It was the case of
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who in prison will discover his great literary
talent that would make him one of the greatest writers of the 21st
century. Through the huge force of persuasion that literature possesses, the
Soviet gulag drama will be known by the whole world. However, the above
mentioned event represents but a tiny piece in a diabolic mechanism, in
which the communist dictatorship has replaced the
fundamentals of
civilization by ideological surrogates, in a tenacious attempt to transform
the history of half a century into a tragic ordeal for the entire humanity.
On the other hand, that event shows that the
so-called unfreeze of Stalin’s repressions that took place during the war
had come to an end before it was really over. The criminal actions that had
already made millions of innocent victims in the USSR would start again,
with even greater fury. This time, they would cover a much wider space, also
including Central and South Eastern Europe.
The atrocities of the two world
wars during in the first half of the 20th century were not
sufficient enough to understand that the western civilization cannot be
strengthened only by the assertion of a certain cultural superiority or by
maintaining a permanent state of conflict.
At the end of the
Second World War, the United Nations General Assembly adopted and signed the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the first document with universal
vocation, meant to defend the real values of humanity. The large number of
agreements signed by different countries seemed to indicate a stabilization
of society and of its rights after the chaos caused by the two World Wars
and the ideologies they were based on. Russia, Ukraine, Poland and
Yugoslavia were among the United Nation founders. Romania, like other
countries under the Soviet influence, would also join them.
Only few
would have suspected that this document and its principles would be brutally
violated in the communist countries. But what caused such an attitude?
The answer lies in
the contrast between the surface politics of those states and the new
communist ideology that they had adopted. The human person has been replaced
by an un-individualized one whose existence is entirely dependent on their
affiliation to a group. Any counter-reaction to the group
principles attenuates up to
dissolving their identity and exiles
them to the periphery
of society. The utopia of equal rights, the elimination of a constructive
competition, the removal of the right to freedom of speech have led to the
emergence of an amorphous form, which claimed itself society; here ideology
replaces feeling, the freedom of speech is transformed into a mere
slogan, religion
is replaced by the communist one-party creed
and more or less concealed forms of terror are substituted for freedom. All
these transformations have resulted in a new face of
Eastern Europe,
furrowed
by the pain of millions of people.
The result:
the establishment of communism in Eastern Europe by violent means and by the
bloody repression of anti-communist resistance. The elimination of real or
potential opponents was achieved by incarcerating them in centres for
torture-based re-education prisons with extermination regime, forced labour
camps, political assassinations, summary executions, mass deportations.
Final count: millions of deaths, tens of millions of ruined human lives
.
Beyond the Iron
Curtain, the countries spared from the red scourge could do nothing but
watch, most of the time helplessly, at the convulsions of the countries
where communism had become a state of fact. The only way to help them seemed
to acknowledge the human rights to all those for whom the only reality was
that enforced by the dictatorial communist regimes. Nowhere else in the
world did the Declaration of the Human Rights hold such influence and power
as in the former communist countries. It is the lever that led to the
dissolution of this system in the Eastern Europe countries. Where did this
influence come from? From the fact that the Declaration’s principles
represent the fundamentals of human existence, regardless of race, religion
or political affiliation. Their "politics" promotes the natural way of life
in which each person is unique by what they do, think or feel. When the
communist oppressions, censorship and terror seemed to ensure a peaceful
future for this system, the suffering it had caused turned into a true
pedagogy of freedom, thus forming strong characters, able to dissolve this
state of fact.
On August 1st,
1975, thirty-three heads of state and governments from European countries
along with leaders of the United States and Canada signed the final act of
the Helsinki Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe. It ratified
the inviolability of the borders, as they had been established at the end of
the World War II, but it also contained a so called "third basket",
regarding the free circulation of people and ideas.
The Helsinki Act was considered by
the leaders of the USSR
and other communist states in
Eastern Europe a great victory that consecrated the new borders of the
Soviet empire. The democratic intellectuals seized the chance they are
offered: in August 1976, the KOR is created in Poland, that is the defence
committee of those persecuted by the communist regime. In Czechoslovakia in
January 1977, 238 persons signed Charter 77, which required the application
of the basket 3 in the Helsinki Accord. In 1978, also in the Czech Republic
VOWS is founded, that is the defence committee of those who subjected to
unjust suffering. In 1978 reflection circles centred round writers and
philosophers, scientists or dissident artists are initiated in Hungary, in
the Baltic countries as well as in Russia.
The fall of
communism was, above all, an ideological collapse, that had prepared the
political fall of the dictatorial regimes within most of the former Soviet
bloc countries. In this context, culture played a fundamental role. At the
same time with the official jargon, an „underground” discourse appeared,
aiming to denounce imposture and mendacity, as well as to reject those
which, as the well-known anticommunist dissident Doina Cornea said, "have
ceased to think." For the Soviet empire, over-armed for a "cold" or "warm"
war, the peril did not come from the West, with which it was dealing in a
successful manner. The peril did not come from the "American missiles”. It
came from their own countries’ intellectuals, despised by the "men of the
system". "Who is that musician?" Gorbachev asked when a professor from the
University of Vilnius, Vitautas Landbergis, dared to proclaim Lithuania’s
independence on behalf of the Sajudis civic movement in defiance of
the KGB troops. The peril came through the democratic intellectuals "speech"
and through their "writing", illegally spread by rudimentary means.
In
1999 I awarded the Presidential Gold Medal “A decade since the fall of
communism in Central and South Eastern Europe” to the former president of
the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev. I added him to such recipients as Walesa,
Havel, and Pope Joan Paul II, for the role his „Glasnost” politics have had
for the reawakening of the oppressed nations within the USSR.
Mikhail Gorbachev's attempt to
reform communism had lamentably failed, by the end of the 80s,confirming the
certitude that many intellectuals from the former Soviet bloc had from the
beginning, that the communist system cannot be reformed, but only done away
with.
The
effects of the democratic intellectuals’ humanistic discourse did not take
long to materialize. Movements like the "Polish Summer” or the “Prague
Spring" prepared the ultimate fall of the communist regimes during the
early 90s. An ideology where human rights are almost non-existent cannot
last forever. The students’ riots in Poland in the spring of 1968, or the
Prague Spring showned that young people cannot stand the communist lies.
Echoes of these movements were felt in Romania, too, through the miners’
riots in the Jiu Valley in 1977, or that of the workers in Brasov in 1987.
Suffering, long used as a terrible instrument for control and oppression,
became the gateway to freedom. When, in 1989, millions of workers marched
through this gateway the communist dictatorships that had been claiming to
rule on their behalf suddenly collapsed through a peaceful revolution. Only
in Romania, the communism regime set up through murder and violence was
ended through murder and vioelence: 1,200 dead persons, 3,500 seriously
injured and thousands of tortured people paid the price for freedom in
Timisoara and Bucharest.
When looking
into these events almost twenty years after thecollapse of the Soviet bloc
they do confirm that asserting human rights is synonymous with the
expression of an authentic human identity. Not taking them into
consideration means the inevitable return to a condition that the entire
Eastern Europe tries to forget. The pedagogy of the past suffering has
undoubtedly achieved its target, but in the new context of accession to the
European Union, it should teach the lesson of freedom and openness to the
authentic values of humanity.
For the young
generation, freed from the communist constraints, their parents’ torments
might seem a topic related rather to a past tributary to suffering and
lack of freedom, than to a present characterised by another type of
political, economic and social crisis . However, those who still bear the
live memory of that epoch are the main originators of a new attitude that
tries to tackle the human rights issue from a contemporary perspective. The
horrors of the bygone epoch have left their marks upon the collective
mentalities within the ex-communist area. Their new approached is
characterized by balance, well-tempered realism, seeking to avoid the
reiteration of such a deviation. The millions of dead people in the
communist camps may seem for some of our contemporaries mere statistics, but
the moral effect remains overwhelming. The contemporary society in the
former communist countries refuses to accept any totalitarian approach,
regardless of how it is packaged.
Human rights
are perceived today in the new key of mutual understanding and acceptance,
without excluding the sad memory of communist times. The intransigency
against any attempt at discrimination, against freedom of speech, against
any anti-democratic attempt at leadership, the condemnation of the
ultra-nationalist political discourse and the actual fight against
terrorism, all this is nothing but the sequel of this new way of
understanding the reality. Briefly, the human person has regained got back
its rights, occupying the central place from where it had been dislocated
through the communist ideology. Beyond this optimistic image of the
post-communist society, we should not overlook the fact that the perception
upon the ideal of freedom , achieved through so much and hard suffering can
also be distorted: the excessive idealization may transfer the fundamentals
of freedom such as they appear in the Declaration of human rights to utopian
spheres. Ignoring this ideal and particularly the pedagogy of suffering may
cause an irreparable break between the values of the past and the desire of
the present to assert itself; making it formal can move the interest and
poles of action towards an area characterized by pseudo-values, falseness
and imposture. For each of the former Communist bloc countries understanding
this lesson of authentical freedom represents the great stake of shaping
their own identity within the new United Europe. Without ignoring the past,
we should not let overlook the fact that this is rather a guide, than a goal
which we must achieve. It is not viable to hold on to a condition that is no
longer actual , just as it is equally wrong to adopt an attitude totally
independent of the great lessons of history.
What can we do
to avoid such situations? It is enough to look carefully at the history
woven around the ideal of freedom, as it is formulated in the Declaration of
Human Rights. Each country and each people have brought their contribution
to conceiving it and, ultimately, it is this story that makes the document
have a universal, perennial vocation. It is not text itself, but the idea
conveyed that motivated the action of tens of nations to defend liberty.
The transition
in Eastern Europe has not bee a the only
transition during the last twenty years. The whole world passes in fact
through a transition. The strategic alliances have formed fragile
constellations. The diplomatic priorities are changing in the light of an
ever-moving geopolitical configuration. The shifts of this ending millennium
do not exclude any area of life: the forms and the substance of knowledge
are rapidly evolving, the technological revolution effects become more and
more tangible, and the sphere of telecommunications practically spans the
entire planet. Economic practices and financial instruments evolve under the
impulse of a fast dynamic and the fluctuations on the capital markets are
triggered by an almost unpredictable logic. At the same time, traditional
models are overshadowed by unusual behaviour and more and more often we have
to respond to bioethical dilemmas inconceivable a few decades ago.
Our present
world faces a series of paradoxes: underdevelopment does not exclude arming,
democracy does not eradicate corruption, and market economy fails to prevent
ecological disasters and unemployment. 50 years after it was adopted, the
Universal Declaration of the Human Rights is systematically defied, either
on ideological pretexts, or under the endemic burden of poverty.
It would be
inappropriate to leave out of this short analysis what might be called the
globalization of vices. Organized crime, traffic of drugs, weapons,
radioactive substances or human organs, child prostitution, paedophilia,
underground economy, tax dodging and forced emigration are the most
striking, but not the only aspects of world-wide ills that governments,
law forces or humanitarian organisations have to do battle against, often
admitting their inefficiency.
The past
teaches us that no civilization or social structure in the history has just
vanished, like the mythical Atlantis. The source of the above mentioned
disorders belongs more to time rather than to space. On a smaller and
smaller planet, deeply heterogeneous collective periods confront each other.
The West has stepped into the so-called post-modern and post-industrial age.
The Eastern Europe countries cross post-communist times, meant to provide
their full evolution into modernity. On the other hand, many societies of
our contemporary world rely upon a pre-modern mentality.
Politics and
economy have succeeded in organizing the planet space, but not also its
time. Through agreements,
governments can bring together
geographically far distant countries. In their turn, the world economy
players can build the infrastructure necessary to ensure any type of
connection between human communities. Physical distances thus become very
relative; however, this is not the case when talking about the time
perception gaps. These gaps generate contradictory horizons of expectations.
Western man wants a 'green' vacation, while the Indian in the Amazon forest,
living in an unpolluted environment, dreams about a motorboat. One
individual wants to return to nature and another tries to enter
technological modernity. No one would object if diversity of time
perceptions would lead only to different personal ideals. Unfortunately,
from this point on not only our personal desires split, but also community
attitudes, expressed through political offensive options. All kinds of
misunderstandings occur today mainly because the different branches of the
world live inside parallel histories. The big challenge of the next
millennium seems to be related to the question: what can we do for all the
planet's inhabitants to become truly contemporary?
How can we
explain to those outside the democratic Western world the fact that it seeks
to progressively free itself from the fascination of modernity and that it
is looking for a spiritual alternative that does not exclude a dialogue with
the traditional values? How could we persuade the West that the pre-modern
or the post-totalitarian societies can pass directly to post-modernity,
without being confronted with the excesses of the industrial age? We are
facing a communication problem and I believe that, at this level, a better
understanding of the "human rights" concept plays a fundamental role.
The Oslo
Freedom Forum is a good opportunity. First, we can try to make a distinction
between the "human rights" and its related concepts such as democracy and
the rule of law upon which is focussed the energy of civil society. From
our experience during the communist regime, we can understand the easiness
with that the totalitarian regimes may accept the "rule of law" principle. I
could see how the "free elections" slogan, shouted in front of the tanks and
weapons belonging to the communist repression system could be used for the
seizure of power by the former communist nomenclature and the new oligarchs.
I did see how the “shop window democracy" could disguise itself into a real
democracy. I did see how manipulating the public opinion through the
oligarchs’ "free media" can be more effective in the market economy and in
democracy times, than the communist propaganda spread by the official media
of the totalitarian regime, in which no one believed any more. I did see how
the commanders and the authors of crimes against their own people could fend
off criminal responsibility through prescription, because the agreements
regarding „genocide” do not apply to their situation and the general
recognition of "crimes against humanity" is thus delayed. After all, can we
actually give "human rights" a generally accepted defition?
We live in a
more or less the same 21st century world, thanks to international law and
by virtue of technological progress. We will not really have a dialogue
until we live in a same type of time. But, in order to stand before one
another with our particular affinities and needs, it is necessary to
establish a universal consensus referring to those moral values that
protects not only each community, but also each person. How could we
initiate a real dialogue to discover it?
It's risky to
establish such a consensus around the idea of good. We can surmise that, for
centuries from now on, every society will have its own views about its
spiritual or earthly welfare. Trying to standardize these concepts means to
advocate the establishment of a single type of thinking and to ineffectively
multiply the outbreaks of tensions. Political doctrines, symbolic contexts,
local traditions and belief systems are irreducible. There are therefore
legitimate suspicions of any syncretistic project able to relativize the
uniqueness of these discourses and representations. No one – a politician,
thinker, religious leader or ordinary man - is willing to sacrifice his
identity. We cannot talk effectively if the interlocutor feels the danger of
having his identity maimed. Nothing allows us to pretend that our offer is
superior, in absolute terms, compared to one made by others . On the other
hand, nobody can claim today to reduce the whole human family to the
denominator of his own political, economic, cultural or religious options.
Therefore, if we cannot always perceive the common good, it seems to
me more reasonable to begin with identifying the common harm. It is
in the interest of all nations to meet on the same ground in order to reject
what they all reckon to be intolerable.
I am confident
that everyone here refuses from the very beginning the idea of war,
terrorism, torture, pollution, crime of opinion, xenophobia, racism, and
genetic manipulation, exploitation of children, social exclusion, hunger,
professional discrimination on sex, religion or ethnic affiliation. We have
the duty to diagnose together these diseases, so that we can heal together
the wounds that they continue to make.
Moreover, we
cannot forget that we paid a toll of tens of millions of human lives for the
experience of the communist regime, which tried to alienate us from our
natural humanistic European vocation. The freedom regained through human
sacrifice has given us all not only rights, but also responsibilities that
we are gradually getting used to, under often difficult social and
psychological conditions. For half century the citizens of the former
communist countries were deprived of all their rights, including the right
to life. The lesson of their suffering and struggle is a first step for
understanding the great lesson of every individual liberty within the
boundaries of respect for the other individuals’ liberty.
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