We are so hamyd,
For-taxed and ramyd,
By these gentlery-men!
― The Wakefield Second Shepherds’ Play, c.1425–1450 [1]
We are men the same as they are:
Our members are as straight as theirs are,
Our bodies stand as high from the ground,
The pain we suffer’s as profound.
Our only need is courage now,
To pledge ourselves by solemn vow,
Our goods and persons to defend,
And stay together to this end…
Robert Wace, Le roman de la Rou et des ducs deNormandie, 1160–70s [2]
On my return to Prague, last year, after tramping in Hungary and Transylvania, my friend Filip Marek took a day off for some more explorations of the Bohemian countryside. This turned out to be the most emotionally charged day in my travels, and I’ve delayed describing it because of its personal importance to me.
The landscape around Prague is not much different, at first glance, from that of Southern Ontario. It’s rich farmland, gently rolling hills, and patches of mixed forest similar to those around Toronto. Most of it was so pleasant that I couldn’t help replaying snatches of Dvořák, Smetana and Janáček in my head as the car rolled under the dappled sunlit trees, past fields and villages that seem to be both ancient and brand new at the same time. However, our quest was to extract something incongruously disturbing and tragic from Bohemia’s woods and streams.[3] We were going to see two places that do not loom large in the history books, but loom large in the kind of history that I am concerned with. The first was the Vojna Hard Labour Camp, in the forest near the village of Příbram, and the second was the site of Lidice, a village that no longer exists.
The Vojna prison camp, or NPT‑U, as the Communist regime designated it, operated between 1947 and 1961, when its prisoners were transfered to NPT‑Z, the Bytíz Hard Labour Camp. Vojna was a uranium mine, and its prisoners were largely “politicals”, democrats, artists, writers, old partisan fighters against the Nazi occupation, anyone who might be a focus of resistance to the Communist regime. There were dozens of such camps in the Bad Old Days, but most have been demolished. This one has been preserved. When Filip and I arrived, it was closed. But the director opened it for us, and gave us a personally guided tour, lasting more than an hour. The director was extremely knowledgeable, and was personally managing the reconstruction of the site. The flimsy buildings had mostly been knocked down, or disintegrated. But great care is now being taken to reconstruct everything as it was, using interviews with and memoirs of survivors, as well as archaeological and documentary evidence. For example, I was shown a cell which was painted differently from the others in the same block. No one knows why it was different, but since survivors agree that it was, it has been restored that way.
It was an extraordinary visit. The Director answered all my questions, which I chose carefully to elicit information I would not find in books. While only a small segment of the complex of barracks has been restored, there was enough there to give you at least a vague feeling of what it must have been like. Most touching was the small “political education” room, were prisoners were forced to endure droning lectures on the “philosophy” of Karl Marx, which I don’t doubt was not much better an experience than being worked to death shoveling uranium ore. A “punishment cell”, basically a concrete coffin in the ground, did not need much restoration. To relieve visitors of the unremitting gloom, one of the buildings has been fitted with an exhibit of children’s art.
Compared to Lubyanka Prison, or the regime of gulag camps in the Soviet Union, Vojna was pretty tame stuff, but it was enough to fuel my rage. Such vile places are not merely archaeological remnants of a distant age. There are plenty of such places today. No one knows how many innocent victims languish in the infamous laogai of the Emperor Hu Jintao, in China. Beijing admits to holding 260,000. That is probably just the tip of the iceberg, and the number of victims has been steadily climbing as Hu grasps that nobody in the rest of the world gives a damn about it, as long as they can get the cheap chemicals, steel pipe, asbestos, hand tools, cotton… and fresh body parts for transplant, that slave labour produces. Yes, there are plenty of such places, including some run by George W. Bush, Jr. and his sickening cronies. Some of my countrymen have been tortured in those.
Camp NPT‑U today. The sign above the entrance reads “Praci ke svobode”, an exact translation of the slogan written above the gates of Nazi
concentration camps, “Arbeit mach frei”
Camp NPT‑U when it was in operation:
Next we drove to Lidice. What town can you find on the map, but not on the Earth? Lidice. Lidice was a small village, west of Prague, which the Nazi occupation regime had “erased from the map” in 1942. In defiance, cartographers still place it on their maps. I first learned the story of Lidice when I was a small child, from a television drama now long forgotten. It was one of the stories that haunted me, in my safe Canadian childhood, and drove me towards my present occupation. When Filip actually took me to the empty field where Lidice once stood, I’m afraid that nothing in my words or my face could convey the dark feelings churning in me. I haven’t been able to write about it until now.
Here are the bare facts. On June 10, 1942, under the direction of Horst Böhme, SS Commander of the C division of the Einsatzgruppe, SS police forces marched into this small, picturesque Bohemian village, chosen because it was “typical” and close to Prague. The roads around it were blocked, so no escape was possible. The entire population was rounded up. All the women and children were taken to a school building. The men were taken to a barn. Then, starting in the morning, all males over 16 years of age were brought out, in batches of 5, and shot. The bodies were left in heaps, as each new batch was brought out to stand in front of the previous batch, and the executioners stepped back a pace for each round. By afternoon, there were 173 bodies rotting in sun.
That was only the beginning. The 184 women of the village were separated from the children. They were forced onto trucks, driven to the closest railway station, and from there shipped by train to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp near Berlin. Only a handful survived the regime of hard labour and torture.
All the buildings of the village were destroyed, razed to the ground and the rubble taken away. All the family pets and farm animals were killed. All the graves were dug up, the bodies destroyed, the markers removed. The entire process was filmed by the Nazis.
The children of the village were transported to Łódź, in Poland. After a few weeks of semi-starvation, and explicitly denied any sanitation or medical care, they were instructed to write postcards to their relatives. Seven of the children were selected for “aryanization”. The remainder were shipped to the extermination facilities at Chelmo, where they were gassed. I shall provide, at the end of this essay, a list of the children. I provide this list for a reason. I want the readers of this essay to understand what I’m talking about when I discuss the concept of dictatorship. I’m not talking about a “political system”, or a “form of government” or something that you keep in the same compartment in your head as the one where you keep discussions of gross national products or health care systems, or bilateral trade agreements.
When Filip took me to the site of Lidice, it was a warm May afternoon, approaching the 65th anniversary of the attrocity. It’s a small park, now, with a tasteful sculpture representing the children, a few flower beds, and a lot of grass.
This little expedition took place against an interesting psychological background. A friend of Filip’s had just been attacked, and seriously injured by a Neo-Nazi. Though they appear to be a small movement, and most Czechs dismiss them as unimportant, in fact, there are a shockingly large number of them, and the police have a habit at winking at their violent attacks on the Roma, and the small number of Africans and Asians who live in the republic. The injuries that she sustained were serious ― the Neo-Nazi had tried to run her over with a car while she was reporting on one of their demonstrations. She was hospitalized in a town known as a hotbed of these scumballs, and the hospital gave every indication of being perfectly willing to let them come back and finish her off in her bed. So her friends had driven there and hustled her out, risking a painful car ride back to Prague rather than leave her there. How permanent and disabling her injuries would be was not yet known.
These events serve as a reminder that there is nothing remote about dictatorship. Movements like the neo-Nazis may appear to be marginal phenomena in places like Western Europe, but in much of the world, they constitute a norm. In many places in the world, there would be nobody in a position to rescue Filip’s friend. In such places, criminal thugs are not a small movement of troublemakers existing on the margins. They are in charge. They are riding in limousines, directing armies and economies, and are welcome in the boardrooms of international finance, and in the councils of the United Nations. But they are not different, morally, psychologically, or intellectually, from the small-time thugs who attacked Filip’s friend. They are the same scum.
Nearly half the world still lives under the boots of dictators. One dictator alone rules more than a billion people ― Hu Jintao, who launched his career by murdering children in Tibet, and keeps a thriving industry of slave labour and extermination camps going. Currently, there are dozens of such vermin, whose status as dictators are beyond dispute: Isaias Afwerki, Bashar al-Assad, Omar Al Bashir, Paul Biya, Fidel Castro, Hu Jintao, Islam Karimov, Seyed Ali Khamenei, Kim Jong-il, Aleksandr Lukachenko, Makhosetive (self-styled King Mswati III), Pervez Musharraf, Robert Mugabe, Teodoro Obiang Nguema, Denis Sassou Nguesso, Nguyễn Tấn Dũng, Muammar al-Qaddafi, Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, Choummaly Sayasone, Hun Sen, Than Shwe, Meles Zenawi are among the worst of them, but there are plenty of others, and plenty of cases of “heads of state” who would love to play in the same league, but have some limitations on their power, or whose regimes teeter on the edge of full dictatorship, or who rule indirectly through appointed puppets. You have to keep reminding yourself of the most important and essential fact about these criminals: every one of them has a Lidice. Every one of them. They are all murderers of children. Some of them are responsible for dozens of Lidices, or hundreds of Lidices, or thousands of Lidices. But there is always a Lidice for any dictator.
What I urge people to learn and understand is that the power of these criminals comes directly from us. It is our collaboration, our willingness to tolerate them, and our constant efforts to validate them and help them that gives them their power.
Dictators only rule because we allow them to. They cannot rule unless they are given legitimacy by the world’s financial and political institutions, and all the world’s political and financial institutions conspire to do exactly that. They are given the power by us to buy the weapons with which they murder, torture, and make war. They are given the power by us to spend the riches that they extort from their victims, and they are allowed by us to keep their stolen wealth in banks, and they are allowed by us to flounce around the globe, bragging of their crimes, without fear of ever being arrested, tried, or punished. Democratically elected public officials pretend that they are the same things as themselves, that their “governments” have the same status as a real one, and that their criminal organizations are the same thing as the legitimate activities of a civilized society.
One event sticks in my mind to symbolize everything that is sick and depraved in our world. When a former Prime Minister of my own country died, Fidel Castro was invited to attend the funeral. This literally ― I am not using a figurative expression ― made me throw up. When I learned of it, I was sick with anger and disgust, and vomited. The thought that a filthy, degenerate, loathsome piece of shit like Fidel Castro, a racist, homophobic [see discussion of Castro’s persecution and torture of gays], mass-murdering slave trader and exploiter of millions of innocent people… the thought that this criminal garbage was invited to my country, and treated with honour and respect by democratically elected officials, was just too much for me to deal with. It got me in the gut, just as contemplating the site of Lidice got me in the gut. Why do people do this? WHY? How can any human being living in a democracy willingly allow such an obscene event to take place? On that day, I was ashamed to be Canadian.
Let’s look at what it really means to advocate democracy. The most fundamental principle of democratic thought is that only freely and honestly elected officials constitute government. No person or group of people who are not freely and democratically elected are legitimate in any way. Dictatorship is not “another form of government”. Dictatorship is not government. It is only crime. Anyone who rules over others through force, and is not elected, is merely a criminal ― nothing else, and nothing more. If you believe that an unelected criminal has any kind of legitimacy, if you believe that they should be treated as if they had been elected, then it is self-evident that you do not really believe in democracy, or genuinely advocate it.
Democracy derives both its forms and its legitimacy from morality ― from the universal moral imperative of human rights. That morality demands that all dictators be treated in this way only: complete rejection, complete opposition, complete anathema. No collaboration with a dictator is morally permissible.
It is immoral for anyone to treat a dictator, or his henchmen, as if they were “government”, or as if the territory they control was a “country”, or as if their flags, anthems, and symbols were legitimate representations of the people they bully and exploit. It is immoral for the citizens of a democracy to allow a dictator to have an “embassy” or a “consulate” on democratic soil, or to send “diplomatic representation”, or to in any way be accorded the privileges of a legitimate government. If a dictator, or any of his henchmen, is found on the soil of a democratic nation, it is necessary that they be instantly arrested and put on trial for their crimes.
It is immoral to permit any dictator or his henchmen to participate in international bodies, such as the United Nations. By having dictatorships embedded in its councils, the United Nations ceases to be a legitimate body. It represents nothing, should not be allowed to influence free people in any way. If we lived in a truly free and civilized society, then any elected public official who knowingly and willingly ate with, shook hands with, or privately communicated with a dictator, or was even at any time in the same room with a dictator, would be automatically removed from office and tried for treason.
It is immoral for anyone to engage in any economic exchange of any kind with a dictator or his henchmen. All money or property in the hands of a dictator is, ipso facto, stolen property. It belongs to the people that the dictator stole it from. To receive it is to knowingly receive stolen goods, and should be treated as such by the law. In a civilized, democratic society, anyone who knowingly gives even a single penny to a dictator should be arrested and do hard time in prison. Anyone who gives or sells weapons to a dictator, or conspires to provide them with weapons indirectly, should be imprisoned for life. To give a weapon to a dictator is treason to humanity, an unforgivable crime. Any corporation that engages in exchanges with a dictatorship of any kind should immediately be deprived of its corporate charter, have all its assets seized, and have all members of its board of directors charged with criminal conspiracy.
No bank or financial institution has the right to provide services to a dictator or to his henchmen. It is precisely because dictators and their retinues can deposit the wealth that they steal from the people into numbered bank accounts, and that they are allowed to spend it freely, that it is profitable to become a dictator. Any bank that knowingly provides such services to a dictator does not have the right to exist, and should be put out of business.
When the corporate boards of directors of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft agreed to collaborate with the dictator of China in the systematic censorship of the internet, in order to preserve his power and mentally enslave the people of China, they were committing a monstrous crime — a crime against humanity, a crime against civilization, and a crime against the people of China. They deserve to go to jail for it, and in a decent society they would go to jail for it. The excuses they offer are transparent revelations of their greed and moral corruption.
It is immoral for anyone to willingly serve in an army controlled by a dictator. Even if one finds oneself in such an army by conscription, or under threat to one’s family, or other forms of duress, it must always be remembered that such an army is not a legitimate army. It is one’s moral duty to do everything possible to sabotage it. If such an army is sent to fight against a legitimate government, then it is one’s moral duty to surrender. “Soldiers” in a dictators’ army are not really soldiers. If captured by democratic forces, they should be tried in an ordinary civilian court, to determine if they have committed civilian crimes. They should not be treated any differently from civilians. Officers in the army of a dictatorship cannot claim to be mere victims. Serving as an officer in a dictator’s army is a criminal act in itself, one which should be severely punished.
The endless cycle of exploitation and suffering that dictatorship creates is clearly illustrated by Lidice. That is what we, the democratic thinkers, are fighting against.
We cannot grasp, because no human mind can grasp, the horror of the millions exterminated in the Holocaust, the Soviet Gulag, in the killing fields of Cambodia, the tens of millions of children who died in the hideous, prolonged agonies of Mao Zedong’s famines, or the children raped, brutalized and turned into psychopaths by Africa’s dictators, or the disappeared victims of Pinochet, Castro, Suharto, and the countless other strutting generalissimos and Great Leaders. It is all too much for any mind to wrap around. Death and suffering on that scale cannot be contemplated except as a bland column of statistics, and the mind ceases to feel emotions about it.
That is one of the psychological weaknesses that dictators exploit most effectively. We would not dream of inviting into our home a man that we knew had strangled a single child to death. But let that man murder a thousand, or ten thousand, or a million children, and we will invite him to speak to our Parliament, and shake his hand. All dictators know this. They know that they are safest when their crimes are the most monstrous, that there is no punishment for them in this world, and they will be written up in the history books as great men. And they know that everyone will collaborate with them, everyone will help them, everyone will pave the way for them.
That’s why I will hammer into my readers the names of the children of Lidice. When you allow a dictator to have an embassy in your country, you are spitting into the faces of the children of Lidice. When you make a business deal with a dictator, you are slapping the faces of the children of Lidice. When you allow your democratic representatives to have cocktail parties with dictators, you are kicking the children of Lidice in the face, stomping on their bodies with your feet.
I know that you can’t picture the millions of murders that dictators ― and their greedy and cowardly collaborators ― are responsible for. I know that you can’t really feel anything about it. But you can damn well picture the children of a single village. You can imagine what that horrible day in June, 1942 was like for those small, helpless, boys and girls. You can imagine their terror and agony. You can imagine their faces.
That is what dictatorship is all about. That is why you should fight dictatorship with every resource at your disposal. And that is why you should demand that your elected officials and your businessmen and your bankers and your intellectuals cease and desist from collaborating with such vermin.
The children of Lidice were Josef Brejcha, age 4; Josef Bulina, age 11; Anna Bulinová, age 13; Jaroslava Bulinová, age 10; Jiří Čermák, age 11; Miloslava Čermáková, age 7; Božena Čermáková, age 9;Jiři Frühauf, age 3; Karel Hejma, age 7; František Hejma, age 13; Jaroslava Hermanová, age 2; Marie Hočková, age 9; Věra Honzíková, age 12; Marie Hočková, age 9; Božena Honzíková, age 12; Zdeněk Hroník, age 7; Božena Hroníková, age 12; Marta Hroníková, age 3; Zdeňka Hroníková, age 11; Václav Jedlička, age 4; Karel Kácl, age 7; Věra Kafkova, age 5; Anna Kaimlová, age 12; Jaroslav Kobera, age 9; Václav Kobera, age 5; Milada Koberová, are 11; Zdeňka Koberová, age 8; Hana Kovařovská, age 5; Ludmila Kovařovská, age 4; Antonín Kozel, age 7; Věnceslava Krásová, age 7; Rudolf Kubela, age 3; František Kulhavý, age 6; Jaroslav Kulhavý, age 11; Miloslav Liška, age 5; Milada Miková, age 5; Jitka Moravcová, age 1; Václav Moravec, age 10; Karel Mulák, age 11; Marie Muláková, age 14; Zdeněk Müller, age 4; Antonín Nerad, age 13; Alena Nová, age 3; Milada Novotná, age 14; Antonín Pek, age 7; Emílie Pelichovská, age 14; Václav Pelichovský, age 9; Josef Pešek, age 7; Anna Pešková, age 5; Jiřina Pešková, age 6; Miroslav Petrák, age 10; Zdeněk Petrák, age 8; Jiřina Petráková, age 14; Zdeněk Petřík, baby; Marie Pitínová, age 10; Štěpán Podzemský, age 3; Věra Průchová, age 15; Josefa Příhodová, age 11; Anna Příhodová, age 15; Jaroslava Příhodová, age 1; Věnceslava Puchmeltrová, age 13; Miloslav Radosta, age 5; Václav Rameš, age 8; Jaroslava Ramešová, age 1; Božena Rohlová, age 7; Jiřina Růženecká, age 12; Jiři Sejc, age 5; Jiřina Součková, age 11; Marie Součková, age 13; Miroslave Součková, age 12; Jarmila Straková, age 2; Ludmila Straková, age 1; Josef Suchý, baby; Miroslava Syslová, age 13; Josef Šroubek, age 7; Marie Šroubková, age 14; Jaroslava Štorková, age 9; Antonín Urban, 11; Věra Urbanová, age 4; Josef Vandrdle, age 13; Dagmar Veselá, age 5; Karel Vlček, age 6; Jaromír Zelenka, age 1; Ivan Žid, age 7. [4]
Monument at Lidice.
The faces of the children are not generalized abstractions. They are
carefully reconstructed from photographs to represent the individual
children as they were in life.
———-
[1] Heilman, Robert B. – Anthology of English Drama Before Shakespeare — Holt, Rinehart & Winston — 1952
[2] verses 60027–6034. ed. Frédéric Pluquet, I, 2nd part. Rouen, 1827 tr. Henry Krauss. Quoted in Krauss, Henry — The Living Theatre of Medieval Art — Indiana UP — 1967
[3] A phrase that came immediately to my mind, as it is the title (z ceskych luhu a háju = “Among Bohemia’s woods and streams”) of one of the movements of Smetana’s Má Vlast.
[4] source: Janusz Golczynski — Oboz Smierci w Chelmno Nad Nerem — published by the Konin Museum, 1991. This list is short 4 names, as the official count is 88, including one baby born in Ravensbrück and killed there.I have calculated the ages from the given birth years, but, since these are not the exact birth dates, some of these ages may be off by a year. Thankyou to Filip Marek for providing me with the correct Czech spellings, and for providing extra information.
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