Evidentia

St. Mary’s Church, Kraków

I have written a few times here about liberty and slavery. Actually, the time I first became aware of liberty was while visiting Kraków, Poland with my friend Wilczek Siemienski in the late 1970s.

Poland was a virtual colony of the Soviet empire, and subjected to the faceless tyranny of communism. I met people who had survived Nazi concentration camps or served as slaves in the Soviet gulag system. I met others who were subjected to the more refined bureaucratic torments of perpetual servitude. I got to know people who opened up a space of personal liberty for themselves. Wilczek took me to visit his aunt Pelagia Potocka, an elderly lady who operated a dissident printing press in her home. Countless friends were in and out of jail for forty-eight hours, simply for expressing their opposition to the régime. I learned that “real life” was experienced in private, and largely in secret, where the lives of individual Poles were intense and colourful. Some Poles, in their private lives, struck me as somehow freer than the Canadians I knew back home in Montreal, where liberty was simply a given and was taken for granted.

The clarion call of liberty

I remember walking across the vast market square of Kraków, before the twin Gothic towers of St. Mary’s Church, and hearing the hejnał Mariacki ring out every hour. I found this clarion call to freedom unbelievably moving, and I still do. The hejnał has been a regular feature of Polish life ever since the 13th century, when a bugler alerted his compatriots to a Tatar invasion but was then suddenly, in mid-melody, fatally pierced in the neck by an arrow.

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I began studying the nature of liberty, and came across The Captive Mind, a peculiar book by the Polish-Lithuanian Nobel laurate Czesław Miłosz. In this book, Miłosz explained what happened to authors when they were subject to totalitarian pressures to conform.

Czesław Miłosz

Communism by turns smothered and spied on the individual, disrupted and re-ordered his life, co-opted the weak and harassed the strong, turning everything public into shades of grey.

But authors want above all to be published, to be read. So, some sold themselves out, and became official authors in the service of the State; others practiced Ketman, which according to Miłosz is originally a Muslim strategy for survival, and consists in shielding one’s private doubts about the ideology in place with an outward display of acrobatics. His definition of Professional Ketman appealed to me above all: “since I find myself in circumstances over which I have no control, and since I have but one life and that is fleeting, I should strive to do my best. I am like a crustacean attached to a crag on the bottom of the sea. Over me storms rage and huge ships sail; but my entire effort is concentrated upon clinging to the rock, for otherwise I will be carried off by the waters and perish, leaving no trace behind. If I am a scientist I attend congresses at which I deliver reports strictly adhering to the Party line. But in the laboratory I pursue my research according to scientific methods, and in that alone lies the aim of life.”

The idea of dissidence appealed to me, since it combined individualism and altruism. I saw Miłosz as a dissident, although he tasted the bitter cup of exile. As he wrote in The Captive Mind, “Now I am homeless – a just punishment. But perhaps I was born so that the ‘Eternal Slaves’ might speak through my lips.”

The literary formation of Czesław Miłosz included clandestine journalism during the Warsaw Uprising

Part of his literary formation was being a clandestine journalist during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, during which the Nazis fire-bombed the city, while the Soviets watched and waited on the other side of the Vistula. Many members of Wilczek’s family also took part in this Uprising; some of them told me about it.

When visiting Poland, I wondered why Europeans make it seem as if the re-enslavement by the Nazis and Soviets of tens of millions of Europeans was some kind of passing historical aberration, as if the rest of the world (apart from a few islands of exported liberty, such as North America and Australia) were doomed to slavery, but Europeans were naturally destined for liberty. Of course some Western powers, Canada among them, declared war on Nazi Germany in September 1939, because of the invasion of Poland. But by the time of Yalta, in 1945, Poland was tossed as war booty to the Soviets. Given the existence of the Iron Curtain at the time of my stays in Kraków, it was as if whoever did not enjoy liberty, could not even be considered European. Whereas history shows that servitude and slavery have been part of the landscape in Europe for millennia.

I also wondered then, and I wonder now, why there are so few dissidents in Western democracies. Could it be that we also are co-opted, that we get into bed with the State or large corporations simply because it is convenient, or necessary for our survival? Do we not also practice Ketman of our own, a kind of craven opportunism, allowing us to profit publicly from the system while nurturing private anxieties, doubts and hopes? When there is such a gap between what a person does and what he says, one can hardly speak of having any conviction.

If there is one constant in human nature, it seems to me that even in the midst of relative liberty, some malevolent individuals, groups, criminal organizations, large corporations not to mention agents of the State are constantly devising new ways to reduce others to servitude, in other words, to enslave them. At the same time, others promote liberty assiduously.

The hejnał and Miłosz serve as reminders that liberty is not to be taken for granted.

Sadly, Wilczek Siemienski was killed during the devastating earthquake in Haiti just recently. When I wrote this blog, last December, I was thinking of him. He was working for the United Nations in the area of human rights.

Liberty should not be taken for granted