Independent Historiography Reborn

Abstract

No one has analysed more brilliantly the moral and spiritual crisis of contemporary Czechoslavakia, and the fate of its history, than Vaclav Havel, in his now famous letter to Gustav Husak in April 1975.¹ ‘In a society which is really alive’, he wrote, ‘there is naturally always something happening…. Any society that is alive is a society with a history.’ However, in an ‘entropic’ society, as Havel called it, in which ‘the mechanical prevails over the vital’ and ‘order without life’ exists, true history cannot exist. ‘In our country, too, one has the impression that for some time there has been no history. Slowly, but surely, we are losing the sense of time. We begin to forget what happened when, what came earlier and what later, and the feeling that it really doesn’t matter overwhelms us. As uniqueness disappears from the flow of events, so does continuity; everything merges into the single grey image of one and the same cycle and we say, “There is nothing happening”.’ In this situation the ‘disorder of real history’ is replaced by the ‘orderliness of pseudo-history’ which is determined not by ‘the life of society’ but by ‘an official planner’.

‘History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

‘The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc … the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it.

‘And yet he was in the right: They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended … Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.’ — George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London, 1954, pp. 127, 171, 68).