Sarawak Headhunter

Taib & Gang Ignore Penans Yet Again

2012-05-23T19:04:00.000+08:00

Tired Penans snubbed

Joseph Tawie | May 23, 2012

Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud and his 56 elected reps turned their backs on a Penan delegation who had journeyed five days to see them at the State Legislative Assembly.

KUCHING: A five-day journey from Long Sa’at in interior Ulu Baram came to nought yesterday when all Barisan Nasional elected leaders spurned a 13-member Penan delegation who came to see them to present the community’s development plan.

All the 71 lawmakers including Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud and his deputy Alfred Jabu Numpang knew the Penans were coming.

In fact, they along with journalists had early yesterday morning received an invitation to attend the Penan community’s development briefing at 12.30pm at the media conference room in the State Legislative Assembly.

But neither Taib nor his 56 elected representatives turned up.

Only the 15 opposition assemblymen from DAP and PKR were present to hear their proposal on how the community could protect their rights, their adat (culture), manage their forests and develop their economy.

A disappointed Siang Ngadau, a spokesman for the group, said: “We are deeply disappointed. They (BN lawmakers) do not care about our plight.

“It is not easy for us to come here. It took us five days to reach Kuching depending on the availability of transport. Firstly, we have to walk through jungle tracks for three hours, use longboats for another three hours, riding on four-wheeled drive for eight hours before we can reach the nearest town.

“From Marudi and Miri, we have to fly to Kuching.”

When asked why they did not approach their assemblyman Dennis Ngau (Telang Usan), Siang said that Ngau knew of their plan, but was not interested in their welfare.

“If the BN assemblymen and the authorities can help us we will not come to Kuching to present our case.

“But they just don’t care about our plight,” Siang added.

Rude BN reps

Explaining the purpose of their visit, Siang said it was to share with all the elected representatives and journalists their proposal through their Penan Peace Park project to develop the community.

“The Penans from 18 Penan villages have since 2009 been discussing how they can uphold and protect their rights and adat, preserve their history, look after their forests, rivers and environment and to develop their economy.

“Thus the idea of Penan Peace Park came into being. We are worried that our survival and our livelihood will be affected once the Baram dam is constructed,” said Siang, pointing out that through this Penan Peace Park a number of projects would be launched not only to ensure their survival but also to carry out all those objectives.

Meanwhile, Sarawak opposition leader Wong Ho Leng pledged DAP’s support for the Penan Peace Park.

Praising them for their bold peace park project, Wong, who is also the Bukit Assek assemblyman, said that it was to preserve their community, their culture and forest resources.

“For all these reasons, DAP will extend its support to and to fight for the Penan cause.

“We cannot allow the Penans to be continually marginalised by the Barisan Nasional,” he said.

Wong also voiced his “disgust” at the BN leaders’ lack of courtesy.

“I must express my disgust at the absence of BN elected representatives at the briefing.

“Although every assemblyman and assemblywoman from BN, DAP and PKR were given an invitation letter to come, not a single minister, assistant minister or assemblyman from BN appeared here.

“I think the Penan community has every right to know the reason for the lack of concern on the part of BN on the plight of the Penan people,” said Wong, who is also state DAP chairman.

‘Nothing wrong in listening’

Sarawak PKR chief Baru Bian also took the BN leadership to task.

“I don’t see why the BN elected representatives were not present. There is nothing wrong in listening to the whole thing.

“The important thing is that we work for everybody and for the good of the rakyat irrespective of their political differences.

“Don’t say that because they are with the opposition, then you don’t support them. That is not good.

“As far as we are concerned, what they (Penans) presented today is very logical and reasonable.

“There is a need for it, and I hope the authorities and ministers would support their project,” said Bian, who is the Ba’Kelalan assemblyman.

Comment by Sarawak Headhunter: Even the White Rajahs treated the Penans better than Taib Mahmud & his regime.

1 Lagi Projek Khianat UMNO-BN Diperlanjutkan

2012-05-23T10:00:00.000+08:00

(Sabahkini) - SAYA, Chung Su Li, menujukan surat terbuka ini kepada Perdana Menteri Malaysia, Menteri Dalam Negeri dan Jabatan Penguatkuasa di Malaysia agar memantau kegiatan subversif iaitu pemberian kerakyatan songsang kepada warganegara India di Sabah.

Siasatan saya mendapati seramai lebih kurang 100 orang warga India di Sabah dan lebih kurang 1,500 di Semenanjung Malaysia telah berjaya mendapat Kad Pengenalan dengan membayar sejumlah wang di antara RM 30,000 sehingga RM 75,000 kepada sindiket yang mempunyai rangkaian di seluruh Malaysia.

Saya mewakili majoriti suara rakyat Sabah ingin menarik perhatian kerajaan yang sedang berusaha untuk mencari dalang-dalang dalam aktiviti menjual IC kepada warga asing, terutama daripada India, Pakistan, Indonesia dan Filipina.

HEBAT....Skandal IC Projek terbaru masih menggunakan Modus operandi yang sama iaitu laporan kehilangan kad pengenalan.

Aktiviti membuat IC menggunakan wang telah mula menjadi-jadi di Sabah setelah seorang yang bernama Nasir Bin Yusof berjaya mendapatkan IC untuk dirinya pada awal tahun 2011.

Nasir Bin Yusof atau Latiff, yang berasal daripada RegunathaPatti, Tamil Nadu, India datang ke Malaysia dengan mengunakan Visa Tukang Masak di sebuah Restoran India.

Beliau kemudiannya telah berjaya membuka beberapa kedai sendiri di sekitar Kota Kinabalu, Sabah. Antara bekas Restoran beliau yang terkenal ialah Restoran Salimah berhampiran Hospital Mesra Bukit Padang dan di Terminal Inanam.

Beliau membuka kedai mengunakan nama seorang warganegara Malaysia dan menjalankan perniagaan tersebut sedangkan dia memegang Visa tukang masak pada ketika itu.

PASPORT.....Salinan Pasport India Nasir yang ketika itu menggunakan nama Kader Moideen Latheef. Mustahil Jabatan Imigresen tidak mempunyai salinan kerana beliau mempunyai Permit Kerja sebagai Tukang Masak.

Pada masa itu, beliau mula mengalihkan minat beliau ke bidang lain. Atas sifat-sifat beliau yang berani dan pandai menarik hati dan memikat pegawai kerajaan dengan memberikan suapan tertentu; telah berjaya menjadi agen menguruskan dokumen kepada pekerja asing dan majikan warganegara.

Beliau menjalankan tugas khas ini sedangkan pada hakikatnya beliau hanya seorang tukang masak di kaca mata undang-undang, mengatasi Agensi Pekerjaan Swasta dan Agensi Kerajaan yang mempunyai potfolio mengeluarkan dokumen pengenalan diri.

Latiff mula menjual satu demi satu kedai beliau apabila perniagaan haramnya mula maju. Beliau tidak perlu sakit kepala lagi memikirkan tentang apa juadah yang perlu di masak di kedainya. Beliau juga tidak perlu membayar cukai perniagaan dan pendapatan. Beliau mula memberikan perhatian yang serius dalam aktiviti agen tersebut kerana sudah terkenal di Sabah.

Mengikut pemerhatian saya, beliau keluar masuk hampir setiap hari di Jabatan Imigresen Sabah (JIS). Beliau akan datang biasanya waktu petang dengan membawa beg berisi pasport dan sampul surat berwana coklat. Beliau akan terus berjumpa dengan pegawai yang diperlukannya dan mendapat layanan istimewa.

Kenapa perkara ini boleh terjadi? Latiff telah pun membeli dua organisasi penting iaitu Jabatan Imigresen Sabah (JIS) dan Jabatan Pendaftaran Sabah. Beliau merasuah hampir semua kakitangan JIS bermula daripada sumbangan sarapan pagi, makan tengah hari, minuman, alat solek, peralatan rumah dan kredit telefon bimbit. Jika disemak telefon bimbitnya, sudah tentu terdapat nombor telefon semua pegawai pegawai tinggi kerajaan terutama Imigresen, JPN dan Polis.

Latiff akan menguruskan visa pekerja asing dengan bayaran bermula daripada RM600 sehingga RM 1,000. Majikan lain yang cuba berurusan sendiri di kaunter akan mengalami pelbagai kerumitan dan kelewatan serta syarat yang sangat ketat.

Pegawai JIS tanpa segan silu akan mencadangkan kepada majikan untuk bertemu Latiff untuk memudahkan urusan mereka. Ini semua hasil tunjuk ajar Latiff. Namun setakat ini, hanya Pengarah Imigresen Sabah, Mohd Mentek sahaja yang tidak dapat dibeli kerana ketegasan dan prinsip y utuh yang dimilikinya.

Latiff tidak berjaya meraih simpati daripada Mentek yang kental dengan semangat kenegerian dan memahami masalah Sabah. Agensi Pekerja Asing yang berdaftar dengan Pasukan Petugas Khas Persekutuan hanya bermimpi di siang hari untuk mendapatkan layanan serupa dengan Latiff.

SEGERA.....Nasir menjadi pemilih ekpress dengan kad pengenalan yang ada padanya.

Latiff juga membantu orang ramai untuk mendaftarkan pekerja asing mereka secara haram, menguruskan penubuhan syarikat secara haram untuk memastikan warga asing dapat membawa kaum keluarga dan kerabat mereka masuk ke Malaysia melalui visa pegawai dagang.

Beliau juga mempunyai kenalan pengawai yang telah dirasuah di Lapangan Terbang Antarabangsa Kota Kinabalu terutama Pegawai Kanan Imigresen untuk membenarkan pekerja yang mengunakan visa bekerja di Semenajung Malaysia masuk bekerja di Sabah selain menguruskan urusan balik warga asing yang mempunyai masalah Imigresen.

Selain itu, beliau turut membantu orang ramai dengan bayaran tertentu untuk menguruskan dokumen lain seperti urusan membuat sijil nikah dan urusan JPN yang lain. Beliau juga sudah semakin berani apabila menjadi Setiausaha Parti Kimma sejurus mendapat IC Projeknya. Beliau mempunyai ramai kenalan dalam facebooknya terutama ahli Kimma seluruh negara.

Latiff kemudian membuka sebuah kedai setelah memiliki banyak wang, semata-mata untuk menutupi segala aktiviti haramnya. Kedai tersebut ialah JJ One Phone di Lot 57, Bandaran Berjaya, Kota Kinabalu.

Dalam kedai ini, terdapat sekurang-kurangnya 50 pasport dalam satu-satu masa. Kedai ini dibuka untuk mengelirukan pihak berkuasa dan menutup mata orang ramai. Namun kedai ini hanya menjadi mesin 'Money Laundering' kerana hanya menjual kredit telefon dan telah memindahkan operasi haramnya ke Asia City, Kota Kinabalu.

Latiff ini berjaya melepaskan diri daripada tindakan undang undang kerana memiliki pengaruh yang kuat serta memiliki keajaiban. Beliau pernah ditahan kerana menipu dalam menurunkan tandatangan seorang majikan setelah pekerja asingnya yang ditahan di Kudat oleh Pegawai Penguatkuasa Imigresen Sabah yang dikenali sebagai Halid. Namun, kes itu ditutup tanpa sebarang tindakan.

Beliau juga berkawan rapat dengan seorang polis yang bernama Ayub kerana Ayub mengenali hampir semua polis berpangkat tinggi di Sabah kerana dahulunya mempunyai sebuah kedai runcit dalam kawasan Ibu Pejabat Polis Kepayan.

Dengan Ayub, semua kawan beliau terutama orang India boleh keluar daripada tahanan dengan mudah tanpa sebarang kerumitan. Selain itu, di setiap pusat tahanan terutama di Kimanis Papar, Latiff mempunyai orang untuk mengeluarkan sesiapa saja yang ditahan dengan mengenakan bayaran antara RM2,000 hingga RM5,000 setiap seorang dan wang tersebut akan dikongsi bersama pegawai yang terlibat.

Pendedahan saya ini khas untuk menekankan bagaimana Latiff, seorang warga India yang telah lahir semula di Malaysia dan menjadi Warganegara Malaysia seterusnya menjadi salah satu kepala dalam membuat IC di Sabah.

Mengikut rekod, Latiff atau nama asalnya, Kader Moideen Latheef yang mengunakan Passport India bernombor E3171231 yang sah sehingga 08.10.2012 dan visa juga sah sehingga hujung 2011 dengan tarikh lahir dalam pasport 10 Oktober 1972.

Kini beliau tidak lagi menggunakan pasport India setelah mendapat resit kad pengenalan Malaysia 620605-12-6421 dengan identiti dan nama baru iaitu Nasir Bin Yusof dan tarikh lahirnya di kebelakangkan pada 05 Jun 1962. Perkara ini sangat jelas menunjukan berlaku banyak penipuan yang dilakukan oleh Latiff. Bagaimana beliau boleh tua 10 tahun dalam IC berbanding Pasport beliau?

Siapakah Nasir Bin Yusof ini sebenarnya? Adakah orang yang telah meninggal atau pun orang yang tidak menuntut ICnya? Ini bukan fitnah. Saya sertakan salinan pasport dan semakan daftar pemilih beliau.

Saya percaya bahawa Tuhan akan meninggal bukti bagi menumpaskan semua kejahatan di dunia ini. Bukti yang saya berikan sangat jelas. Namun, bagaimana pula Latiff ini berjaya memiliki IC ini?

Adakah hal ini seperti yang dibangkitkan oleh Naib Presiden PAS, Dato Mahfuz Bin Omar baru-baru ini? Apa pun saya akan memberikan serba sedikit maklumat mereka yang terlibat dan terpulang kepada kerajaan Malaysia untuk menyiasatnya.

Jangan kerana nila setitik, rosak susu sebelanga. Orang macam Latifflah yang menyebabkan desakan terhadap RCI terus dilaungkan oleh rakyat Sabah. Saya berpendapat, penahanan beberapa individu yang saya berikan ini akan mencari penyelesaian masalah IC di Sabah.

Latiff ini berjaya mendapatkan IC beliau melalui pertolongan Datuk Haji Jaffaer Henry, bekas Pengarah JPN Sabah melalui bantuan Suzina Binti Mohd Rahfee. Puan Suzina mempunyai hubungan rapat dengan Latiff. Latiff sentiasa mengambil dan menghantar Puan Suzina apabila pergi atau balik daripada mana-mana urusan di luar negeri terutama daripada Kuala Lumpur dan Labuan.

Selain itu, Latiff sentiasa mengunakan kereta Puan Suzina apabila dia tiada di Sabah. Latiff juga menyediakan semua keperluan rumah kepada Puan Suzina. Saya hairan bagaimana Puan Suzina yang bergred KP 27 yang juga baru mengangkat sumpah sebagai Penolong Pegawai Pendaftaran pada tahun 2009 dan menerima penempatan baru di JPN Kota Kinabalu boleh menandatangani resit laporan kehilangan kad pengenalan pada tahun 2004 dan 1996?

Beliau yang baru mengangkat sumpah untuk bertugas di JPN Kota Kinabalu pada 28 Mei 2009 bertempat di 'The Regency, Tanjung Tuan Beach Resort, Port Dickson berjaya menyediakan semua dokumen secara sempurna untuk mendapatkan IC kepada Latiff; tetapi tidak berjaya membuatnya tanpa meninggalkan bukti kukuh.

Selepas berjaya mendapatkan IC, Latiff melihat perkara ini daripada sudut perniagaan. Beliau ingin mengaut keuntungan besar dengan menjual IC seperti ini. Beliau kemudianya mencari jalan dan beliau mula bersekongkol dengan rangkaian Musakkar Bin Abdullah (Kadersha) yang juga memiliki ‘IC MASIH PANAS’ yang maklumatnya disertakan bersama ini.

Rangkaian Musakkar ini terdiri daripada beberapa orang daripada Jabatan Pendaftaran Negara. Mereka diketui oleh Abdul Rahman bin Md Noor (Gred 42) Ketua Unit Khas Sabah (KUS) di Putrajaya; diikuti Puan Farrah Izanni Binti Mohamad Ismail, Penolong Pengarah Unit Khas Sabah; Md. Solehan bin Omar, Pengarah Bahagian; Ruslan Bin Alias, Penolong Pegawai Pendaftaran; Susilan dan Puan Sulaiha dan beberapa pegawai di Bahagian Kad Pengenalan.

Mereka menerima permohonan Kad Pengenalan seperti ini hanya daripada Latiff, Musakkar dan beberapa orang lagi. Mereka akan meminta menyediakan butiran serta gambar dan kemudian mereka akan diberikan resit IC, Sijil Lahir dan seterusnya Maykad berserta dokumen lain oleh pegawai di atas.

Saya tidak mengenali semua pegawai tersebut, akan tetapi semua mereka ini benar-benar terlibat. Saya tiada memiliki bukti lain selain daripada ini. Namun, saya yakin dengan bantuan semua individu tersebut, Latiff berjaya mendapatkan IC seseorang yang telah mati ataupun yang tidak dituntut oleh pemohon.

Kejayaan Latiff ini berjaya menambah ahli rangkaian dan agen di Sabah. Latiff kemudian bertukar menjadi salah satu ahli rangkaian ini dengan harapan dapat menguat untung yang besar. Rangkaian ini kemudian di sertai oleh Salim Khan Bin Kaboor dengan IC bernombor 681012-12-5123 iaitu pemilik sebuah restoran terkenal di Sabah iaitu Restoran Salim, di Lintas Plaza, Kota Kinabalu.

Setelah beliau berkahwin kali kedua, beliau telah jatuh dalam perniagaan dan setelah mula berniaga IC, beliau kini sudah naik semula dan semakin kaya. Rangkaian ini kemudian berjaya mendaftarkan seramai 100 orang setakat ini di Sabah dan di Semenanjung 1,500 lebih.

Semua orang yang telah meninggal di Semenanjung Malaysia telah lahir semula dengan bantuan pendekar-pendekar yang baru wujud di Sabah ini. Adakah ini zaman batu atau zaman moden? Salim dan Latiff sentiasa menjemput Rahman apabila sampai di Sabah dengan menyediakan semua kemudahan termasuk hotel mewah dan sebagainya. Perkara ini amat merisaukan saya dan seluruh rakyat Sabah.

IC yang dimiliki oleh Latiff telah dibuat sebegitu sempurna tanpa boleh dipertikaikan lagi. Siap dengan salinan laporan kehilangan kad pengenalan yang kononnya pernah hilang pada 12 Mac 2004 dan 30 Disembet 1996 yang ditandatangani oleh Puan Suzina yang saya sertakan sekali dengan laporan saya ini.

Namun dengan kuasa tuhan, saya telah menjumpai beberapa kelemahan dalam laporan ini kerana nama penuh dalam laporan ini ialah Nasir @ Lathiep Bin Yusuf yang mana sangat berbeza dengan IC beliau. Adakah Puan Suzina ini bekerja dari tahun 1997 sehingga 2011 dalam satu bahagian yang sama dalam JPN Kota Kinabalu atau beliau baru ditempatkan di Kota Kinabalu pada Mei 2009? Adakah perkara ini boleh masuk akal?

Latiff mempunyai dua orang adik beradik lagi di Sabah yang mana salah satunya berada di Papar dan tidak mempunyai IC dan salah satunya yang bernama Peer Mohammad Bin Kadeer dengan no Maykad 600323-12-5465. Adik beradik satu bapa tetapi dibinkan kepada orang lain. Tidakkah pihak kerajaan boleh menyiasat hal ini?

Seorang lagi agen khas untuk pekerja asing India yang terlibat dalam rangkaian ini ialah Musakar Bin Abdullah dengan IC No 620305-12-5961. Jika meneliti kisah Musakar, beliau ini boleh dianggap sangat berbahaya dan saya memiliki beberapa dokumen untuk membuktikan bahawa IC Musakar ini baru di beli.

Beliau datang daripada India mengunakan Visa Tukang Masak untuk Kedai Kopi Farvin Inanam yang dijamin oleh Majikannya, Aziz Bin Kasim. Kemudian Aziz telah membatalkan visa tersebut dan menghantarnya balik ke India. Salinan tersebut turut disertakan. Beliau kemudiannya balik ke Malaysia dengan jaminan seseorang lagi.

Beliau kemudian membuka sebuah kedai barang-barang aneka kecil di belakang kedai Farveen Curry House berhampiran Shell, Kampung Air Kota Kinabalu. Seratus peratus barang dalam kedai ini ialah barang curi yang dibekalkan oleh sindikit tertentu dan menjadikan tingkat atas kedai beliau tempat menyimpan barang atau stor.

Kemudian beliau akan menjualnya di kedai tersebut. Pihak kerajaan boleh menyiasat hal ini dengan lebih lanjut lagi. Tambahan pula, nama Musakkar ini sewemangnya nama bukan India. Tentu sekali, Mykad ini milik rakyat Malaysia atau Indonesia.

Musakkar datang ke Malaysia dengan nama Kadersha Mydeen atau nama gelaran Katta Kaja dengan pasport India bernombor A7754373. Kemudian beliau membuat IC dengan bayaran RM 30,000 melalui rangkaiannya. Beliau berasal daripada Asoor, Trichy, Tamilnadu dan pasportnya sah sehingga 5 Mei 2009.

Beliau kini sudah membuka restoran sendiri di hadapan kedai barang anekanya dengan nama Restoran Farveen Curry House bertentangan Shell Kampung Air. Pada asalnya, beliau hanya bekerja di situ. Apabila berjaya mendapat untung yang banyak daripada penjualan IC, beliau terus membeli kedai tersebut dan menjadikan ia miliknya. Kegiatan Kadersha ini boleh mengancam keselamatan Negara kita.

Kadersha ini pada asalnya bekerja bersama Aziz bin Kasim. Atas kebiadapan terhadap Majikannya dan melakukan kesalahan Imigresen, beliau ditahan oleh Jabatan Imigresen Sabah yang ketika itu laporan ini dibuat oleh Aziz di pejabat lama di Wisma Dang Bandang, Kampung Air.

Semasa dalam tahanan, Aziz telah membatalkan visanya dan membeli tiket penerbangannya untuk balik ke India. Salinan tiket tersebut turut disertakan. Namun, Kadersha berjaya keluar daripada tahanan dengan bantuan seseorang.

Beliau kemudian membuat muslihat dan tinggal di Sabah. Sekarang ini beliau kembali ke Malaysia dan berjaya membeli Restoran majikannya sendiri. Fakta ini benar sekali, pihak berkuasa boleh menghubungi bekas majikannya, Aziz bin Kasim di talian 016-8105XXXX (nombor sebenar sila email ke Sabahkini) untuk maklumat lanjut.

Selain itu, satu kes yang masih dalam siasatan di Balai Polis Lama Kota Kinabalu terhadap Kadersha mengenai cek tendang yang dilaporkan oleh Aziz Bin Kasim, bekas majikannya. Baru baru ini, ada orang yang melaporkan tentang IC Musakkar (Kadersha) di Balai Polis Karamusing.

Tetapi kes ini berjaya ditutup olehnya dengan wang ringgit Malaysia. Kadersha juga menyembunyikan dirinya selama seminggu di rumah banglonya yang dibeli dengan wang hasil kerja kerasnya membuat IC di Semenanjung Malaysia sebelum menutup kes ini. SB Mohan daripada Balai Polis Karamusing juga mengetahui hal ini. Dialah yang menguruskan kes-kes India di Kota Kinabalu.

Sehubungan itu, saya mengharapkan satu penyiasatan khas dibuat mengenai hal ini. Saya bersama ratusan rakan saya tidak akan teragak-agak untuk mengumpulkan tandatangan bagi memastikan kerajaan Malaysia menyiasat hal ini dan tidak memberikan sebarang alasan.

Kami mahu IC mereka yang terlibat harus ditarik balik. Kami rakyat Sabah tidak mahu mereka menjadi salah satu pengundi dalam pilihanraya 13 akan datang. Kami mahukan penyelesaian menyeluruh.

Sekiranya kerajaan Malaysia tidak menyiasat dan mengenakan tindakan undang-undang ke atas semua suspek ini, maka kami akan meminta bantuan pembangkang untuk menuntut penyiasatan ke atas isu ini yang kami kira amat penting untuk kami warga Sabah. Kami hilang punca pendapatan angkara warga asing seperti Latiff dan Kadersha yang diberikan IC.

Saya berharap agar agensi kerajaan yang terlibat menyiasat hal ini serta merta sebelum pilihanraya akan datang. Penerima IC seperti ini harus dibuang dahulu. Mereka tiada hak memegang kad pengenalan Malaysia.

Pendedahan saya ini membantu kerajaan untuk mengesan individu yang bersalah dan seharusnya inilah peluang yang baik kepada kerajaan Malaysia untuk membersihkan nama daripada dakwaan pembangkang.

Apa pun jutaan rakyat Sabah akan menantikan berita gembira tentang dalang-dalang dan pemegang IC ini ditangkap secepat mungkin. Kami menaruh harapan pada kerajaan yang kami sanjung selama ini. Kami sentiasa menantikan langkah daripada kerajaan selepas ini dengan harapan yang besar.

Penuntutan pembangkang untuk menubuhkan RCI akan terjawab dengan tertangkapnya rangkaian ini. Maklumat ini saya kumpul daripada agen-agen SAH di Sabah dan orang ramai. Selepas penahanan rangkaian ini, Ini kalilah, terjawabnya semua misteri di sebalik desakan penubuhan RCI. Apabila berita ini diketahui oleh mereka, tentu mereka akan bersembunyi dan keluar selepas keadaan baik semula. Tapi ingat, kami tidak akan biarkan rangkaian ini berleluasa sampai bila-bila pun.

Kami tidak mendedahkan identiti kami seperti nombor telefon selengkapnya kerana risau tentang keselamatan kami. Semua yang terlibat amat berbahaya. Pegawai kerajaan juga dikira amat takut dengan mereka ini. Namun jika diperlukan, bukan saya seorang yang akan tampil nanti, ribuan orang yang menyokong saya dalam hal ini akan tampil ke hadapan.

Saya harap kerajaan mulakan dahulu penyiasatan. Semua bukti kukuh telah saya berikan. Tiada satu pun tuduhan saya ini boleh dianggap fitnah. Kami sedang mengumpulkan nama-nama dan biodata mereka yang baru sahaja membeli IC daripada rangkaian ini dan akan didedahkan kemudian hari.

Sedangkan masih ramai pemegang kad bunga raya di Sabah akibat daripada kelewatan JPN menguruskanya yang berpunca daripada kekurangan maklumat, bagaimana kerajaan boleh bertindak mengeluarkan IC berbayar seperti ini yang seratus peratusnya haram?

Sekian, Terima Kasih,

Salam Satu Malaysia,

CHUNG SU LI

Basic Principles On The Role Of Lawyers

2012-05-22T12:57:00.001+08:00

Basic Principles on the Role of Lawyers

Adopted by the Eighth United Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders, Havana, Cuba, 27 August to 7 September 1990

Whereas in the Charter of the United Nations the peoples of the world affirm, inter alia , their determination to establish conditions under which justice can be maintained, and proclaim as one of their purposes the achievement of international cooperation in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion,

Whereas the Universal Declaration of Human Rights enshrines the principles of equality before the law, the presumption of innocence, the right to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, and all the guarantees necessary for the defence of everyone charged with a penal offence,

Whereas the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights proclaims, in addition, the right to be tried without undue delay and the right to a fair and public hearing by a competent, independent and impartial tribunal established by law,

Whereas the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights recalls the obligation of States under the Charter to promote universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and freedoms,

Whereas the Body of Principles for the Protection of All Persons under Any Form of Detention or Imprisonment provides that a detained person shall be entitled to have the assistance of, and to communicate and consult with, legal counsel,

Whereas the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners recommend, in particular, that legal assistance and confidential communication with counsel should be ensured to untried prisoners,

Whereas the Safeguards guaranteeing protection of those facing the death penalty reaffirm the right of everyone suspected or charged with a crime for which capital punishment may be imposed to adequate legal assistance at all stages of the proceedings, in accordance with article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,

Whereas the Declaration of Basic Principles of Justice for Victims of Crime and Abuse of Power recommends measures to be taken at the international and national levels to improve access to justice and fair treatment, restitution, compensation and assistance for victims of crime,

Whereas adequate protection of the human rights and fundamental freedoms to which all persons are entitled, be they economic, social and cultural, or civil and political, requires that all persons have effective access to legal services provided by an independent legal profession,

Whereas professional associations of lawyers have a vital role to play in upholding professional standards and ethics, protecting their members from persecution and improper restrictions and infringements, providing legal services to all in need of them, and cooperating with governmental and other institutions in furthering the ends of justice and public interest,

The Basic Principles on the Role of Lawyers, set forth below, which have been formulated to assist Member States in their task of promoting and ensuring the proper role of lawyers, should be respected and taken into account by Governments within the framework of their national legislation and practice and should be brought to the attention of lawyers as well as other persons, such as judges, prosecutors, members of the executive and the legislature, and the public in general. These principles shall also apply, as appropriate, to persons who exercise the functions of lawyers without having the formal status of lawyers.

Access to lawyers and legal services

1. All persons are entitled to call upon the assistance of a lawyer of their choice to protect and establish their rights and to defend them in all stages of criminal proceedings.

2. Governments shall ensure that efficient procedures and responsive mechanisms for effective and equal access to lawyers are provided for all persons within their territory and subject to their jurisdiction, without distinction of any kind, such as discrimination based on race, colour, ethnic origin, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth, economic or other status.

3. Governments shall ensure the provision of sufficient funding and other resources for legal services to the poor and, as necessary, to other disadvantaged persons. Professional associations of lawyers shall cooperate in the organization and provision of services, facilities and other resources.

4. Governments and professional associations of lawyers shall promote programmes to inform the public about their rights and duties under the law and the important role of lawyers in protecting their fundamental freedoms. Special attention should be given to assisting the poor and other disadvantaged persons so as to enable them to assert their rights and where necessary call upon the assistance of lawyers.

Special safeguards in criminal justice matters

5. Governments shall ensure that all persons are immediately informed by the competent authority of their right to be assisted by a lawyer of their own choice upon arrest or detention or when charged with a criminal offence.

6. Any such persons who do not have a lawyer shall, in all cases in which the interests of justice so require, be entitled to have a lawyer of experience and competence commensurate with the nature of the offence assigned to them in order to provide effective legal assistance, without payment by them if they lack sufficient means to pay for such services.

7. Governments shall further ensure that all persons arrested or detained, with or without criminal charge, shall have prompt access to a lawyer, and in any case not later than forty-eight hours from the time of arrest or detention.

8. All arrested, detained or imprisoned persons shall be provided with adequate opportunities, time and facilities to be visited by and to communicate and consult with a lawyer, without delay, interception or censorship and in full confidentiality. Such consultations may be within sight, but not within the hearing, of law enforcement officials.

Qualifications and training

9. Governments, professional associations of lawyers and educational institutions shall ensure that lawyers have appropriate education and training and be made aware of the ideals and ethical duties of the lawyer and of human rights and fundamental freedoms recognized by national and international law.

10. Governments, professional associations of lawyers and educational institutions shall ensure that there is no discrimination against a person with respect to entry into or continued practice within the legal profession on the grounds of race, colour, sex, ethnic origin, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth, economic or other status, except that a requirement, that a lawyer must be a national of the country concerned, shall not be considered discriminatory.

11. In countries where there exist groups, communities or regions whose needs for legal services are not met, particularly where such groups have distinct cultures, traditions or languages or have been the victims of past discrimination, Governments, professional associations of lawyers and educational institutions should take special measures to provide opportunities for candidates from these groups to enter the legal profession and should ensure that they receive training appropriate to the needs of their groups.

Duties and responsibilities

12. Lawyers shall at all times maintain the honour and dignity of their profession as essential agents of the administration of justice.

13. The duties of lawyers towards their clients shall include:

( a ) Advising clients as to their legal rights and obligations, and as to the working of the legal system in so far as it is relevant to the legal rights and obligations of the clients;

( b ) Assisting clients in every appropriate way, and taking legal action to protect their interests;

( c ) Assisting clients before courts, tribunals or administrative authorities, where appropriate.

14. Lawyers, in protecting the rights of their clients and in promoting the cause of justice, shall seek to uphold human rights and fundamental freedoms recognized by national and international law and shall at all times act freely and diligently in accordance with the law and recognized standards and ethics of the legal profession.

15. Lawyers shall always loyally respect the interests of their clients.

Guarantees for the functioning of lawyers

16. Governments shall ensure that lawyers ( a ) are able to perform all of their professional functions without intimidation, hindrance, harassment or improper interference; ( b ) are able to travel and to consult with their clients freely both within their own country and abroad; and ( c ) shall not suffer, or be threatened with, prosecution or administrative, economic or other sanctions for any action taken in accordance with recognized professional duties, standards and ethics.

17. Where the security of lawyers is threatened as a result of discharging their functions, they shall be adequately safeguarded by the authorities.

18. Lawyers shall not be identified with their clients or their clients' causes as a result of discharging their functions.

19. No court or administrative authority before whom the right to counsel is recognized shall refuse to recognize the right of a lawyer to appear before it for his or her client unless that lawyer has been disqualified in accordance with national law and practice and in conformity with these principles.

20. Lawyers shall enjoy civil and penal immunity for relevant statements made in good faith in written or oral pleadings or in their professional appearances before a court, tribunal or other legal or administrative authority.

21. It is the duty of the competent authorities to ensure lawyers access to appropriate information, files and documents in their possession or control in sufficient time to enable lawyers to provide effective legal assistance to their clients. Such access should be provided at the earliest appropriate time.

22. Governments shall recognize and respect that all communications and consultations between lawyers and their clients within their professional relationship are confidential.

Freedom of expression and association

23. Lawyers like other citizens are entitled to freedom of expression, belief, association and assembly. In particular, they shall have the right to take part in public discussion of matters concerning the law, the administration of justice and the promotion and protection of human rights and to join or form local, national or international organizations and attend their meetings, without suffering professional restrictions by reason of their lawful action or their membership in a lawful organization. In exercising these rights, lawyers shall always conduct themselves in accordance with the law and the recognized standards and ethics of the legal profession.

Professional associations of lawyers

24. Lawyers shall be entitled to form and join self-governing professional associations to represent their interests, promote their continuing education and training and protect their professional integrity. The executive body of the professional associations shall be elected by its members and shall exercise its functions without external interference.

25. Professional associations of lawyers shall cooperate with Governments to ensure that everyone has effective and equal access to legal services and that lawyers are able, without improper interference, to counsel and assist their clients in accordance with the law and recognized professional standards and ethics.

Disciplinary proceedings

26. Codes of professional conduct for lawyers shall be established by the legal profession through its appropriate organs, or by legislation, in accordance with national law and custom and recognized international standards and norms.

27. Charges or complaints made against lawyers in their professional capacity shall be processed expeditiously and fairly under appropriate procedures. Lawyers shall have the right to a fair hearing, including the right to be assisted by a lawyer of their choice.

28. Disciplinary proceedings against lawyers shall be brought before an impartial disciplinary committee established by the legal profession, before an independent statutory authority, or before a court, and shall be subject to an independent judicial review.

29. All disciplinary proceedings shall be determined in accordance with the code of professional conduct and other recognized standards and ethics of the legal profession and in the light of these principles.

The Father Of The Illegitimate UMNO Baru (Haramjadah)

2012-05-20T01:54:00.000+08:00

A deranged doctor in the house

Josh Hong

Mahathir Mohamad may have been a dutiful and well-respected medical doctor back in the 1940s. But his decision to enter the political fray has - it’s safe to say - turned out to be a sheer nightmare for the country as a whole.

Mahathir could have maintained his good reputation as a doctor, but his name is now ruined, forever associated with the Twin Towers of corruption and cronyism, his only solace being perhaps the personal wealth that he and his sons managed to accumulate when he was at the zenith of his tyrannical rule.

And the most pathetic thing about this old man is that he had a choice to become either a statesman or a rascal, but he has clearly opted to be remembered as a deranged veteran who refuses to believe the world around him has changed.

By any standards, Mahathir was an intelligent man among his contemporaries. Even Lee Kuan Yew found him a tough nut to crack.

Lee is an elite member of the old anglophile school who could easily quote a famous British judge to justify his own autocratic governance, but was confronted with tremendous difficulties in articulating his thoughts with the masses in Singapore’s early days as an independent state. But Mahathir, himself from the top drawer of his time, was often able to return to the grassroots and arouse populist sentiment for his own cause when the going got tough.

Which makes it all the more tragic that the doctor has now become deranged in his own house. With Barisan Nasional appearing to lose power sooner or later, he is living in great fear of his own misdeeds and transgressions being laid bare under the Malaysian sun. Had Mahathir been a righteous and just-minded leader, he would not have to shudder constantly at the scenario of an alternative government, for his rectitude would remain intact, come what may.

But integrity is precisely what the doctor is short of. To pre-empt potential change of government, he is now working profusely to smear both the Bersih movement and the opposition by joining the government’s chorus of vilification.

In fact, he is almost a lead singer!

Admittedly, Mahathir, who is single-handedly responsible for the erosion of the Malaysian judiciary does not see eye to eye with the Bar Council. The bad blood, however, came only from the doctor himself as he tried to ‘fix’ the judges as he did his own patients in Alor Star. His caustic remarks that the Bar Council has become a political party therefore only reveal his ineptitude in understanding the role of the legal fraternity.

Hence, it was a blessing that the colonial administration allegedly denied him a scholarship to read law in London!

Instead of hurling hollow accusations at the Bar Council, Mahathir should have the decency to admit as many as 90 percent of the judges, high-ranking police officers and “mainstream” journalists - especially those from RTM, TV3, Utusan Malaysia, Berita Harian, The Star and the New Straits Times - actually joined Umno and became his underlings after 1988.

Speaking truth to power

No, the Bar Council is not partisan. It just so happens that the current government is more often than not found to be on the wrong side of the law, and our lawyers are duty-bound to correct it. A Singaporean lawyer once told me how much she wished her colleagues back home would have the guts to speak truth to power like many of her Malaysian counterparts. This time on the Bersih 3.0 rally, the Malaysian Bar Council has again proven her right, of which I am indeed proud.

And Mahathir consistently refuses to accept the simple fact that Malaysians have different political identifications as rightful citizens. As far as he sees it, anyone who votes for the opposition is a bad Malaysian and less worthy, yet he ought to be told that not all who vote for Pas are religious “fanatics” and those who opt for the DAP are Chinese “chauvinists”. They simply want a government that is less corrupt, more honest and knows its limits.

My parents, for one, voted first the Barisan Sosialis Rakyat Malaya and then PAS throughout their lives, and did that make them racists or religious bigots? And how would “racists” like my parents have chosen PAS over either the MCA or the Chinese-dominated Gerakan in the first place? Can the doctor see the abject lack of logic in his view?

Simply put, Mahathir is now so paranoid and caught up with profound angst that he has lost all his senses, bent only on poisoning the minds of the Malays - young and old alike - with his race-centric rhetoric. Instead of championing greater transparency, public accountability and political integrity, he is going on an immoral crusade against anyone who simply wants to make Malaysia a better country to live in.

Which, in retrospect, was perhaps a reason why he was rejected by the colonial administration, for Mahathir just beats the British at their own game: divide and rule that is.

JOSH HONG studied politics at London Metropolitan University and the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. A keen watcher of domestic and international politics, he longs for a day when Malaysians will learn and master the art of self-mockery, and enjoy life to the full in spite of politicians.

What The Opposition Must Do To Win Sarawak & Sabah In GE-13

2012-05-11T05:55:00.001+08:00

To win Sarawak and Sabah in GE-13, the Opposition must promise (after the respective State Governments have also been changed) to:

1. Restore Sarawak & Sabah's Nation status as per the 18/20 Points Agreements;

2. Adhere to all the other provisions of the 18/20 Points Agreements;

3. Give back to Sarawak & Sabah full control over their petroleum resources & renegotiate what Sarawak & Sabah are willing to give to the Federal Government;

4. Allow Sarawak & Sabah to determine and control their own education, finance & taxation systems;

5. Re-designate the "Chief Minister" of each Nation as "Prime Minister";

6. Implement a system of proportionate and popular representation, by reducing the disproportions in the number of voters between each Parliamentary seat and also each State seat and whereby the Prime Minister of Malaysia as well as the Prime Ministers of Sarawak and Sabah shall be voted by the whole of the respective electorates;

7. Allow Sabah & Sarawak to establish their own Army and State Police and be responsible for their own Defence and Internal Security;

8. Allow Sarawak & Sabah full control of their own Citizenship, Customs and Immigration;

9. Implement full Borneanisation of Sarawak & Sabah's Administrative Service;

10. Give fair and full opportunities to Sarawakians and Sabahans who choose to join the Federal Diplomatic and Administrative Service;

11. Give Sarawak & Sabah the right of deciding at any time whether to secede from the Federation or not, by way of a referendum of their citizens; and

12. Give Sarawak & Sabah the right to remove the citizenships of illegal immigrants wrongfully granted by the (previous) Federal government.

This should do for a start at redressing the wrongs that have been done by Malaya to Sarawak & Sabah since the formation of Malaysia.

Let us see whether the Opposition is sincere enough in their dealings with Sarawak & Sabah to be able to make and keep such promises.

Kenapa Sarawak & Sabah Harus Keluar Malaysia

2012-05-11T03:22:00.000+08:00

How To Tell If The Illegitimate UMNO/BN Government Is A Fascist Regime

2012-05-09T23:21:00.000+08:00

From a post by Charles Thomas to the New Straight Times Malaysia Facebook Page.

The following is a checklist to determine if one is a Fascist, and the powers that be in Malaysia fits the bill, well almost. It is slowly turning into a Fascist regime. God help us all!

Def ~ Fascism - often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.

Are you a fascist? Many people are fascists and they don’t even realize it. And sometimes, they know it all too well, but hide and deny it. Most of the time though, it’s obvious who the fascists are. For instance, you might be a fascist if…

1. You are obsessed with national power and pride and believe your country doesn’t have to follow the rules and shouldn’t ever apologize for doing things that are wrong. You think your nation can do whatever it wants.

2. You believe in the rule of the few, election rigging, political decisions being made by a select group of officials behind closed doors, embrace the informal and unregulated exercise of political power, arbitrary deprivation of civil liberties, and little tolerance for meaningful opposition.

3. You believe in survival of the fittest, an every man for himself mentality that causes you to believe that poor people and sick people are weak and must be punished. You think rich people are strong because they are wealthy and that they should rule us. You also believe your race is superior to all others.

4. You use the media as a political propaganda machine to target a specific audience and to push your agenda on others. You make sure the media demonizes your opponents and takes your side on nearly every issue. You use your propaganda machine to play on the fears of others.

5. You are obsessed with security, and war. You feed this obsession by spending trillions of dollars building up a large military force and are willing to sacrifice domestic programs your people count on to keep your military huge. You start unnecessary and costly wars and you are paranoid of other nations.

6. You are driven to indoctrinate others into your way of thinking. So much so, that you try to re-write history, change the way school children are taught and you brainwash the ignorant. You use your propaganda machine as a tool to achieve this.

7. You fear and demonize intelligent people who have a higher education because they are the ones who can thwart your effort to brainwash people. You then attempt to prevent others from achieving a higher education because you want the people as ignorant as possible so you can convince them that your way is the right way.

8. You have a deep hatred and fear of communists and you instill your followers with hatred and fear of others by accusing your political opponents of being communists. This gives you an easy scapegoat to blame when things go wrong. Any person or policy you don’t like is branded as communism.

9. You disrespect women and think their place is in the home. You believe women are weak and cannot do things that men do. You believe that sexual harassment or assault is no big deal and that the only thing women are good for is cooking meals and having babies.

10. You strongly align yourself with corporations and you support corporate money and influence in government. You despise government regulations that keep corporations honest because you believe everything should be controlled by the free market and that corporations should be allowed to do whatever they please.

11. You are obsessed with religion. You seek to declare and to impose religious laws on all the people across the country. You believe other religions are inferior and that those who practice them should either be converted or destroyed.

12. You believe your race is superior and seek to disenfranchise or humiliate other races. You believe in legalized discrimination and fantasize about a return to times when the races were separate or when those of color were enslaved. You use code words in an attempt to hide your racism and you make laws that weaken the influence of those of color. Immigration and voting laws in particular.

13. You absolutely despise unions. To you and those like you, labor unions represent the empowerment of workers. Since you believe corporations can do whatever they want, you see organized labor as a threat because they fight for higher wages, health care, safety regulations, less hours, vacations, sick days, and holidays off. This obviously threatens the amount of money corporations can give to you and your cause so you brand unions as proponents of socialism/communism and make laws that severely weaken them so that corporations can have a cheap, mindless labor force.

14. You are obsessed with crime and a major supporter of punishing those who commit crimes. So much so, that you don’t care about the concept of ‘innocent until proven guilty.’ You are proud of executing people and aren’t bothered if an innocent person is killed. You seek to make harsher laws, especially laws that target specific groups of people such as immigrants, women, and people of color. You also oppose human rights and using humane interrogation tactics and you seek to undermine the independent judiciary.

15. You believe every election should go your way and to reach that goal, you push voting laws that disenfranchise those who traditionally vote for opponents such as people of color, the elderly, college students, and the poor. You even stoop to fixing elections in some cases and complain when your opponents challenge the vote counts.

16. You believe in rewarding your friends with positions when you gain power and you reward those who support you with government contracts and money, especially corporations. You also do your best to aid your supporters in any way you can, such as repealing undesirable pieces of legislation and regulations. You often have something to gain financially from this.

17. You create scapegoats to blame when problems arise. Whether it’s communists, socialists, the West, minorities, homosexuals, the poor, foreigners, immigrants, one thing is for certain. You and your propaganda tool will blame each and every one of those groups for bad things that happen even if you were the cause of the problems in the first place.

18. You take advantage of a national disaster such as an economic collapse or an attack to demonize your opponents and push your agenda. You use these events to strike fear into the population in an attempt to scare people into voting for you and your cause. It’s all about fear and scare tactics.

How UMNO Failed Malaysia on 28th April 2012

2012-05-03T04:25:00.000+08:00

Many people failed Malaysia on Saturday — A Malaysian

May 01, 2012

MAY 1 — Tan Sri Ahmad Fuad Ismail, the Datuk Bandar of Kuala Lumpur, failed us when he forgot that he was a public servant and instead, became a servant of the ruling party of the day.

Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein failed us when, even after the experience of Bersih 2.0, he oversaw, as Home Minister, the unnecessary violence wreaked on an almost wholly peaceful gathering of citizens who merely were out to state their concerns over what they see as a flawed electoral process. And to rub salt into the wound, in the aftermath, Hishammuddin sought to justify the unwarranted violence.

Datuk Seri Najib Razak failed us when as Prime Minister of all Malaysians — regardless whether they support him or not — he uttered not a squeak to ensure his flock (and as citizens, we are his flock) were facilitated in gathering peacefully to voice their concerns.

The mainstream newspapers — The Star, the New Straits Times, Berita Harian and, but of course, Utusan Malaysia — failed us yet again when they sought to justify the wrongs and entrenched their position as propagandists rather than the chroniclers of truth that they are supposed to be.

And while the police and the ruling party may want us to believe that the organisers of Bersih 3.0 also failed us, I disagree because everything that Fuad and the authorities did to prevent their citizens from gathering at Dataran Merdeka, I believe, was a formula to encourage a few hotheads to breach the barriers and they got what they wished for — an excuse to blame the organisers.

Some, like the New Straits Times, say the organisers should have taken the option of gathering at Stadium Merdeka as offered by the authorities and that would have prevented any incident. Really? Why not argue that if Fuad had allowed Dataran Merdeka as a venue, there would not have been any incidence either? But Fuad acted as if Dataran Merdeka (Independence Square) — an oxymoron after Saturday’s events — is his personal turf. Why so adamant Fuad? Independence is not only yours to savour; it is ours as well.

I have never voted for the opposition parties in my life. Now, months towards retirement age, I will ashamedly say that every election that I have been eligible to vote, I blindly marked X next to the “dacing” symbol. Yes, I had my concerns about issues. But I always felt that the Barisan Nasional was the better alternative, despite its shortcomings, despite its corruption and abuse of power, despite its authoritarian ways.

But in recent years, many a time I have looked up and asked the Almighty, is this what we deserve — a choice between bad and slightly worse? When Bersih 2.0 took to the streets in July last year, I stayed away, monitoring their progress on the news portals. I believed in their cause but I was one of the many who asked what use it would be to gather like that. Nothing will change.

But, like the many who were appalled at the way our ordinary fellow citizens were herded up like cattle and bundled into Black Marias to Pulapol and who were appalled at the way the authorities and the mainstream media tried to lie to us in subsequent days that there were only 6,000 “violent” protesters, and that they arrested a quarter of them, I decided then that I would be at Bersih 3.0. I believed then that whether things changed or not, I would be there to tell this Government, this ruling party that I have supported for more than 30 years, that I, too, want them to change things.

There have been so many accounts in cyber world of “My Bersih 3.0” experience — some heart wrenching, some angry, some bitter and some, in the spirit of all the great religions of this world — Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism — urging forgiveness and asking us to move forward.

But this is what I saw.

I saw friends who had never shown an interest in politics coming with their wives and children to say they wanted free and fair elections, because rightly or wrongly, they believe that the electoral system is flawed. They were not there to be violent.

I saw in the narrow alleys cutting through to Lebuh Ampang, a group of young and old Muslims, praying as a Jemaah in their distinctive yellow T-shirts. They were not there to be violent.

I saw many mothers and their teenaged daughters; fathers holding up small children. They were not there to be violent.

I saw the normally reticent Chinese, many young people among them, taking to the streets — either in green “Stop Lynas” or yellow Bersih tees. I saw this refined old Malay gentleman, well dressed and in his 60s, holding on firmly to an equally distinguished looking Chinese gentleman of similar age, marching to show that they were friends united in a cause. I saw this elderly Chinese lady, caught by a skull-capped, bearded PAS Unit Amal, as she almost stumbled and fell while taking photographs. I heard him say: “Aunty, jaga-jaga sikit. Jangan jatuh…”

I saw the lawyer-type Indian gentlemen and ladies marching proudly, side by side their spouses and children, laughing and joking in between chanting “Hidup Bersih.” I saw them passing water bottles to those who did not have any; I saw them aiding the old; I saw them carrying the young; I saw — after such a long, long time, Malaysians who represent the spectrum of the Malaysia that should be, united in purpose.

None of them were there to be violent.

Many a time I choked up — like when they burst into the national anthem and despite the heat and the rush of bodies, trying to stand at attention. Like when they played around with the huge yellow balloon, pushing it from one to another, like a carnival. Like when I saw the children and fathers of different races looking out for each other, offering a tissue or a sweet, holding up umbrellas for the old. Like when this teenaged Chinese boy asked me: “Uncle, why you not wearing yellow?” Like when the old Kelantanese man — whom I knew not from Adam — spoke to me in Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman: “Dah make? Make dulu. Lama nak tunggu.” (Have you eaten? Better eat. It’s a long wait.)

Who, I ask myself, among them was there to be violent? To whom should we pose this question?

Tell us Tan Sri Fuad. Tell us Datuk Seri Hishammuddin. Please tell us Datuk Seri Najib and Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin. Please tell us Datuk Seri Rais Yatim because you, who once led unruly demonstrations when you were in Semangat 46, had so many mean things to say about us. Tell us Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, you who ruled us for 23 years and brooked no dissent — who among this crowd of elderly to very young, representing the 1 Malaysia you all pay lip service to, who were the violent ones out to overthrow the Government?

Perhaps there were some amongst the tens of thousands who were carried away and broke the barricades. Perhaps it’s a sign of the level of trust and confidence that people have in their Government that some believe agent provocateurs planted among the crowd started the trouble. But pray tell Datuk Seri Hishammuddin and Tan Sri Ismail Omar — what justification was there to punch, kick, tear gas and baton charge so many of us who were on our way back and were so far from the scene of the incident? Our pain and our blood are on your hands.

Barisan Nasional has not learnt from the past. They do not listen. They only want us to listen. As far as I am concerned, July 9, 2011, and April 28, 2012, made up my mind and that of my family and friends.

In a perverse way, the Barisan Nasional has achieved what it could not through its sloganeering — a growing number of Malaysians united in purpose.

That spirit, Datuk Seri Najib, you cannot break, no matter how many baton charges, how many beatings, how many tear gas canisters and how much chemical-laced water you throw at us. You know why? Because you failed us.

A Police Force Poisoned By UMNO

2012-05-03T02:37:00.000+08:00

PDRM - the armed division of Umno

S Thayaparan

8:00AM May 2, 2012

"I hate victims who respect their executioners" - Jean-Paul Sartre

"Policemen so cherish their status as keepers of the peace and protectors of the public that they have occasionally been known to beat to death those citizens or groups who question that status." - David Mamet

COMMENT The ghosts of A Kugan, Aminulrasyid Amzah, Teoh Beng Hock and a host of others (whose names go unmentioned) watch silently as Prime Minister Najib Razak proclaims the police the victims of the state sanctioned violence that they (the police) perpetrated on the Bersih 3.0 marchers on April 28.

But in a sense he is right. The police are victims. They are as much victims of the Umno regime as any other citizen of Malaysia.

I realise at this emotional post-Bersih 3.0 moment, nobody is interested in any kind of discussion about the police other than how they are the armed division of Umno, but I would like to address certain issues regarding the violence that occurred during the April 28 protest.

This should not be read as some sort of apologia for the actions of the PDRM (Royal Malaysian Police) but rather my (hopefully) informed opinion on what has been troubling many men and women who have served, and who currently serve, in the various security apparatus of this country.

As a matter of public record, I would like to state that in my opinion any police officer who can be identified as abusing any marchers should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. They are a disgrace to the uniform, the public and finally the Agong.

On Sunday night (the day after Bersih 3.0), I received a call from an old senior police officer I knew from my Sarawak days.

"What the hell, Thaya, did you see the baby faces on parade there? What the hell were they (the government) thinking?"

We got into a long conversation and indeed I had the same conversation with many other retired and serving members of the various security forces in the country.

What amazed me the most of the police presence last Saturday was how young most of them looked. Many of my friends speculated that they looked fresh out of whatever passes for training these days.

Seeing the violence they committed in the various videos circulating on the Internet, it reminded me of schoolboys engaging in fist fights. There was no sense of any higher authority in command merely random violence targeted at anyone unlucky enough to get in their way.

Indeed, the protestors themselves seemed more organised, especially when they were shielding those unlucky police personnel who for whatever reason "accidently" rammed into them from the anger of the crowds.

Siege mentality

Having been on the other side of protest marches gives one a particular perspective when it comes to situations like this.

All military personnel receive some kind of public order training, or at least they did in my time, so I have some vague familiarity with what these men were going through. A long time ago, I too at various times in my career either stood guard or was giving the orders. The fear in their eyes was evident and so was the anger.

Wherever I went I made it a point to keep an eye on our boys in blue and sometimes even interacted with them. On numerous occasions, I realised that they had been standing still or milling about in the hot sun staring at the procession around them without having anything to drink.

One of my biggest expenses last Saturday was buying drinks for them, which they at first refused but gratefully accepted after I spoke to their commanding officer. I was extremely happy seeing that other Bersih protestors doing the same thing at various points across the city.

Understandably those I engaged with in conversation were rather tight-lipped about what they thought of this whole affair, but something deep inside me knew there was trouble brewing.

"You know how it is now. The rot started post-69 or thereabouts," an old army comrade reminded me. "It infected all the services."

I want readers to think about how police officers or any other security personnel are infected with the Umno garbage of race and religion.

Remember how non-Malays are accused of being unpatriotic because they choose not to serve in the security apparatus of this country even though institutional racism is an open secret, much like it is in the civil service.

I have no idea if there is a police equivalent of a Ridhuan Tee Abdullah teaching at whatever police training schools in operation now, but it doesn't take a genius to understand that these impressionable young minds who are supposed to be taught to serve and protect all citizens of the country are infected with that peculiar brand of Umno bigotry that excludes everyone even other Malays and Muslims if they don't subscribe to the party's ideology.

Add to this, the ranting of the two Alis (Ibrahim and Hasan) published in the racist propaganda organs of the state (which is probably the only news outlets they are exposed to) and what you get is a siege mentality acerbated by the fact that there is already an invisible line that separates security and civilian citizens.

When you are constantly indoctrinated with hate, sooner or later seeing the ‘other' as not human and not fellow citizens but rather just another threat to ‘national security' or to racial hegemony becomes part of who you are.

Imagine standing in the hot sun looking at people having fun, marching and enjoying themselves - crowds which consist of rebellious Malays and non-Malays who would wish to usurp your rightful place in the destiny of Malaysia.

Agent provocateurs

And if you think this indoctrination only affects the Malays, a former Malay Army major related to me that in a recent conversation, two Chinese and an Indian junior officers told her that Bersih was anti-government and anti-national (whatever that meant). Since she was attending, she didn't take too well to her patriotism being questioned.

And let's not forget that some protestors went out of their way to taunt the police. All that pent-up rage from both sides needed an outlet, but the difference is the police are supposed to maintain their calm in stressful situations.

Understand now that I am not claiming all the police out there are like this or that the protestors were spoiling for a fight.

Anyone who was there will tell you that the vast majority of protestors were law-abiding and peaceful participants in this process, but what they were up against was a police force poisoned by years of Umno interference.

It would not surprise me if they were agent provocateurs who were amongst the peaceful protestors. The so-called SOP (standard operating procedure) of retrieving recording devices from well, everyone, is evidence that the practitioners of the dark arts were out in full force.

But I also (and this where I will earn the scorn of Pakatan Rakyat supporters and maybe even Bersih supporters) would not be surprised if there were those within Pakatan who thought it would be a good symbolic gesture to reclaim Dataran Merdeka or at least make a go of it.

And anyone who has attended any of these demonstrations will tell there are always people who are there just for the sake of engaging in mindless violence for the sheer hell of it and were waiting for an opportunity to explode.

So there were all these elements for a perfect storm. Now of course the mainstream news organs beholden to their political masters will tell you it's all the fault of S Ambiga and Anwar Ibrahim and indeed we should all accept that in this struggle with this particular regime, scenes like this are bound to occur whenever mass protests are organised, but at the end of the day it is needed simply because if we are ever to get our police force back, to elevate them from their Umno victimhood, we need to constantly remind the regime that we are not afraid.

An old police friend asked me the other night, who I thought started the trouble. I said what I always say. In Umno I trust.

S THAYAPARAN is Commander (rtd) of Royal Malaysian Navy.

The Malayan Colonization Of Sabah (& Sarawak)

2012-04-27T11:50:00.001+08:00

The Great Malaysian Lie

2012-04-23T02:16:00.002+08:00

Important! Read till the End!!!

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: J TAN <jimtan_udin@yahoo.com.au>
Date: Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 7:19 AM
Subject: Re: Fwd: Independence of Malaysia
To: kc chong <kcchong2@gmail.com>
Cc: Tan Sri Bernard G Dompoh <n4upko@yahoo.com>, Johnny Joseph Tingang <gmel.com@gmail.com>, Dunstan Chan <dunstan.desee@gmail.com>

TKS No comments.Let the Natives of Sabah and Sarawak be "screwed" by the so call Malays.

Native of Malaya

From: kc chong
To:
Sent: Tuesday, 17 April 2012 6:32 AM
Subject: Fwd: Independence of Malaysia

All genuine malaysians MUST read this !!!

*******************

And let us be clear once and for all. Sarawak never JOINED Malaysia because there was no Malaysia to join in the first place. Sarawak joined Malaya and Sabah to FORM Malaysia . Never forget that. Teach it to your children...

-.....

....a copy of the Sarawak Government Almanac, .... The British gave up Sarawak on the 22nd of July, 1963 and on that day we became an independent nation. A country all of our own. Our own flag, our own anthem and even our own money! ....

There seems to be a complication in the above,

i.e. Sarawak, North Borneo and Brunei became

independent on 16 July 1963

...but the British renegade because of fierce

objection from Philippines and Indonesia.

Unlike Singapore which also became independent

about that time -- Singapore had its own govt

and prime minister -- the Borneo states were

never independent.

On Kimsoon's note below, they (British) were

forced to postpone Malaysia day by two weeks

because of serious military aggression primarily

from Indonesia and may be Philippines (it was

all British decision).

For those who are interested,

For the records, I went through all these happenings. I was a young adult at that time with no inclination towards politics. However, I vaguely remembered reading in the newspapers how the date of 16th September 1963 came about. Originally, the declaration of Malaysia was scheduled for 31st August 1963 to coincide with the anniversary date of the declaration of Independence of the Federation of Malaya (which was 31st August 1957). The reason why it was postponed was that Indonesia and the Philippines, at that time, strongly objected to the formation of Malaysia .....Indonesia threatened armed confrontation and Philippines refusing to back down from its claim to North Borneo (as Sabah was then known). To ease up tensions, the then Malayan government decided to postpone the declaration of Malaysia to 16th September 1963. Hence, the anomaly in the dates.

I have a leaflet outlining how the formation of Malaysia came about, starting with a proposal by Tunku Abdul Rahman over a press luncheon in Singapore on 27th may 1961 and the eventual formation of the Cobbold Commission to work out the details. This leaflet was pre-printed for the release of the First Day Cover stamps scheduled for 31st August 1963 (the date was actually mentioned in the leaflet) but which we all know, was postponed to 16th September 1963. The leaflet is in fine print and with age, the paper is a bit brittle. Nevertheless, I'll try to scan it into the computer and forward again to you in the near future for your information. Hopefully, this will come out all right and with that you can interpret the basis on the formation of Malaysia or at least, a summary of it.

Kimsoon

____________________________________________________________

Sent: Friday, 2 March 2012, 10:31
Subject: Independence

Sunday, August 14, 2011

It is time to stop buying into a lie.

Dear Reader,

May I be honest?

I am sad. I am sad because I am told by my government that I must celebrate the Independence Day of my country on the 31st of August. But what is so wrong about this that it makes me sad?

Let me tell you. If you don’t like dry and boring history lessons, you can leave my blog now. But if you have ten minutes to spare, read on.

The Federated States of Malaya which comprised all the nine Sultanates, Malacca and Penang were given their independence by Great Britain on the 31st of August, 1957. The photo below records the historic event. It is the iconic image of Tunku Abdul Rahman proclaiming independence for Malaya . Yes, MALAYA . Not Sarawak, not Sabah, but MALAYA . And this date became known as MERDEKA DAY. For the Federated States of MALAYA .

Then, six years later, Sarawak was given her independence. On the 22nd of July, 1963. Bet you didn’t know that the 22nd of July is an historic date for Sarawak , huh? Of course you wouldn’t. It has probably been wiped off the official history text books, or glossed over during history classes. But if you buy a copy of the Sarawak Government Almanac, it’s there in black and white. The British gave up Sarawak on the 22nd of July, 1963 and on that day we became an independent nation. A country all of our own. Our own flag, our own anthem and even our own money!

Then, fifty five days later, after the British granted her independence, Sarawak, together with Sabah, Singapore, and the Federated States of Malaya came together to form a new nation called MALAYSIA on the 16th of September. This date, the 16th of September, 1963, came to be known as MALAYSIA DAY because it was on this historic day that a brand new country was born in the world. ( Singapore got ‘kicked out’ later but Malaysian history books politely claim she decided to withdraw from the new nation. Brunei was also involved in the discussions to form Malaysia but it too decided against the idea.)

However, gradually, Malaysia Day became forgotten through, I suspect, a subtle and systematic process of brainwashing on the part of the Barisan Nasional government. More and more emphasis was placed on Merdeka Day and Malaysia Day was ignored, its significance eroded and displaced by Merdeka Day. Merdeka Day became a public holiday, and the whole country began to get caught up in celebrations come every 31st August.

Young Sarawakian school children were, and still are taught to wave flags and jump for joy come 31st August because on this date Malaysia achieved her independence. Now if you have been paying attention, you will obviously have noticed that there is a factual error in the previous sentence. Malaysia DID NOT achieve her independence on the 31st of August, 1957 simply because Malaysia had not existed yet! It was only Malaya which achieved her independence on the 31st of August, 1957; Malaysia was only formed six years AFTER Malaya achieved independence.

The date 31st of August means very little to me as a Sarawakian and yet I am told by my government to honour this date on the basis that I am a citizen of Malaysia and therefore as a proud and loyal Malaysian, I should jump and shout for joy that Malayans received their independence on the 31st of August despite the fact that I am also a Sarawakian and this date has little significance to me. This date did not affect my beloved Sarawak in any way whatsoever and has never been part of its rich history, so what is there to celebrate or what memory is there to honour and cherish for a Sarawakian? Sarawak achieved her independence on the 22nd of July but the government does not give this date any due recognition. Instead, I am to celebrate a date which has more significance for my fellow Malaysians in West Malaysia . That is why I am sad.

Malaysia Day, the 16th of September, 1963, however, means a lot to me. It was the date my beloved Sarawak became a part of a new nation, standing tall and proud in the world amongst other independent nations. Shouldn’t this date when we officially became a country take centre-stage in our history as a nation?

And yet, it was only last year that the Barisan Nasional government decided to recognise Malaysia Day and grant it ‘public holiday’ status. And only because Pakatan Rakyat ‘reminded’ the BN government. It actually took the BN government forty-seven years to recognise Malaysia Day officially!

But the question on my mind is why did the BN government try to sweep Malaysia Day under the carpet and dispatch it to the annals of history to be conveniently forgotten? And why do I suspect that there is a conspiracy going on to distort and blur the story of the formation of Malaysia ?

Let me draw your attention to the opening paragraph of a blog entry dated 15th September, 2009, by Prime Minister Dato’ Seri Najib Razak. He wrote,

“On this day (16 September) forty-six years ago, Malaysia welcomed Sabah and Sarawak as states and set out on a course toward becoming one of the leading nations in the world. I was only 10 years old when my father, Tun Abdul Razak Hussein, witnessed the historic proclamation of Sabah ’s independence in 1963, but I remember how proud he was during that momentous occasion. Sabah and Sarawak occupy a special place in my heart because of that history.”

Spot the offending sentence? “ Malaysia welcomed Sabah and Sarawak as states.” The Prime Minister of Malaysia, no less, officially writes in his official blog that Sabah and Sarawak were welcomed INTO a country called Malaysia in 1963!

Not only is this sentence factually wrong (as Malaysia was actually formed on that very day and you cannot ‘welcome’ other states into an entity which would need those very states to form it in the first place in order to welcome anything into), but it is also a blatant re-writing of history! Sabah and Sarawak were not just states of a larger country, Mr. Prime Minister; Sabah and Sarawak were INDEPENDENT COUNTRIES and EQUAL PARTNERS to Malaya !

But if you were to believe the Prime Minister writing in his blog, Sabah and Sarawak were only states that joined an already existing country! Surely the Prime Minister of Malaysia would know history and know how his own country was formed? And if he genuinely made a mistake, surely one of his many advisers and staff members would quickly alert him to the fact and correct the glaring mistake? Or did they not know too, and if so, it begs a more disturbing question: is our country being runned by incompetent people who do not know the history of their own country? Truth be told, I suspect no one made a mistake.

It is plain that history is deliberately being re-written. But why? Two glorious words: Malaysia Agreement.
The Barisan Nasional government wants us to forget that there is such a thing as the Malaysia Agreement. It wants us to forget because the Malaysia Agreement specifies very clearly that Sabah and Sarawak have certain rights and privileges enshrined in the 18-Point (Sarawak) and 20-Point ( Sabah ) Agreements respectively. Sabah and Sarawak, both independent countries, came together as equal partners with Malaya to form Malaysia with pre-conditions attached. And these pre-conditions would empower Sabah and Sarawak . Empowerment is a frightening thing to the BN. It does not like to empower anyone except itself. Now more so than ever, it needs Sabah and Sarawak to retain its majority in Parliament and cling on to power. So to give power to Sabah and Sarawak is a very frightening idea to the BN government. So what does it do? It re-writes history and hopes that Sabahans and Sarawakians forget. It teaches Sabahan and Sarawakian school children to celebrate the 31st of August as Malaysia ’s Independence Day whilst remaining deafeningly mute on the 16th of September. It uses newspapers, television and colourful parades to brainwash the masses into believing the lie that it assiduously propagates - that Malaysia gained independence on the 31st of August, 1957; when in actual fact Malaysia had not yet existed.

But all is not lost. You and I can change the situation. We can bring honour back to the 16th of September and accord it the significance it rightly deserves. More importantly, you and I can honour the Malaysia Agreement and return power to Sabah and Sarawak . Did you know that the Pakatan Rakyat has made a very important pledge to the peoples of Sabah and Sarawak ?

Respecting the position of Sabah and Sarawak as equal partners in the Malaysian Federation, and honouring previous agreements made, Pakatan Rakyat pledges to restore autonomy to Sabah and Sarawak in line with and within the framework of the Federal Constitution and the Federation Agreement.

Yes. A Pakatan Rakyat government will honour the Malaysia Agreement. (The Federation Agreement is basically the Malaysia Agreement.) This pledge is contained in the Buku Jingga, the book of policy pledges by the Pakatan Rakyat. You can download the Buku Jingga in English HERE. If you, like me, love Sarawak and want to see her powers and status as an equal partner restored, you will know what to do come the 13th General Election.

Back to the Prime Minister’s blog entry, which you can read HERE. If you continue reading the blog entry, you will see that the whole purpose of the entry was to appease Sabahans and Sarawakians. Wasn’t it ironic that in trying to appease us, he actually made us feel even more displeased, thinking us illiterate idiots with short memories?

So when is our nation Malaysia ’s Independence Day? There simply isn’t one. Our nation Malaysia never achieved independence. Our nation Malaysia was born out of the coming together of three individual nations already independent BEFORE they formed Malaysia .

And let us be clear once and for all. Sarawak never JOINED Malaysia because there was no Malaysia to join in the first place. Sarawak joined Malaya and Sabah to FORM Malaysia . Never forget that. Teach it to your children.

I will fly my Jalur Gemilang proudly on the 16th of September. Not on the 31st of August. It is time to stop buying into a lie.

P.S. If the Barisan Nasional is genuinely not guilty of subtle and systematic brainwashing and never willfully schemed to displace Malaysia Day with Merdeka Day (and my entire argument about the insidious plot to wipe the Malaysia Agreement from memory is therefore in tatters), then the Barisan Nasional is guilty of a far graver and greater sin - absolute and unadulterated ARROGANCE; the significance of Malaya’s independence far outweighs that of Malaysia’s formation and birth and to hell with what Sabah or Sarawak might think. And that means we’re well and truly screwed.

Posted by Vernon Kedit at 12:42 AM

A BN Win In GE-13 Will Be Illegitimate

2012-04-21T15:00:00.000+08:00

BN trump card: 'First past the post' guarantee

Paraman VS
12:53PM Apr 21, 2012

(As usual, comments by Sarawak Headhunter in red)

COMMENT Malaysia (purportedly) practises democracy. Its elections are conducted in a manner popularly known as 'first past the post', meaning that the polls are won by a candidate with the most votes.

The winning candidate does not necessarily need to receive an absolute majority of all votes cast.

BN is one of the world's longest uninterruptedly elected coalition of political parties ruling a country. Its rule over Malaysia is now entering the sixth decade.

The opposition parties and its leaders have long complained that BN has been practising unfair and illegal methods in most of the polls, to assure victory and consolidate their power. However, it is only after 2008 that more light is being shed on the crooked ways that BN appears to be employing to win at all costs in the looming elections. In more ways than one, the distance in the race to the post for a BN victory appears to be getting shorter by the day at the expense of the opposition. From the expert analysis of many political scientists such as Wong Chin Huat and Ong Kian Ming as well as electoral reform coalition Bersih and civil society action group TindakMalaysia, a clearer picture is beginning to unveil - the GE13 is going to go down in the nation's history as the dirtiest elections ever.

Public funds origin ignored

The usual dirty tactics as always remain. BN being the ruling government is accused of controlling the mainstream media like the national television and radio broadcasts as well as the newspapers. Claims of federal money being utilised to fund their political campaigns, government machinery and facilities being abused, civil servants being bullied to assist are serial complaints from the opposition.

In Sarawak, BN candidates even make use of helicopters allocated for the EC and paid out of public funds. The EC doesn't need or use as many helicopters as it purportedly does for elections in Sarawak. Abuse of government machinery and public funds is nothing new to BN in Sarawak.

What is even more alarming is the revelation of the elaborate methods being employed to dilute the power of the legitimate voters in this country. First, is the outright rigging methods which include vote buying, ballot stuffing and counting/tabulation frauds. Second, is the rigging through the electoral roll. This is done by three methods:

Inclusion of non-voters - the phantom voters. This includes dead people voting, non-resident, non-existent voters (cloning) and foreigners being given citizenship/MyKads;

Exclusion of legitimate voters omitted directly from the electoral roll;

Redelineation of constituencies: by altering the size and boundary of the electorate, one can affect the power of the ballot. Recently the EC had been doing this under the 'border correction exercise' term.

The count of registered voters who number more than 50, sharing a same address is 1,262.

The number of new voters who have been 'registering' since BN lost its two-thirds majority in the last GE is nothing short of spectacular.

As of Dec 31, 2011, 12,595,268 Malaysians have registered as qualified voters.

This sudden feverish spurt of 'voter enlightenment' appears to show Selangor as its epicentre.

Selangor registered 340,000 new voters since the last GE, which is a 21.8% rise compared with the national average of 16.3% in voter registration.

Ong Kian Ming highlights that history appears to be repeating itself as the two states Sabah (after the 1990 elections) and Terengganu (after the 1999 polls) saw a sudden jump in the number of voters in the electoral roll after the BN loss.

Subsequently in the following GEs, miraculously the BN returned to power in spectacular fashion.

In 2011, the National Institute for Democracy and Electoral Integrity (NIEI), Centre for Independent Journalism (CIJ) and Merdeka Centre conducted a national voter registration audit.

The main purpose was to assess the accuracy and completeness of the electoral rolls.

A total of 1,177 ordinary voters were randomly sampled from 60 parliamentary constituencies.

The key findings indicated that 8% of these voters live at invalid addresses.

About 26% of these voters are unrecognisable voters, meaning they could not be recognised by a neighbour or local resident.

In short, these voters' identities may not be valid. Only 31% of them were living in their stated addresses.
Playing pucks with EC roll

The high number of non-resident voters is a major concern and poses an unhealthy practice of democracy as per our 'first past the post' system that is especially designed to provide for actual residents to elect their representatives in accordance with the local needs as per the knowledge and issues faced by the local residents.

Malaysian Electoral Roll Analysis Project (Merap) detected around 100,000 problematic names based on 10 issues.

Ong Kian Ming states if this number is added with other previously highlighted issues, it would be easily mount to over 400,000 dubious voters and that, too, is only the tip of the iceberg.

There are also a further 42,051 voters on the electoral roll whose IC numbers could not be detected in the National Registration Department (NRD) database.

Strangely Election Commission (EC) chief Abdul Aziz Mohd Yusof (far right) finds this trivial as it only amounts to 0.3% of the master electoral roll of 12.6 million voters.

It is a wonder if the EC chief could find anyone who is 0.3% pregnant in this world. One can either be pregnant or not and in this case the electoral roll must be viewed as "dirty" and nothing less.

Even more hilarious is 42,000 out of 12.6 million is actually 0.003% and not 0.3% as he had stated. Perhaps decimals are not a big issue to the EC.

Another mind-boggling issue is that in the voter registration audit report, it is clearly stated that the EC had given the total number of registered voters as of March 31, 2011 as 12,032,467. How is that so?

Bersih had also unearthed more instances of fraud in the latest electoral roll.

It appears that there are 24,105 voters in Sabah and Sarawak who have been allegedly re-registered in Selangor. (Migrants from Sarawak and Sabah perhaps?)

Its steering committee claimed that 15,520 Sabah and 8,585 Sarawak voters had been registered twice in Selangor in the latest updated electoral roll until first quarter of 2012.

The Selangor State Government is perfectly right in wanting to do an in-depth study of the highly-likely tainted state electoral roll and to have separate elections from the federal elections, notwithstanding the EC's unsubtle threats that separate elections could cost RM30 million more that the state would have to cough out if the Federal Government had no more allocations of funds.

The Selangor State and its people would stand to lose tens if not hundreds of billions more should they allow a corrupt and illegitimate BN regime to regain control of the state through illegal means.

ALL Pakatan Rakyat-controlled states would do well to consider this notwithstanding the costs.

It would be a great pity if the BN could so cheaply continue to rob the people of not only a legitimate electoral victory but also of the resources and wealth that is rightfully the people's and not the BN's.

Should BN win again this time (beyond a doubt illegally), the scale of the looting and pillaging will be unprecedented and open and the people will be stripped and raped in broad daylight of whatever little decency they have left.

Backdoor postal voters

Another alarming development that is brewing is the BN government appears to be rushing to pass the Rela Act in Parliament.

The first reading has been submitted and among the subjects one states 'allowing Rela members to assist any security force or authority established under written law upon the latter's request'.

Some are wondering if this is a backdoor method to eventually register the over two million strong Rela members or even a part of them as postal voters.

After all, there is a provision in postal voter regulation 3(f) which empowers the EC to designate any group as postal voter through the gazette.

Looking at all these issues from a macro point of view, it appears that the BN is very determined to win the 13th GE and is willing to go to whatever extent to do so (and using the people's own money to do it).

This time however, cases of abuse will be well-documented with video and photographic evidence that cannot be ignored both in the court of law as well as public opinion. If the BN manages to come to power again this time, it will not only be but be seen to be an illegitimate regime against which all means of unseating it will be legitimate.

Pakatan Rakyat's chances of coming to power are looking slimmer even though the crowds that are turning up at their ceramah are swelling.

In a free and fair elections, it is my personal opinion that Pakatan will win hands down, but in a polls that one has 'first past the BN's post' rule, Pakatan would require a perfect storm of the unity and support of all races in Malaysia to do so.

DR PARAMAN VS is a general practitioner by profession. Just entering into his fifth decade of life, he regretfully admits to having exercised his right to vote only once - which was in the last general election. He drove 200km to do so. His wish is that the millions of Malaysians who have yet to register as voters will do so, soonest possible. He can be reached at paramanvs@yahoo.com.sg

The Cursed Baram Dam

2012-04-17T02:03:00.000+08:00

How The US & Its Corporations Enslave The World

2012-03-31T05:55:00.000+08:00

Radio Free Sarawak

2012-03-05T02:14:00.000+08:00

Taib's Final Days

2012-03-05T01:59:00.000+08:00

The 18-20 Point Agreement Between Malaya & Sarawak & Sabah

2012-03-05T01:44:00.000+08:00

Mahathir The Father Of Malaysia's Problems

2012-03-03T06:56:00.000+08:00

Sarawak Headhunter's comments on "The 10 Mistakes of Mahathir Mohamad":

Mahathir is a person who would rather destroy the whole nation in his efforts to avoid being proven wrong than accept the fact that he made many mistakes that have cost and will continue to cost the whole country dearly.

Criticism of others comes easy to him, but he can't take it himself.

Certainly he can make life miserable for his successors and no one has yet been able to deal with him as he deserves. If there is any person, other than Daim Zainuddin, who deserves to be imprisoned under the ISA for economic sabotage and endangering the security of the nation, it is Mahathir.

The New Economic Policy was definitely abused to the maximum by him and a selected group of cronies in UMNO, chief of whom of course was Daim Zainuddin, the man who singlehandedly siphoned out the most of Malaysia's wealth and caused the country and many of its institutions to suffer massive losses.

Mahathir and Daim never really allowed the NEP to address poverty and raise the level of Malay participation in the economy, except for the few (themselves included of course) whom they selected and were able to collaborate with them at the expense of the vast majority of Malaysians (especially Malays) whom they were able to dupe.

There was no mistake in the deliberate pattern in which Mahathir & Daim systematically accumulated their own enormous wealth and for their cronies and proxies "through the money-making schemes hatched under the guise of the NEP". This was plain looting that they managed to disguise and control through their tight grip on power and the regulatory apparatus of the government. The so-called privatization (in fact piratization) of government assets to a few favoured Malay entrepreneurs was actually a sham.

In reality it was not so much that they were "not able to deal with the ‘instant success’ or the stress of big time business" that many succumbed to debt during the 1998 Asian financial crisis. They were only proxies for Daim and Mahathir, who had managed to convince them that what they were doing was in the national interest and the interests of the Malays and UMNO in particular. Under Daim's and Mahathir's directives, they facilitated the stripping and looting of the very businesses that they were supposed to nuture, supposedly for the purposes of maintaining the power of UMNO and its hold over the nation but actually to enrich Daim and Mahathir (whether they realized it or not).

They were rewarded handsomely for their roles in these schemes, but ultimately at the expense of their own credibility and capacity. It would prove impossible for them to make enough to cover the money siphoned out of these businesses by Daim and Mahathir, thereby necessitating the massive government bailouts.

This coupled with the pooling of wealth in the hands of a few "left the ordinary Malays and Malaysians with just a few crumbs to share amongst themselves", but not many realised it at the time (which was really borrowed time), since Daim and Mahathir were able to mask what they were doing through the creation of artificial and shallow economic booms and progress (especially through the use of petroleum revenues stolen from Sarawak and Sabah).

Indeed it has now blown up to today’s red-hot disputes about social and economic fairness, but there are still many especially in UMNO/BN, who refuse to see or cannot see the real cause of the dire situation that Malaysia is in today. The more delusional among them even go to the extent of denying that Malaysia is on the brink of bankruptcy, which is where the doings of Daim and Mahathir in particular and UMNO in general have put us all.

So now we find, in times of rapidly rising prices and costs of living but without commensurate income, that "there is not enough money for scholarships, education, healthcare, employment and welfare for everyone, even the Malays who have been repeatedly told by Mahathir’s Umno party that they will get priority".

It is not so much that Mahathir chose the wrong people for the wrong jobs or that he trusted the wrong people. Mahathir and Daim worked together to pick people who could be manipulated, coerced, intimidated or blackmailed into doing things that suited their evil plans. Many of these people were hauled to court to settle debts not really of their own doing or making but incurred at the behest of Daim and Mahathir or as a result of their schemes.

The result of course is that "only Daim Zainudin remains ‘filthy’ rich". Mahathir was not really had, since he was together with Daim a significant beneficiary of all these schemes, but he may not have realised the full extent of what Daim had siphoned off and that this combined with his own grandiose schemes would place such a great burden on the nation. The self-deception of a megalomaniac like Mahathir and the mass deception that he perpetrated on the Malaysian people is something that all Malaysians will be paying for through their nose for the forseeable future.

Mahathir could have foreseen that the National Debt would become as high as it is today (over RM450 billion) if he had really bothered to count the cost of all the nefarious schemes that he and Daim implemented. Mahathir was never responsible enough to think about the future and the consequences of any of his and Daim's actions. That he never saved a sen for Malaysia for a rainy day could generously be seen as a "mistake", but should rather be seen as gross criminal neglect and dereliction of duty (if he really had any sense of duty).

Mahathir had no real economic policy to speak of. His economic policy was based on his tentative opinions and speculative viewpoints, not forgetting his and Daim's own exploitative shenanigans and crooked schemes. His "skewed understanding of the economy" was more a character defect than a mistake.

Mahathir’s ego and conscious desire to be a dictator was also not a mistake but a defect of character. Mahathir. Daim and UMNO/BN never lost their integrity since they never had any in the first place. As a result they could hardly be well-intentioned, except in a kind of "by the way" manner.

UMNO has always been racist. Its very name betrays its racist origins and nature, so much so that its membership abandoned its own founder when he tried to change it into a multi-racial party. Mahathir exploited this to the fullest. He was both a product of UMNO's racism as well as a proponent and ideologue of it. UMNO Malays generally didn't take much convincing that what (Mahathir and Daim and their other leaders) had done was necessary and in their interests. They have kept themselves deceived until today in spite of all the evidence that they choose to ignore, mainly because of their own racial and racist hang-ups, to the extent that many of them (Mahathir being chief of them all) deliberately suppressed their real (Indian) racial origins to become more Malay than the "real" Malays themselves.

Corruption was tolerated and exploited by Mahathir himself to maintain his power in UMNO and over the nation. While pretending to be "clean, efficient and trustworthy" ("bersih, cekap, amanah"), he allowed those he wished to control to get trapped in their own web of corruption so that they were not only no threat to him but could be made to do whatever he wanted.

That corruption has now spread so wide that it threatens the very fabric of the nation and UMNO has not been able to come to grips with it. In fact UMNO seems to be quite comfortable wallowing in it at the expense of the nation.

For UMNO to survive, it has to get rid of Mahathir once and for all, and for Malaysia to survive (even if without Sarawak and Sabah), it has to rid itself of UMNO.

Al Tugauw
Sarawak Headhunter

Mahathir The Infallible?

2012-03-03T06:43:00.000+08:00

The 10 mistakes of Mahathir Mohamad

Nawawi Mohamad

Former premier Mahathir Mohamad has criticized every prime minister of Malaysia from the late Tunku Abdul Rahman to the current leader Najib Razak, sparing no one except of course, himself. Mahathir has also criticized other world leaders including UK’s Tony Blair and of course George W Bush, the 43rd president of the United States.

So far none of his local peers have swung back at him, which is not surprising considering that several are already dead and only Najib and 5th prime minister Abdullah Badawi are alive. As for the international leaders, they have largely ignored Mahathir’s existence, which only adds to his frustration, but there is nothing he can do to them. However, he can make life miserable for his successors here, and this he is already doing.

When Mahathir retired in 2003, after 22 years as PM, there was talk about his ‘great’ legacy and he was even called Bapa Pemodenan or Father of Modernization. Some 9 years after his retirement, the excesses and sheer ill-judgement of his economic, social and political decisions have come back to wallop the nation with a backlash stronger than the ferocious tsunami of 2006 that devastated much of South Asia.

At 86, Mahathir is now reviled by most Malaysians, blamed for the massive corruption that may soon bankrupt the country if no remedial economic action is taken, and for the apartheid-scale racial fissures amongst the various ethnic groups in the country.

NEP

Just pick the New Economic Policy, which was the brainchild of the policymakers of the 1960s but which he abused to the maximum. This abuse alone is enough to ensure that he will stay in the Malaysian Hall of Villains rather than in the Hall of Fame which he still thinks he belongs in.

His peers with better memories including former Finance minister Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah said last week that the NEP was never meant to create or to be used to incubate a class of Malay capitalists, but to address poverty and to raise the level of Malay participation in the economy. It was never meant to be abused by the government of the day to handpick a select group of Malay entrepreneurs, load them with sharply-discounted government deals and then expect them to prosper and create enough economic ripples to help lift the rest of the community.

This was Mahathir’s first and major mistake. But was it really a mistake? Doubters and critics point to the enormous wealth he accumulated for his cronies and proxies through the money-making schemes hatched under the guise of the NEP, and by privatizing government assets to favored Malay entrepreneurs, one of whom is the disgraced former MAS chairman Tajudin Ramli. Not able to deal with the ‘instant success’ or the stress of big time business, many succumbed to debt during the 1998 Asian financial crisis. Tajudin and friends like Halim Saad fell from hero to zero, losing enormous amounts of money and requiring massive government bailouts.

Cronies but the masses get nothing

The second mistake Mahathir, in his foolishness, made was to pool the major part of the nation’s wealth in the hands of a few. This time he included non-Malays millionaires such as Vincent Tan, Robert Kuok and Ananda Krishnan. Tan has just announced his retirement, Kuok unhappy with the worsening racial system in the country has chosen to stay Hong Kong, while Ananda is wanted by the Indian authorities for allegedly having corruptly wangled a telecoms licence to buy into Aircel.

This pooling of wealth in the hands of a few inevitably left the ordinary Malays and Malaysians with just a few crumbs to share amongst themselves, a slow-boil situation that has blown up to today’s red-hot disputes about social and economic fairness. Not only is there not enough money for scholarships, education, healthcare, employment and welfare for everyone, even the Malays who have been repeatedly told by Mahathir’s Umno party that they will get priority, have left in the lurch.

Malays now form 96% of the poorest 40% lowest income earners in the country. As for the non-Malays, of course, they have felt the pinch more. Many have been forced to go overseas to work and to study. That’s right, educational and employment opportunities are scarce for the non-Malays in the country. Again, the only group that benefited were the elite in the Umno party, their families and cronies. So Mahathir – despite his self-praise – was in fact rather shortsighted. Money was far more important to him than he cared to admit.

Trusting the wrong people

The third mistake that Mahathir made was choosing the wrong people for the wrong jobs. He also trusted the wrong people. All of the Malays tycoons that he picked had no real business savvy but were merely the trusted aides of former Finance minister Daim Zainuddin. That is why guys like Tajuddin, Halim, Rashid Husein of RHB Bank, Mohd Noor Mutalib and Abdul Rahman Maidin of MRCB fared poorly in the end. Some have even been hauled to court to settle debts.

Only Daim Zainudin remains ‘filthy’ rich. His nominees ended up owning all the various banks and business enterprises meant to be transferred into Umno Baru. Somehow, as the Umno legend goes, Daim managed to secure these for himself. This was obviously a huge letdown for Mahathir. Instead of ‘tricking’ people over to his point of view, for once, he had been had!

Set Malaysia off on the borrowing habit

Mahathir did not foresee that the National Debt could be as high as it is today, having ballooned to over RM450 billion. Despite several ‘begging’ trips to Singapore and Brunei, he was politely rebuffed. In the end, he borrowed from overseas by issuing bonds and ‘stealing’ every spare sen from Petronas and the other Government-Linked-Companies to fund his mega projects. Throughout his 22-year rule, Mahathir never saved a sen for Malaysia for a rainy day. And this was his fourth mistake.

Weak grasp of economic principles

Mahathir is just an ordinary doctor; a general practitioner and not a specialist. His understanding of economics is as rudimentary as the average Malaysian. His idea of increasing the equity of the Malays is so simplistic – use the GLCs. Mahathir’s vision of doing business is by profiteering through controlling shares in as many companies as possible without considering the possibility of losing money. Sad to say, real life businesses involves losses, not just profits.

Mahathir’s economic policy was not based on any solid foundation and had never been tested in any country before. It was based on his opinions and viewpoints. If these had been any good or worked, many countries would have already implemented similar ideas centuries ago. Even established capitalist and communist economic systems have come under fire and economic collapse is a norm these days, part of a man-made boom and bust cycle. Several economists have even urged nations to revert back to gold-based currencies, an ancient and established type of monetary system, so what are Mahathir’s child-like economic concepts by comparison? His fifth mistake is therefore his skewed understanding of the economy. It led to the controversial de-pegging of the ringgit from the US dollar and the overnight closure of the CLOB share market trading in 1998 – two events that investors have still not forgiven Malaysia and Mahathir for.

Dictator syndrome

Mahathir’s ego and unconscious desire to be a dictator is his sixth mistake. He amended the constitution to weaken the Agong and the Sultans and then made sure that the law and enforcement bodies obeyed him. He sacked the Chief Justice Tun Salleh Abbas and closed both eyes when judges were openly bought by those who had money. It would be tough for Malaysians and their investors to fully trust the judiciary system again. This is why the Umno-BN has lost its integrity and the people their faith in the coalition. Malaysians will always distrust whatever Umno-BN does even if it may be well-intentioned.

Racist policies

To prevent the disintegration of his policies and his misdeeds from being exposed, Mahathir had to resort to his favorite racial politics. He had to convince the Malays that what he had done was necessary and in their interests. He kept for himself the great jewels and gave out the small chips so as to convince the Malays that the war against the other races was real. The non-Malays had to be kept back. Thus the budget allocations for places like BTN or the National Civics Bureau where Malay graduates and civil servants were openly taught to be suspicious of the other races.

But not all the Malays bought it. Such teachings were against Islam and also against universal values. The Malays were left confused, while the non-Malays totally sidelined. So being racist is Mahathir’s seventh mistake.

Corruption

If Mahathir and Umno have been successful in making sure Malaysia achieves developed nation status by 2020, why does the record show so many serious faults to date. There are only eight years to go but the economy is still in a shambles with the national debt soaring, racial and religious harmony in disarray, and the political situation worsening with Umno-BN now openly resorting to physical violence to stop the opposition from holding their rallies.

The education system is also leading nowhere, healthcare is getting worse and more expensive, the much-touted and corrupt 1Care already rejected before it can even come on-stream, law and order is still questionable, mismanagement and graft more entrenched than before in the Umno-BN government. Instant of all cylinders kicking in, and culminating into the realization of Vision 2020, Malaysia may go bankrupt instead. Not fighting corruption, but perpetuating it is Mahathir’s eighth mistake.

Meddling with the running of the country

The majority of the Malays are poor and still need government help despite 55 years of Umno “successes“ (read failures). The non-Malays have been patient enough and have given Umno enough chances. They have waited until the third generation after the nation’s independence in 1957 and they are now fed-up with Umno-BN. The same too is happening with the Malays. Those not in the direct line of the Umno gravy train, and this would be the great majority, are getting fed-up too. More have voted for the opposition and will continue to do so.

When Mahathir realized that things were turning sour, he handed over the baton to Abdullah Badawi, thinking that he could still control the running of the government by ‘remote control’. But when things were not carried out as he had wished, Mahathir forced an ouster and replaced Badawi with Najib. Granted, the disorganized Badawi was in no capacity to lead Malaysia but Najib is just as incapable too. All through, instead of giving a helping hand, Mahathir continued to meddle with the running of the country. Interfering with the running of the country and disallowing the current leaders to put in solutions that suit the era is Mahathir’s ninth mistake.

Causing trouble in Umno and pushing Mukhriz up the ladder

Yet Mahathir stubbornly refuses to accept or to admit to his mistakes. This is one man who refuses to face up to reality. He is not really interested in the welfare of Malaysians at all, not even the Malays or Umno. He only wants to save his face and to make sure that his son Mukhriz will become prime minister no matter what deals he has to execute with the current batch of Umno warlords to effect this.

Ruthless and completely selfish, Mahathir would think nothing of creating chaos just to fulfill that ambition. After all, he could de-register Umno just to stay in power. Imagine what he won’t dare to do to get Mukhriz in as Umno president. But it is this incessant interfering and trouble-making in Umno that will be his tenth and last mistake.

Mahathir will doom Umno, and in imploding, Umno will very likely take Mahathir down for the count.

Do Sarawakians Want This In Sarawak?

2012-02-17T11:54:00.000+08:00

See Sarawak Report: "Scandal of SALCO - How Taib Plans To Make Billions From Bakun"

The Power Of The Powerless

2012-02-06T18:58:00.000+08:00

Understanding what has been happening in Malaysia and what to do about it - the lessons and inspiration of Eastern Europe's struggle for freedom from the tyranny of Communism.

Václav Havel: The Power of the Powerless
To the memory of Jan Patocka

"The Power of the Powerless" (October 1978) was originally written ("quickly," Havel said later) as a discussion piece for a projected joint Polish Czechoslovak volume of essays on the subject of freedom and power. All the participants were to receive Havel's essay, and then respond to it in writing. Twenty participants were chosen on both sides, but only the Czechoslovak side was completed.   Meanwhile, in May 1979, some of the Czechoslovak contributors who were also members of VONS (the Committee to Defend the Unjustly Prosecuted), including Havel, were arrested, and it was decided to go ahead and "publish" the Czechoslovak contributions separately.

Havel's essay has had a profound impact on Eastern Europe. Here is what Zbygniew Bujak, a Solidarity activist, told me: "This essay reached us in the Ursus factory in 1979 at a point when we felt we were at the end of the road. Inspired by KOR [the Polish Workers' Defense Committee], we had been speaking on the shop floor, talking to people, participating in public meetings, trying to speak the truth about the factory, the country, and politics. There came a moment when people thought we were crazy. Why were we doing this? Why were we taking such risks? Not seeing any immediate and tangible results, we began to doubt the purposefulness of what we were doing. Shouldn’t we be coming up with other methods, other ways?

"Then came the essay by Havel. Reading it gave us the theoretical underpinnings for our activity. It maintained our spirits; we did not give up, and a year later - in August 1980 - it became clear that the party apparatus and the factory management were afraid of us. We mattered. And the rank and file saw us as leaders of the movement. When I look at the victories of Solidarity, and of Charter 77, I see in them an astonishing fulfillment of the prophecies and knowledge contained in Havel's essay."

Translated by Paul Wilson, "The Power of the Powerless" has appeared several times in English, foremost in The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, edited by John Keane, with an introduction by Steven Lukes (London: Hutchinson, 1985). That volume includes a selection of nine other essays from the original Czech and Slovak collection.
I

A SPECTER is haunting Eastern Europe: the specter of what in the West is called "dissent". This specter has not appeared out of thin air. It is a natural and inevitable consequence of the present historical phase of the system it is haunting. It was born at a time when this system, for a thousand reasons, can no longer base itself on the unadulterated, brutal, and arbitrary application of power, eliminating all expressions of nonconformity. What is more, the system has become so ossified politically that there is practically no way for such nonconformity to be implemented within its official structures.

Who are these so-called dissidents? Where does their point of view come from, and what importance does it have? What is the significance of the "independent initiatives" in which "dissidents" collaborate, and what real chances do such initiatives have of success? Is it appropriate to refer to "dissidents" as an opposition? If so, what exactly is such an opposition within the framework of this system? What does it do? What role does it play in society? What are its hopes and on what are they based? Is it within the power of the "dissidents" - as a category of subcitizen outside the power establishment - to have any influence at all on society and the social system? Can they actually change anything?

I think that an examination of these questions - an examination of the potential of the "powerless" - can only begin with an examination of the nature of power in the circumstances in which these powerless people operate.

II

Our system is most frequently characterized as a dictatorship or, more precisely, as the dictatorship of a political bureaucracy over a society which has undergone economic and social leveling. I am afraid that the term "dictatorship," regardless of how intelligible it may otherwise be, tends to obscure rather than clarify the real nature of power in this system. We usually associate the term with the notion of a small group of people who take over the government of a given country by force; their power is wielded openly, using the direct instruments of power at their disposal, and they are easily distinguished socially from the majority over whom they rule. One of the essential aspects of this traditional or classical notion of dictatorship is the assumption that it is temporary, ephemeral, lacking historical roots. Its existence seems to be bound up with the lives of those who established it. It is usually local in extent and significance, and regardless of the ideology it utilizes to grant itself legitimacy, its power derives ultimately from the numbers and the armed might of its soldiers and police. The principal threat to its existence is felt to be the possibility that someone better equipped in this sense might appear and overthrow it.

Even this very superficial overview should make it clear that the system in which we live has very little in common with a classical dictatorship. In the first place, our system is not limited in a local, geographical sense; rather, it holds sway over a huge power bloc controlled by one of the two superpowers. And although it quite naturally exhibits a number of local and historical variations, the range of these variations is fundamentally circumscribed by a single, unifying framework throughout the power bloc. Not only is the dictatorship everywhere based on the same principles and structured in the same way (that is, in the way evolved by the ruling super power), but each country has been completely penetrated by a network of manipulative instruments controlled by the superpower center and totally subordinated to its interests. In the stalemated world of nuclear parity, of course, that circumstance endows the system with an unprecedented degree of external stability compared with classical dictatorships. Many local crises which, in an isolated state, would lead to a change in the system, can be resolved through direct intervention by the armed forces of the rest of the bloc.

In the second place, if a feature of classical dictatorships is their lack of historical roots (frequently they appear to be no more than historical freaks, the fortuitous consequence of fortuitous social processes or of human and mob tendencies), the same cannot be said so facilely about our system. For even though our dictatorship has long since alienated itself completely from the social movements that give birth to it, the authenticity of these movements (and I am thinking of the proletarian and socialist movements of the nineteenth century) gives it undeniable historicity. These origins provided a solid foundation of sorts on which it could build until it became the utterly new social and political reality it is today, which has become so inextricably a part of the structure of the modern world. A feature of those historical origins was the "correct" understanding of social conflicts in the period from which those original movements emerged. The fact that at the very core of this "correct" understanding there was a genetic disposition toward the monstrous alienation characteristic of its subsequent development is not essential here. And in any case, this element also grew organically from the climate of that time and therefore can be said to have its origin there as well.

One legacy of that original "correct" understanding is a third peculiarity that makes our systems different from other modern dictatorships: it commands an incomparably more precise, logically structured, generally comprehensible and, in essence, extremely flexible ideology that, in its elaborateness and completeness, is almost a secularized religion. It offers a ready answer to any question whatsoever; it can scarcely be accepted only in part, and accepting it has profound implications for human life. In an era when metaphysical and existential certainties are in a state of crisis, when people are being uprooted and alienated and are losing their sense of what this world means, this ideology inevitably has a certain hypnotic charm. To wandering humankind it offers an immediately available home: all one has to do is accept it, and suddenly everything becomes clear once more, life takes on new meaning, and all mysteries, unanswered questions, anxiety, and loneliness vanish. Of course, one pays dearly for this low-rent home: the price is abdication of one’s own reason, conscience, and responsibility, for an essential aspect of this ideology is the consignment of reason and conscience to a higher authority. The principle involved here is that the center of power is identical with the center of truth. (In our case, the connection with Byzantine theocracy is direct: the highest secular authority is identical with the highest spiritual authority.) It is true of course that, all this aside, ideology no longer has any great influence on people, at least within our bloc (with the possible exception of Russia, where the serf mentality, with its blind, fatalistic respect for rulers and its automatic acceptance of all their claims, is still dominant and combined with a superpower patriotism which traditionally places the interests of empire higher than the interests of humanity). But this is not important, because ideology plays its role in our system very well (an issue to which I will return) precisely because it is what it is.

Fourth, the technique of exercising power in traditional dictatorships contains a necessary element of improvisation. The mechanisms for wielding power are for the most part not established firmly, and there is considerable room for accident and for the arbitrary and unregulated application of power. Socially, psychologically, and physically, conditions still exist for the expression of some form of opposition. In short, there are many seams on the surface which can split apart before the entire power structure has managed to stabilize. Our system, on the other hand, has been developing in the Soviet Union for over sixty years, and for approximately thirty years in Eastern Europe; moreover, several of its long-established structural features are derived from Czarist absolutism. In terms of the physical aspects of power, this has led to the creation of such intricate and well-developed mechanisms for the direct and indirect manipulation of the entire population that, as a physical power base, it represents something radically new. At the same time, let us not forget that the system is made significantly more effective by state ownership and central direction of all the means of production. This gives the power structure an unprecedented and uncontrollable capacity to invest in itself (in the areas of the bureaucracy and the police, for example) and makes it easier for that structure, as the sole employer, to manipulate the day-to-day existence of all citizens.

Finally, if an atmosphere of revolutionary excitement, heroism, dedication, and boisterous violence on all sides characterizes classical dictatorships, then the last traces of such an atmosphere have vanished from the Soviet bloc. For some time now this bloc has ceased to be a kind of enclave, isolated from the rest of the developed world and immune to processes occurring in it. To the contrary, the Soviet bloc is an integral part of that larger world, and it shares and shapes the world's destiny. This means in concrete terms that the hierarchy of values existing in the developed countries of the West has, in essence, appeared in our society (the long period of co-existence with the West has only hastened this process). In other words, what we have here is simply another form of the consumer and industrial society, with all its concomitant social, intellectual, and psychological consequences. It is impossible to understand the nature of power in our system properly without taking this into account.

The profound difference between our system - in terms of the nature of power - and what we traditionally understand by dictatorship, a difference I hope is clear even from this quite superficial comparison, has caused me to search for some term appropriate for our system, purely for the purposes of this essay. If I refer to it henceforth as a "post-totalitarian" system, I am fully aware that this is perhaps not the most precise term, but I am unable to think of a better one. I do not wish to imply by the prefix "post" that the system is no longer totalitarian; on the contrary, I mean that it is totalitarian in a way fundamentally different from classical dictatorships, different from totalitarianism as we usually understand it.

The circumstances I have mentioned, however, form only a circle of conditional factors and a kind of phenomenal framework for the actual composition of power in the post-totalitarian system, several aspects of which I shall now attempt to identify.

III

The manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: "Workers of the world, unite!" Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his ideals? Has he really given more than a moment's thought to how such a unification might occur and what it would mean?

I think it can safely be assumed that the overwhelming majority of shopkeepers never think about the slogans they put in their windows, nor do they use them to express their real opinions. That poster was delivered to our greengrocer from the enterprise headquarters along with the onions and carrots. He put them all into the window simply because it has been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse,
there could be trouble. He could be reproached for not having the proper decoration in his window; someone might even accuse him of disloyalty. He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life. It is one of the thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil life "in harmony with society," as they say.

Obviously the greengrocer is indifferent to the semantic content of the slogan on exhibit; he does not put the slogan in his window from any personal desire to acquaint the public with the ideal it expresses. This, of course, does not mean that his action has no motive or significance at all, or that the slogan communicates nothing to anyone. The slogan is really a sign, and as such it contains a subliminal but very definite message. Verbally, it might be expressed this way: "I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace." This message, of course, has an addressee: it is directed above, to the greengrocer's superior, and at the same time it is a shield that protects the greengrocer from potential informers. The slogan's real meaning, therefore, is rooted firmly in the greengrocer's existence. It reflects his vital interests. But what are those vital interests?

Let us take note: if the greengrocer had been instructed to display the slogan "I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient,” he would not be nearly as indifferent to its semantics, even though the statement would reflect the truth.   The greengrocer would be embarrassed and ashamed to put such an unequivocal statement of his own degradation in the shop window, and quite naturally so, for he is a human being and thus has a sense of his own dignity. To overcome this complication, his expression of loyalty must take the form of a sign which, at least on its textual surface, indicates a level of disinterested conviction. It must allow the greengrocer to say, "What's wrong with the workers of the world uniting?" Thus the sign helps the greengrocer to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides them behind the facade of something high. And that something is ideology.

Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something supra-personal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves. It is a very pragmatic but, at the same time, an apparently dignified way of legitimizing what is above, below, and on either side. It is directed toward people and toward God. It is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo. It is an excuse that everyone can use, from the greengrocer, who conceals his fear of losing his job behind an alleged interest in the unification of the workers of the world, to the highest functionary, whose interest in staying in power can be cloaked in phrases about service to the working class. The primary excusatory function of ideology, therefore, is to provide people, both as victims and pillars of the post- totalitarian system, with the illusion that the system is in harmony with the human order and the order of the universe.

The smaller a dictatorship and the less stratified by modernization the society under it, the more directly the will of the dictator can be exercised - In other words, the dictator can employ more or less naked discipline, avoiding the complex processes of relating to the world and of self-justification which ideology involves. But the more complex the mechanisms of power become, the larger and more stratified the society they embrace, and the longer they have operated historically, the more individuals must be connected to them from outside, and the greater the importance attached to the ideological excuse. It acts as a kind of bridge between the regime and the people, across which the regime approaches the people and the people approach the regime. This explains why ideology plays such an important role in the post-totalitarian system: that complex machinery of units, hierarchies, transmission belts, and indirect instruments of manipulation which ensure in countless ways the integrity of the regime, leaving nothing to chance, would be quite simply unthinkable without ideology acting as its all-embracing excuse and as the excuse for each of its parts.

IV

Between the aims of the post-totalitarian system and the aims of life there is a yawning abyss: while life, in its essence, moves toward plurality, diversity, independent self-constitution, and self organization, in short, toward the fulfillment of its own freedom, the post-totalitarian system demands conformity, uniformity, and discipline. While life ever strives to create new and improbable structures, the post-totalitarian system contrives to force life into its most probable states. The aims of the system reveal its most essential characteristic to be introversion, a movement toward being ever more completely and unreservedly itself, which means that the radius of its influence is continually widening as well. This system serves people only to the extent necessary to ensure that people will serve it. Anything beyond this, that is to say, anything which leads people to overstep their predetermined roles is regarded by the system as an attack upon itself. And in this respect it is correct: every instance of such transgression is a genuine denial of the system. It can be said, therefore, that the inner aim of the post-totalitarian system is not mere preservation of power in the hands of a ruling clique, as appears to be the case at first sight. Rather, the social phenomenon of self-preservation is subordinated to something higher, to a kind of blind automatism which drives the system. No matter what position individuals hold in the hierarchy of power, they are not considered by the system to be worth anything in themselves, but only as things intended to fuel and serve this automatism. For this reason, an individual's desire for power is admissible only in so far as its direction coincides with the direction of the automatism of the system.

Ideology, in creating a bridge of excuses between the system and the individual, spans the abyss between the aims of the system and the aims of life. It pretends that the requirements of the system derive from the requirements of life. It is a world of appearances trying to pass for reality.

The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.

Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie; it is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.

V

We have seen that the real meaning of the greengrocer's slogan has nothing to do with what the text of the slogan actually says.   Even so, this real meaning is quite clear and generally comprehensible because the code is so familiar: the greengrocer declares his loyalty (and he can do no other if his declaration is to be accepted) in the only way the regime is capable of hearing; that is, by accepting the prescribed ritual, by accepting appearances as reality, by accepting the given rules of the game. In doing so, however, he has himself become a player in the game, thus making it possible for the game to go on, for it to exist in the first place.

If ideology was originally a bridge between the system and the individual as an individual, then the moment he steps on to this bridge it becomes at the same time a bridge between the system and the individual as a component of the system. That is, if ideology originally facilitated (by acting outwardly) the constitution of power by serving as a psychological excuse, then from the moment that excuse is accepted, it constitutes power inwardly, becoming an active component of that power. It begins to function as the principal instrument of ritual communication within the system of power.

The whole power structure (and we have already discussed its physical articulation) could not exist at all if there were not a certain metaphysical order binding all its components together, interconnecting them and subordinating them to a uniform method of accountability, supplying the combined operation of all these components with rules of the game, that is, with certain regulations, limitations, and legalities. This metaphysical order is fundamental to, and standard throughout, the entire power structure; it integrates its communication system and makes possible the internal exchange and transfer of information and instructions. It is rather like a collection of traffic signals and directional signs, giving the process shape and structure. This metaphysical order guarantees the inner coherence of the totalitarian power structure. It is the glue holding it together, its binding principle, the instrument of its discipline. Without this glue the structure as a totalitarian structure would vanish; it would disintegrate into individual atoms chaotically colliding with one another in their unregulated particular interests and inclinations. The entire pyramid of totalitarian power, deprived of the element that binds it together, would collapse in upon itself, as it were, in a kind of material implosion.

As the interpretation of reality by the power structure, ideology is always subordinated ultimately to the interests of the structure. Therefore, it has a natural tendency to disengage itself from reality, to create a world of appearances, to become ritual. In societies where there is public competition for power and therefore public control of that power, there also exists quite naturally public control of the way that power legitimates itself ideologically. Consequently, in such conditions there are always certain correctives that effectively prevent ideology from abandoning reality altogether. Under totalitarianism, however, these correctives disappear, and thus there is nothing to prevent ideology from becoming more and more removed from reality, gradually turning into what it has already become in the post-totalitarian system: a world of appearances, a mere ritual, a formalized language deprived of semantic contact with reality and transformed into a system of ritual signs that replace reality with pseudo-reality.

Yet, as we have seen, ideology becomes at the same time an increasingly important component of power, a pillar providing it with both excusatory legitimacy and an inner coherence. As this aspect grows in importance, and as it gradually loses touch with reality, it acquires a peculiar but very real strength. It becomes reality itself, albeit a reality altogether self-contained, one that on certain levels (chiefly inside the power structure) may have even greater weight than reality as such. Increasingly, the virtuosity of the ritual becomes more important than the reality hidden behind it. The significance of phenomena no longer derives from the phenomena themselves, but from their locus as concepts in the ideological context. Reality does not shape theory, but rather the reverse. Thus power gradually draws closer to ideology than it does to reality; it draws its strength from theory and becomes entirely dependent on it. This inevitably leads, of course, to a paradoxical result: rather than theory, or rather ideology, serving power, power begins to serve ideology. It is as though ideology had appropriated power from power, as though it had become dictator itself. It then appears that theory itself, ritual itself, ideology itself, makes decisions that affect people, and not the other way around.

If ideology is the principal guarantee of the inner consistency of power, it becomes at the same time an increasingly important guarantee of its continuity. Whereas succession to power in classical dictatorship is always a rather complicated affair (the pretenders having nothing to give their claims reasonable legitimacy, thereby forcing them always to resort to confrontations of naked power), in the post-totalitarian system power is passed on from person to person, from clique to clique, and from generation to generation in an essentially more regular fashion. In the selection of pretenders, a new "king-maker" takes part: it is ritual legitimization, the ability to rely on ritual, to fulfill it and use it, to allow oneself, as it were, to be borne aloft by it. Naturally, power struggles exist in the post-totalitarian system as well, and most of them are far more brutal than in an open society, for the struggle is not open, regulated by democratic rules, and subject to public control, but hidden behind the scenes. (It is difficult to recall a single instance in which the First Secretary of a ruling Communist Party has been replaced without the various military and security forces being placed at least on alert.) This struggle, however, can never (as it can in classical dictatorships) threaten the very essence of the system and its continuity. At most it will shake up the power structure, which will recover quickly precisely because the binding substance - ideology - remains undisturbed. No matter who is replaced by whom, succession is only possible against the backdrop and within the framework of a common ritual. It can never take place by denying that ritual.

Because of this dictatorship of the ritual, however, power becomes clearly anonymous. Individuals are almost dissolved in the ritual. They allow themselves to be swept along by it and frequently it seems as though ritual alone carries people from obscurity into the light of power. Is it not characteristic of the post-totalitarian system that, on all levels of the power hierarchy, individuals are increasingly being pushed aside by faceless people, puppets, those uniformed flunkeys of the rituals and routines of power?

The automatic operation of a power structure thus dehumanized and made anonymous is a feature of the fundamental automatism of this system. It would seem that it is precisely the diktats of this automatism which select people lacking individual will for the power structure, that it is precisely the diktat of the empty phrase which summons to power people who use empty phrases as the best guarantee that the automatism of the post-totalitarian system will continue.

Western Sovietologists often exaggerate the role of individuals in the post-totalitarian system and overlook the fact that the ruling figures, despite the immense power they possess through the centralized structure of power, are often no more than blind executors of the system's own internal laws - laws they themselves never can, and never do, reflect upon. In any case, experience has taught us again and again that this automatism is far more powerful than the will of any individual; and should someone possess a more independent will, he must conceal it behind a ritually anonymous mask in order to have an opportunity to enter the power hierarchy at all. And when the individual finally gains a place there and tries to make his will felt within it, that automatism, with its enormous inertia, will triumph sooner or later, and either the individual will be ejected by the power structure like a foreign organism, or he will be compelled to resign his individuality gradually, once again blending with the automatism and becoming its servant, almost indistinguishable from those who preceded him and those who will follow. (Let us recall, for instance, the development of Husák or Gomukka.) The necessity of continually hiding behind and relating to ritual means that even the more enlightened members of the power structure are often obsessed with ideology. They are never able to plunge straight to the bottom of naked reality, and they always confuse it, in the final analysis, with ideological pseudo-reality. (In my opinion, one of the reasons the Dubček leadership lost control of the situation in 1968 was precisely because, in extreme situations and in final questions, its members were never capable of extricating themselves completely from the world of appearances.)

It can be said, therefore, that ideology, as that instrument of internal communication which assures the power structure of inner cohesion is, in the post-totalitarian system, something that transcends the physical aspects of power, something that dominates it to a considerable degree and, therefore, tends to assure its continuity as well. It is one of the pillars of the system's external stability. This pillar, however, is built on a very unstable foundation. It is built on lies. It works only as long as people are willing to live within the lie.

VI

Why in fact did our greengrocer have to put his loyalty on display in the shop window? Had he not already displayed it sufficiently in various internal or semi-public ways? At trade union meetings, after all, he had always voted as he should. He had always taken part in various competitions. He voted in elections like a good citizen. He had even signed the "anti-Charter." Why, on top of all that, should he have to declare his loyalty publicly? After all, the people who walk past his window will certainly not stop to read that, in the greengrocer's opinion, the workers of the world ought to unite. The fact of the matter is, they don't read the slogan at all, and it can be fairly assumed they don't even see it. If you were to ask a woman who had stopped in front of his shop what she saw in the window, she could certainly tell whether or not they had tomatoes today, but it is highly unlikely that she noticed the slogan at all, let alone what it said.

It seems senseless to require the greengrocer to declare his loyalty publicly. But it makes sense nevertheless. People ignore his slogan, but they do so because such slogans are also found in other shop windows, on lampposts, bulletin boards, in apartment windows, and on buildings; they are everywhere, in fact. They form part of the panorama of everyday life. Of course, while they ignore the details, people are very aware of that panorama as a whole. And what else is the greengrocer's slogan but a small component in that huge backdrop to daily life?

The greengrocer had to put the slogan in his window, therefore, not in the hope that someone might read it or be persuaded by it, but to contribute, along with thousands of other slogans, to the panorama that everyone is very much aware of. This panorama, of course, has a subliminal meaning as well: it reminds people where they are living and what is expected of them. It tells them what everyone else is doing, and indicates to them what they must do as well, if they don't want to be excluded, to fall into isolation, alienate themselves from society, break the rules of the game, and risk the loss of their peace and tranquility and security.

The woman who ignored the greengrocer's slogan may well have hung a similar slogan just an hour before in the corridor of the office where she works. She did it more or less without thinking, just as our greengrocer did, and she could do so precisely because she was doing it against the background of the general panorama and with some awareness of it, that is, against the background of the panorama of which the greengrocer's shop window forms a part. When the greengrocer visits her office, he will not notice her slogan either, just as she failed to notice his. Nevertheless, their slogans are mutually dependent: both were displayed with some awareness of the general panorama and, we might say, under its diktat. Both, however, assist in the creation of that panorama, and therefore they assist in the creation of that diktat as well. The greengrocer and the office worker have both adapted to the conditions in which they live, but in doing so, they help to create those conditions. They do what is done, what is to be done, what must be done, but at the same time - by that very token - they confirm that it must be done in fact. They conform to a particular requirement and in so doing they themselves perpetuate that requirement. Metaphysically speaking, without the greengrocer's slogan the office worker's slogan could not exist, and vice versa. Each proposes to the other that something be repeated and each accepts the other's proposal. Their mutual indifference to each other's slogans is only an illusion: in reality, by exhibiting their slogans, each compels the other to accept the rules of the game and to confirm thereby the power that requires the slogans in the first place. Quite simply, each helps the other to be obedient. Both are objects in a system of control, but at the same time they are its subjects as well. They are both victims of the system and its instruments.

If an entire district town is plastered with slogans that no one reads, it is on the one hand a message from the district secretary to the regional secretary, but it is also something more: a small example of the principle of social auto-totality at work. Part of the essence of the post-totalitarian system is that it draws everyone into its sphere of power, not so they may realize themselves as human beings, but so they may surrender their human identity in favor of the identity of the system, that is, so they may become agents of the system's general automatism and servants of its self-determined goals, so they may participate in the common responsibility for it, so they may be pulled into and ensnared by it, like Faust by Mephistopheles. More than this: so they may create through their involvement a general norm and, thus, bring pressure to bear on their fellow citizens. And further: so they may learn to be comfortable with their involvement, to identify with it as though it were something natural and inevitable and, ultimately, so they may - with no external urging - come to treat any non-involvement as an abnormality, as arrogance, as an attack on themselves, as a form of dropping out of society. By pulling everyone into its power structure, the post-totalitarian system makes everyone an instrument of a mutual totality, the auto-totality of society.

Everyone, however, is in fact involved and enslaved, not only the greengrocers but also the prime ministers. Differing positions in the hierarchy merely establish differing degrees of involvement: the greengrocer is involved only to a minor extent, but he also has very little power. The prime minister, naturally, has greater power, but in return he is far more deeply involved. Both, however, are unfree, each merely in a somewhat different way. The real accomplice in this involvement, therefore, is not another person, but the system itself.

Position in the power hierarchy determines the degree of responsibility and guilt, but it gives no one unlimited responsibility and guilt, nor does it completely absolve anyone. Thus the conflict between the aims of life and the aims of the system is not a conflict between two socially defined and separate communities; and only a very generalized view (and even that only approximate) permits us to divide society into the rulers and the ruled. Here, by the way, is one of the most important differences between the post-totalitarian system and classical dictatorships, in which this line of conflict can still be drawn according to social class. In the post-totalitarian system, this line runs de facto through each person, for everyone in his own way is both a victim and a supporter of the system. What we understand by the system is not, therefore, a social order imposed by one group upon another, but rather something which permeates the entire society and is a factor in shaping it, something which may seem impossible to grasp or define (for it is in the nature of a mere principle), but which is expressed by the entire society as an important feature of its life.

The fact that human beings have created, and daily create, this self-directed system through which they divest themselves of their innermost identity is not therefore the result of some incomprehensible misunderstanding of history, nor is it history somehow gone off its rails. Neither is it the product of some diabolical higher will which has decided, for reasons unknown, to torment a portion of humanity in this way. It can happen and did happen only because there is obviously in modern humanity a certain tendency toward the creation, or at least the toleration, of such a system. There is obviously something in human beings which responds to this system, something they reflect and accommodate, something within them which paralyzes every effort of their better selves to revolt. Human beings are compelled to live within a lie, but they can be compelled to do so only because they are in fact capable of living in this way. Therefore not only does the system alienate humanity, but at the same time alienated humanity supports this system as its own involuntary master plan, as a degenerate image of its own degeneration, as a record of people's own failure as individuals.

The essential aims of life are present naturally in every person. In everyone there is some longing for humanity's rightful dignity, for moral integrity, for free expression of being and a sense of transcendence over the world of existence. Yet, at the same time, each person is capable, to a greater or lesser degree, of coming to terms with living within the lie. Each person somehow succumbs to a profane trivialization of his inherent humanity, and to utilitarianism. In everyone there is some willingness to merge with the anonymous crowd and to flow comfortably along with it down the river of pseudo-life. This is much more than a simple conflict between two identities. It is something far worse: it is a challenge to the very notion of identity itself.

In highly simplified terms, it could be said that the post-totalitarian system has been built on foundations laid by the historical encounter between dictatorship and the consumer society. Is it not true that the far-reaching adaptability to living a lie and the effortless spread of social auto-totality have some connection with the general unwillingness of consumption-oriented people to sacrifice some material certainties for the sake of their own spiritual and moral integrity? With their willingness to surrender higher values when faced with the trivializing temptations of modern civilization? With their vulnerability to the attractions of mass indifference? And in the end, is not the grayness and the emptiness of life in the post-totalitarian system only an inflated caricature of modern life in general? And do we not in fact stand (although in the external measures of civilization, we are far behind) as a kind of warning to the West, revealing to its own latent tendencies?

VII

Let us now imagine that one day something in our greengrocer snaps and he stops putting up the slogans merely to ingratiate himself. He stops voting in elections he knows are a farce. He begins to say what he really thinks at political meetings. And he even finds the strength in himself to express solidarity with those whom his conscience commands him to support. In this revolt the greengrocer steps out of living within the lie. He rejects the ritual and breaks the rules of the game. He discovers once more his suppressed identity and dignity. He gives his freedom a concrete significance. His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth.

The bill is not long in coming. He will be relieved of his post as manager of the shop and transferred to the warehouse. His pay will be reduced. His hopes for a holiday in Bulgaria will evaporate. His children's access to higher education will be threatened. His superiors will harass him and his fellow workers will wonder about him. Most of those who apply these sanctions, however, will not do so from any authentic inner conviction but simply under pressure from conditions, the same conditions that once pressured the greengrocer to display the official slogans. They will persecute the greengrocer either because it is expected of them, or to demonstrate their loyalty, or simply as part of the general panorama, to which belongs an awareness that this is how situations of this sort are dealt with, that this, in fact, is how things are always done, particularly if one is not to become suspect oneself. The executors, therefore, behave essentially like everyone else, to a greater or lesser degree: as components of the post- totalitarian system, as agents of its automatism, as petty instruments of the social auto-totality. Thus the power structure, through the agency of those who carry out the sanctions, those anonymous components of the system, will spew the greengrocer from its mouth. The system, through its alienating presence in people, will punish him for his rebellion. It must do so because the logic of its automatism and self-defense dictate it. The greengrocer has not committed a simple, individual offense, isolated in its own uniqueness, but something incomparably more serious. By breaking the rules of the game, he has disrupted the game as such. He has exposed it as a mere game. He has shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system. He has upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together. He has demonstrated that living a lie is living a lie. He has broken through the exalted facade of the system and exposed the real, base foundations of power. He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, the greengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth. Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate everything. There are no terms whatsoever on which it can co-exist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety.

This is understandable: as long as appearance is not confronted with reality, it does not seem to be appearance. As long as living a lie is not confronted with living the truth, the perspective needed to expose its mendacity is lacking. As soon as the alternative appears, however, it threatens the very existence of appearance and living a lie in terms of what they are, both their essence and their all-inclusiveness. And at the same time, it is utterly unimportant how large a space this alternative occupies: its power does not consist in its physical attributes but in the light it casts on those pillars of the system and on its unstable foundations. After all, the greengrocer was a threat to the system not because of any physical or actual power he had, but because his action went beyond itself, because it illuminated its surroundings and, of course, because of the incalculable consequences of that illumination. In the post-totalitarian system, therefore, living within the truth has more than a mere existential dimension (returning humanity to its inherent nature), or a noetic dimension (revealing reality as it is), or a moral dimension (setting an example for others). It also has an unambiguous political dimension. If the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living the truth. This is why it must be suppressed more severely than anything else.

In the post-totalitarian system, truth in the widest sense of the word has a very special import, one unknown in other contexts. In this system, truth plays a far greater (and, above all, a far different) role as a factor of power, or as an outright political force. How does the power of truth operate? How does truth as a factor of power work? How can its power - as power - be realized?

VIII

Individuals can be alienated from themselves only because there is something in them to alienate. The terrain of this violation is their authentic existence. Living the truth is thus woven directly into the texture of living a lie. It is the repressed alternative, the authentic aim to which living a lie is an inauthentic response. Only against this background does living a lie make any sense: it exists because of that background. In its excusatory, chimerical rootedness in the human order, it is a response to nothing other than the human predisposition to truth. Under the orderly surface of the life of lies, therefore, there slumbers the hidden sphere of life in its real aims, of its hidden openness to truth.

The singular, explosive, incalculable political power of living within the truth resides in the fact that living openly within the truth has an ally, invisible to be sure, but omnipresent: this hidden sphere. It is from this sphere that life lived openly in the truth grows; it is to this sphere that it speaks, and in it that it finds understanding. This is where the potential for communication exists. But this place is hidden and therefore, from the perspective of power, very dangerous. The complex ferment that takes place within it goes on in semi-darkness, and by the time it finally surfaces into the light of day as an assortment of shocking surprises to the system, it is usually too late to cover them up in the usual fashion. Thus they create a situation in which the regime is confounded, invariably causing panic and driving it to react in inappropriate ways.

It seems that the primary breeding ground for what might, in the widest possible sense of the word, be understood as an opposition in the post-totalitarian system is living within the truth. The confrontation between these opposition forces and the powers that be, of course, will obviously take a form essentially different from that typical of an open society or a classical dictatorship. Initially, this confrontation does not take place on the level of real, institutionalized, quantifiable power which relies on the various instruments of power, but on a different level altogether: the level of human consciousness and conscience, the existential level. The effective range of this special power cannot be measured in terms of disciples, voters, or soldiers, because it lies spread out in the fifth column of social consciousness, in the hidden aims of life, in human beings' repressed longing for dignity and fundamental rights, for the realization of their real social and political interests. Its power, therefore, does not reside in the strength of definable political or social groups, but chiefly in the strength of a potential, which is hidden throughout the whole of society, including the official power structures of that society. Therefore this power does not rely on soldiers of its own, but on the soldiers of the enemy as it were - that is to say, on everyone who is living within the lie and who may be struck at any moment (in theory, at least) by the force of truth (or who, out of an instinctive desire to protect their position, may at least adapt to that force). It is a bacteriological weapon, so to speak, utilized when conditions are ripe by a single civilian to disarm an entire division. This power does not participate in any direct struggle for power; rather, it makes its influence felt in the obscure arena of being itself. The hidden movements it gives rise to there, however, can issue forth (when, where, under what circumstances, and to what extent are difficult to predict) in something visible: a real political act or event, a social movement, a sudden explosion of civil unrest, a sharp conflict inside an apparently monolithic power structure, or simply an irrepressible transformation in the social and intellectual climate. And since all genuine problems and matters of critical importance are hidden beneath a thick crust of lies, it is never quite clear when the proverbial last straw will fall, or what that straw will be. This, too, is why the regime prosecutes, almost as a reflex action preventively, even the most modest attempts to live within the truth.

Why was Solzhenitsyn driven out of his own country? Certainly not because he represented a unit of real power, that is, not because any of the regime's representatives felt he might unseat them and take their place in government.   Solzhenitsyn's expulsion was something else: a desperate attempt to plug up the dreadful wellspring of truth, a truth which might cause incalculable transformations in social consciousness, which in turn might one day produce political debacles unpredictable in their consequences. And so the post-totalitarian system behaved in a characteristic way: it defended the integrity of the world of appearances in order to defend itself. For the crust presented by the life of lies is made of strange stuff. As long as it seals off hermetically the entire society, it appears to be made of stone. But the moment someone breaks through in one place, when one person cries out, "The emperor is naked!" - when a single person breaks the rules of the game, thus exposing it as a game - everything suddenly appears in another light and the whole crust seems then to be made of a tissue on the point of tearing and disintegrating uncontrollably.

When I speak of living within the truth, I naturally do not have in mind only products of conceptual thought, such as a protest or a letter written by a group of intellectuals. It can be any means by which a person or a group revolts against manipulation: anything from a letter by intellectuals to a workers' strike, from a rock concert to a student demonstration, from refusing to vote in the farcical elections to making an open speech at some official congress, or even a hunger strike, for instance. If the suppression of the aims of life is a complex process, and if it is based on the multifaceted manipulation of all expressions of life, then, by the same token, every free expression of life indirectly threatens the post-totalitarian system politically, including forms of expression to which, in other social systems, no one would attribute any potential political significance, not to mention explosive power.

The Prague Spring is usually understood as a clash between two groups on the level of real power: those who wanted to maintain the system as it was and those who wanted to reform it. It is frequently forgotten, however, that this encounter was merely the final act and the inevitable consequence of a long drama originally played out chiefly in the theatre of the spirit and the conscience of society. And that somewhere at the beginning of this drama, there were individuals who were willing to live within the truth, even when things were at their worst. These people had no access to real power, nor did they aspire to it. The sphere in which they were living the truth was not necessarily even that of political thought. They could equally have been poets, painters, musicians, or simply ordinary citizens who were able to maintain their human dignity. Today it is naturally difficult to pinpoint when and through which hidden, winding channel a certain action or attitude influenced a given milieu, and to trace the virus of truth as it slowly spread through the tissue of the life of lies, gradually causing it to disintegrate. One thing, however, seems clear: the attempt at political reform was not the cause of' society's reawakening, but rather the final outcome of that reawakening.

I think the present also can be better understood in the light of this experience. The confrontation between a thousand Chartists and the post-totalitarian system would appear to be politically hopeless. This is true, of course, if we look at it through the traditional lens of the open political system, in which, quite naturally, every political force is measured chiefly in terms of the positions it holds on the level of real power. Given that perspective, a mini-party like the Charter would certainly not stand a chance. If, however, this confrontation is seen against the background of what we know about power in the post-totalitarian system, it appears in a fundamentally different light. For the time being, it is impossible to say with any precision what impact the appearance of Charter 77, its existence, and its work has had in the hidden sphere, and how the Charter's attempt to rekindle civic self-awareness and confidence is regarded there. Whether, when, and how this investment will eventually produce dividends in the form of specific political changes is even less possible to predict. But that, of course, is all part of living within the truth. As an existential solution, it takes individuals back to the solid ground of their own identity; as politics, it throws them into a game of chance where the stakes are all or nothing. For this reason it is undertaken only by those for whom the former is worth risking the latter, or who have come to the conclusion that there is no other way to conduct real politics in Czechoslovakia today. Which, by the way, is the same thing: this conclusion can be reached only by someone who is unwilling to sacrifice his own human identity to politics, or rather, who does not believe in a politics that requires such a sacrifice.

The more thoroughly the post-totalitarian system frustrates any rival alternative on the level of real power, as well as any form of politics independent of the laws of its own automatism, the more definitively the center of gravity of any potential political threat shifts to the area of the existential and the pre-political: usually without any conscious effort, living within the truth becomes the one natural point of departure for all activities that work against the automatism of the system. And even if such activities ultimately grow beyond the area of living within the truth (which means they are transformed into various parallel structures, movements, institutions, they begin to be regarded as political activity, they bring real pressure to bear on the official structures and begin in fact to have a certain influence on the level of real power), they always carry with them the specific hallmark of their origins. Therefore it seems to me that not even the so-called dissident movements can be properly understood without constantly bearing in mind this special background from which they emerge.

IX

The profound crisis of human identity brought on by living within a lie, a crisis which in turn makes such a life possible, certainly possesses a moral dimension as well; it appears, among other things, as a deep moral crisis in society. A person who has been seduced by the consumer value system, whose identity is dissolved in an amalgam of the accouterments of mass civilization, and who has no roots in the order of being, no sense of responsibility for anything higher than his own personal survival, is a demoralized person.   The system depends on this demoralization, deepens it, is in fact a projection of it into society.

Living within the truth, as humanity's revolt against an enforced position, is, on the contrary, an attempt to regain control over one's own sense of responsibility. In other words, it is clearly a moral act, not only because one must pay so dearly for it, but principally because it is not self- serving: the risk may bring rewards in the form of a general amelioration in the situation, or it may not. In this regard, as I stated previously, it is an all-or-nothing gamble, and it is difficult to imagine a reasonable person embarking on such a course merely because he reckons that sacrifice today will bring rewards tomorrow, be it only in the form of general gratitude. (By the way, the representatives of power invariably come to terms with those who live within the truth by persistently ascribing utilitarian motivations to them - a lust for power or fame or wealth - and thus they try, at least, to implicate them in their own world, the world of general demoralization.) If living within the truth in the post-totalitarian system becomes the chief breeding ground for independent, alternative political ideas, then all considerations about the nature and future prospects of these ideas must necessarily reflect this moral dimension as a political phenomenon. (And if the revolutionary Marxist belief about morality as a product of the "superstructure" inhibits any of our friends from realizing the full significance of this dimension and, in one way or another, from including it in their view of the world, it is to their own detriment: an anxious fidelity to the postulates of that world view prevents them from properly understanding the mechanisms of their own political influence, thus paradoxically making them precisely what they, as Marxists, so often suspect others of being - victims of "false consciousness.") The very special political significance of morality in the post-totalitarian system is a phenomenon that is at the very least unusual in modern political history, a phenomenon that might well have - as I shall soon attempt to show - far-reaching consequences.

X

Undeniably, the most important political event in Czechoslovakia after the advent of the Husák leadership in 1969 was the appearance of Charter 77. The spiritual and intellectual climate surrounding its appearance, however, was not the product of any immediate political event. That climate was created by the trial of some young musicians associated with a rock group called "The Plastic People of the Universe." Their trial was not a confrontation of two differing political forces or conceptions, but two differing conceptions of life. On the one hand, there was the sterile puritanism of the post-totalitarian establishment and, on the other hand, unknown young people who wanted no more than to be able to live within the truth, to play the music they enjoyed, to sing songs that were relevant to their lives, and to live freely in dignity and partnership. These people had no past history of political activity. They were not highly motivated members of the opposition with political ambitions, nor were they former politicians expelled from the power structures. They had been given every opportunity to adapt to the status quo, to accept the principles of living within a lie and thus to enjoy life undisturbed by the authorities. Yet they decided on a different course. Despite this, or perhaps precisely because of it, their case had a very special impact on everyone who had not yet given up hope. Moreover, when the trial took place, a new mood had begun to surface after the years of waiting, of apathy and of skepticism toward various forms of resistance. People were "tired of being tired"; they were fed up with the stagnation, the inactivity, barely hanging on in the hope that things might improve after all. In some ways the trial was the final straw. Many groups of differing tendencies which until then had remained isolated from each other, reluctant to cooperate, or which were committed to forms of action that made cooperation difficult, were suddenly struck with the powerful realization that freedom is indivisible. Everyone understood that an attack on the Czech musical underground was an attack on a most elementary and important thing, something that in fact bound everyone together: it was an attack on the very notion of living within the truth, on the real aims of life. The freedom to play rock music was understood as a human freedom and thus as essentially the same as the freedom to engage in philosophical and political reflection, the freedom to write, the freedom to express and defend the various social and political interests of society. People were inspired to feel a genuine sense of solidarity with the young musicians and they came to realize that not standing up for the freedom of others, regardless of how remote their means of creativity or their attitude to life, meant surrendering one's own freedom. (There is no freedom without equality before the law, and there is no equality before the law without freedom; Charter 77 has given this ancient notion a new and characteristic dimension, which has immensely important implications for modern Czech history. What Sládeček, the author of the book Sixty-eight, in a brilliant analysis, calls the "principle of exclusion," lies at the root of all our present-day moral and political misery. This principle was born at the end of the Second World War in that strange collusion of democrats and communists and was subsequently developed further and further, right to the bitter end. For the first time in decades this principle has been overcome, by Charter 77: all those united in the Charter have, for the first time, become equal partners. Charter 77 is not merely a coalition of communists and non-communists - that would be nothing historically new and, from the moral and political point of view, nothing revolutionary - but it is a community that is a priori open to anyone, and no one in it is a priori assigned an inferior position.) This was the climate, then, in which Charter 77 was created. Who could have foreseen that the prosecution of one or two obscure rock groups would have such far-reaching consequences?

I think that the origins of Charter 77 illustrate very well what I have already suggested above: that in the post-totalitarian system, the real background to the movements that gradually assume political significance does not usually consist of overtly political events or confrontations between different forces or concepts that are openly political. These movements for the most part originate elsewhere, in the far broader area of the "pre-political," where living within a lie confronts living within the truth, that is, where the demands of the post-totalitarian system conflict with the real aims of life. These real aims can naturally assume a great many forms. Sometimes they appear as the basic material or social interests of a group or an individual; at other times, they may appear as certain intellectual and spiritual interests; at still other times, they may be the most fundamental of existential demands, such as the simple longing of people to live their own lives in dignity. Such a conflict acquires a political character, then, not because of the elementary political nature of the aims demanding to be heard but simply because, given the complex system of manipulation on which the post-totalitarian system is founded and on which it is also dependent, every free human act or expression, every attempt to live within the truth, must necessarily appear as a threat to the system and, thus, as something which is political par excellence. Any eventual political articulation of the movements that grow out of this "pre-political" hinterland is secondary. It develops and matures as a result of a subsequent confrontation with the system, and not because it started off as a political program, project, or impulse.

Once again, the events of 1968 confirm this. The communist politicians who were trying to reform the system came forward with their program not because they had suddenly experienced a mystical enlightenment, but because they were led to do so by continued and increasing pressure from areas of life that had nothing to do with politics in the traditional sense of the word. In fact, they were trying in political ways to solve the social conflicts (which in fact were confrontations between the aims of the system and the aims of life) that almost every level of society had been experiencing daily, and had been thinking about with increasing openness for years. Backed by this living resonance throughout society, scholars and artists had defined the problem in a wide variety of ways and students were demanding solutions.

The genesis of Charter 77 also illustrates the special political significance of the moral aspect of things that I have mentioned. Charter 77 would have been unimaginable without that powerful sense of solidarity among widely differing groups, and without the sudden realization that it was impossible to go on waiting any longer, and that the truth had to be spoken loudly and collectively, regardless of the virtual certainty of sanctions and the uncertainty of any tangible results in the immediate future. "There are some things worth suffering for," Jan Patočka wrote shortly before his death. I think that Chartists understand this not only as Patočka's legacy, but also as the best explanation of why they do what they do.

Seen from the outside, and chiefly from the vantage point of the system and its power structure, Charter 77 came as a surprise, as a bolt out of the blue. It was not a bolt out of the blue, of course, but that impression is understandable, since the ferment that led to it took place in the "hidden sphere," in that semi-darkness where things are difficult to chart or analyze. The chances of predicting the appearance of the Charter were just as slight as the chances are now of predicting where it will lead. Once again, it was that shock, so typical of moments when something from the hidden sphere suddenly bursts through the moribund surface of living within a lie. The more one is trapped in the world of appearances, the more surprising it is when something like that happens.

XI

In societies under the post-totalitarian system, all political life in the traditional sense has been eliminated. People have no opportunity to express themselves politically in public, let alone to organize politically. The gap that results is filled by ideological ritual. In such a situation, people’s interest in political matters naturally dwindles and independent political thought, insofar as it exists at all, is seen by the majority as unrealistic, farfetched, a kind of self-indulgent game, hopelessly distant from their everyday concerns; something admirable, perhaps, but quite pointless, because it is on the one hand entirely utopian and on the other hand extraordinarily dangerous, in view of the unusual vigor with which any move in that direction is persecuted by the regime.

Yet even in such societies, individuals and groups of people exist who do not abandon politics as a vocation and who, in one way or another, strive to think independently, to express themselves and in some cases even to organize politically, because that is a part of their attempt to live within the truth.

The fact that these people exist and work is in itself immensely important and worthwhile. Even in the worst of times, they maintain the continuity of political thought. If some genuine political impulse emerges from this or that "pre-political" confrontation and is properly articulated early enough, thus increasing its chances of relative success, then this is frequently due to these isolated generals without an army who, because they have maintained the continuity of political thought in the face of enormous difficulties, can at the right moment enrich the new impulse with the fruits of their own political thinking. Once again, there is ample evidence for this process in Czechoslovakia. Almost all those who were political prisoners in the early 1970s, who had apparently been made to suffer in vain because of their quixotic efforts to work politically among an utterly apathetic and demoralized society, belong today – inevitably - among the most active Chartists. In Charter 77, the moral legacy of their earlier sacrifices is valued, and they have enriched this movement with their experience and that element of political thinking.

And yet it seems to me that the thought and activity of those friends who have never given up direct political work and who are always ready to assume direct political responsibility very often suffer from one chronic fault: an insufficient understanding of the historical uniqueness of the post-totalitarian system as a social and political reality. They have little understanding of the specific nature of power that is typical for this system and therefore they overestimate the importance of direct political work in the traditional sense. Moreover, they fail to appreciate the political significance of those "pre-political" events and processes that provide the living humus from which genuine political change usually springs. As political actors - or, rather, as people with political ambitions - they frequently try to pick up where natural political life left off. They maintain models of behavior that may have been appropriate in more normal political circumstances and thus, without really being aware of it, they bring an outmoded way of thinking, old habits, conceptions, categories, and notions to bear on circumstances that are quite new and radically different, without first giving adequate thought to the meaning and substance of such things in the new circumstances, to what politics as such means now, to what sort of thing can have political impact and potential, and in what way. Because such people have been excluded from the structures of power and are no longer able to influence those structures directly (and because they remain faithful to traditional notions of politics established in more or less democratic societies or in classical dictatorships) they frequently, in a sense, lose touch with reality. Why make compromises with reality, they say, when none of our proposals will ever be accepted anyway? Thus they find themselves in a world of genuinely utopian thinking.

As I have already tried to indicate, however, genuinely far-reaching political events do not emerge from the same sources and in the same way in the post-totalitarian system as they do in a democracy. And if a large portion of the public is indifferent to, even skeptical of, alternative political models and programs and the private establishment of opposition political parties, this is not merely because there is a general feeling of apathy toward public affairs and a loss of that sense of higher responsibility; in other words, it is not just a consequence of the general demoralization. There is also a bit of healthy social instinct at work in this attitude. It is as if people sensed intuitively that "nothing is what it seems any longer," as the saying goes, and that from now on, therefore, things must be done entirely differently as well.

If some of the most important political impulses in Soviet bloc countries in recent years have come initially - that is, before being felt on the level of actual power - from mathematicians, philosophers, physicians, writers, historians, ordinary workers, and so on, more frequently than from politicians, and if the driving force behind the various dissident movements comes from so many people in nonpolitical professions, this is not because these people are more clever than those who see themselves primarily as politicians. It is because those who are not politicians are also not so bound by traditional political thinking and political habits and therefore, paradoxically, they are more aware of genuine political reality and more sensitive to what can and should be done under the circumstances.

There is no way around it: no matter how beautiful an alternative political model can be, it can no longer speak to the "hidden sphere," inspire people and society, call for real political ferment. The real sphere of potential politics in the post-totalitarian system is elsewhere: in the continuing and cruel tension between the complex demands of that system and the aims of life, that is, the elementary need of human beings to live, to a certain extent at least, in harmony with themselves, that is, to live in a bearable way, not to be humiliated by their superiors and officials, not to be continually watched by the police, to be able to express themselves freely, to find an outlet for their creativity, to enjoy legal security, and so on. Anything that touches this field concretely, anything that relates to this fundamental, omnipresent, and living tension, will inevitably speak to people.   Abstract projects for an ideal political or economic order do not interest them to anything like the same extent - and rightly so - not only because everyone knows how little chance they have of succeeding, but also because today people feel that the less political policies are derived from a concrete and human here and now and the more they fix their sights on an abstract "someday," the more easily they can degenerate into new forms of human enslavement. People who live in the post-totalitarian system know only too well that the question of whether one or several political parties are in power, and how these parties define and label themselves, is of far less importance than the question of whether or not it is possible to live like a human being.

To shed the burden of traditional political categories and habits and open oneself up fully to the world of human existence and then to draw political conclusions only after having analyzed it: this is not only politically more realistic but at the same time, from the point of view of an "ideal state of affairs," politically more promising as well. A genuine, profound, and lasting change for the better - as I shall attempt to show - can no longer result from the victory (were such a victory possible) of any particular traditional political conception, which can ultimately be only external, that is, a structural or systemic conception. More than ever before, such a change will have to derive from human existence, from the fundamental reconstitution of the position of people in the world, their relationships to themselves and to each other, and to the universe. If a better economic and political model is to be created, then perhaps more than ever before it must derive from profound existential and moral changes in society. This is not something that can be designed and introduced like a new car. If it is to be more than just a new variation of the old degeneration, it must above all be an expression of life in the process of transforming itself. A better system will not automatically ensure a better life. In fact, the opposite is true: only by creating a better life can a better system be developed.

Once more I repeat that I am not underestimating the importance of political thought and conceptual political work. On the contrary, I think that genuine political thought and genuinely political work is precisely what we continually fail to achieve. If I say "genuine," however, I have in mind the kind of thought and conceptual work that has freed itself of all the traditional political schemata that have been imported into our circumstances from a world that will never return (and whose return, even were it possible, would provide no permanent solution to the most important problems).

The Second and Fourth Internationals, like many other political powers and organizations, may naturally provide significant political support for various efforts of ours, but neither of them can solve our problems for us. They operate in a different world and are a product of different circumstances. Their theoretical concepts can be interesting and instructive to us, but one thing is certain: we cannot solve our problems simply by identifying with these organizations. And the attempt in our country to place what we do in the context of some of the discussions that dominate political life in democratic societies often seems like sheer folly. For example, is it possible to talk seriously about whether we want to change the system or merely reform it? In the circumstances under which we live, this is a pseudo-problem, since for the time being there is simply no way we can accomplish either goal. We are not even clear about where reform ends and change begins. We know from a number of harsh experiences that neither reform nor change is in itself a guarantee of anything. We know that ultimately it is all the same to us whether or not the system in which we live, in the light of a particular doctrine, appears changed or reformed. Our concern is whether we can live with dignity in such a system, whether it serves people rather than people serving it. We are struggling to achieve this with the means available to us, and the means it makes sense to employ. Western journalists, submerged in the political banalities in which they live, may label our approach as overly legalistic, as too risky, revisionist, counterrevolutionary, bourgeois, communist, or as too right-wing or left-wing. But this is the very last thing that interests us.

XII

One concept that is a constant source of confusion chiefly because it has been imported into our circumstances from circumstances that are entirely different is the concept of an opposition. What exactly is an opposition in the post-totalitarian system?

In democratic societies with a traditional parliamentary system of government, political opposition is understood as a political force on the level of actual power (most frequently a party or coalition of parties) which is not a part of the government. It offers an alternative political program, it has ambitions to govern, and it is recognized and respected by the government in power as a natural element in the political life of the country. It seeks to spread its influence by political means, and competes for power on the basis of agreed-upon legal regulations.

In addition to this form of opposition, there exists the phenomenon of the "extra-parliamentary opposition," which again consists of forces organized more or less on the level of actual power, but which operate outside the rules created by the system, and which employ different means than are usual within that framework.

In classical dictatorships, the term "opposition" is understood to mean the political forces which have also come out with an alternative political program. They operate either legally or on the outer limits of legality, but in any case they cannot compete for power within the limits of some agreed-upon regulations. Or the term "opposition" may be applied to forces preparing for a violent confrontation with the ruling power, or who feel themselves to be in this state of confrontation already, such as various guerrilla groups or liberation movements.

An opposition in the post-totalitarian system does not exist in any of these senses. In what way, then, can the term be used?

1. Occasionally the term "opposition" is applied, mainly by Western journalists, to persons or groups inside the power structure who find themselves in a state of hidden conflict with the highest authorities. The reasons for this conflict may be certain differences (not very sharp differences, naturally) of a conceptual nature, but more frequently it is quite simply a longing for power or a personal antipathy to others who represent that power.

2. Opposition here can also be understood as everything that does or can have an indirect political effect in the sense already mentioned, that is, everything the post-totalitarian system feels threatened by, which in fact means everything it is threatened by. In this sense, the opposition is every attempt to live within the truth, from the greengrocer's refusal to put the slogan in his window to a freely written poem; in other words, everything in which the genuine aims of life go beyond the limits placed on them by the aims of the system.

3. More frequently, however, the opposition is usually understood (again, largely by Western journalists) as groups of people who make public their nonconformist stances and critical opinions, who make no secret of their independent thinking and who, to a greater or lesser degree, consider themselves a political force. In this sense, the notion of an opposition more or less overlaps with the notion of dissent, although, of course, there are great differences in the degree to which that label is accepted or rejected. It depends not only on the extent to which these people understand their power as a directly political force, and on whether they have ambitions to participate in actual power, but also on how each of them understands the notion of an opposition.

Again, here is an example: in its original declaration, Charter 77 emphasized that it was not an opposition because it had no intention of presenting an alternative political program. It sees its mission as something quite different, for it has not presented such programs. In fact, if the presenting of an alternative program defines the nature of an opposition in post-totalitarian states, then the Charter cannot be considered an opposition.

The Czechoslovak government, however, has considered Charter 77 as an expressly oppositional association from the very beginning, and has treated it accordingly. This means that the government - and this is only natural - understands the term "opposition" more or less as I defined it in point 2, that is, as everything that manages to avoid total manipulation and which therefore denies the principle that the system has an absolute claim on the individual.

If we accept this definition of opposition, then of course we must, along with the government, consider the Charter a genuine opposition, because it represents a serious challenge to the integrity of post-totalitarian power, founded as it is on the universality of living with a lie.

It is a different matter, however, when we look at the extent to which individual signatories of Charter 77 think of themselves as an opposition. My impression is that most base their understanding of the term "opposition" on the traditional meaning of the word as it became established in democratic societies (or in classical dictatorships); therefore, they understand opposition, even in Czechoslovakia, as a politically defined force which, although it does not operate on the level of actual power, and even less within the framework of certain rules respected by the government, would still not reject the opportunity to participate in actual power because it has, in a sense, an alternative political program whose proponents are prepared to accept direct political responsibility for it. Given this notion of an opposition, some Chartists - the great majority - do not see themselves in this way. Others - a minority - do, even though they
fully respect the fact that there is no room within Charter 77 for "oppositional" activity in this sense. At the same time, however, perhaps every Chartist is familiar enough with the specific nature of conditions in the post-totalitarian system to realize that it is not only the struggle for human rights that has its own peculiar political power, but incomparably more "innocent" activities as well, and therefore they can be understood as an aspect of opposition. No Chartist can really object to being considered an opposition in this sense.

There is another circumstance, however, that considerably complicates matters.   For many decades, the power ruling society in the Soviet bloc has used the label "opposition" as the blackest of indictments, as synonymous with the word "enemy." To brand someone "a member of the opposition" is tantamount to saying he is trying to overthrow the government and put an end to socialism (naturally in the pay of the imperialists). There have been times when this label led straight to the gallows, and of course this does not encourage people to apply the same label to themselves. Moreover, it is only a word, and what is actually done is more important than how it is labeled.

The final reason why many reject such a term is because there is something negative about the notion of an "opposition." People who so define themselves do so in relation to a prior "position." In other words, they relate themselves specifically to the power that rules society and through it, define themselves, deriving their own position from the position of the regime. For people who have simply decided to live within the truth, to say aloud what they think, to express their solidarity with their fellow citizens, to create as they want and simply to live in harmony with their better self, it is naturally disagreeable to feel required to define their own original and positive position negatively, in terms of something else, and to think of themselves primarily as people who are against something, not simply as people who are what they are.

Obviously, the only way to avoid misunderstanding is to say clearly - before one starts using them - in what sense the terms "opposition" and "member of the opposition" are being used and how they are in fact to be understood in our circumstances.

XIII

If the term "opposition" has been imported from democratic societies into the post-totalitarian system without general agreement on what the word means in conditions that are so different, then the term "dissident" was, on the contrary, chosen by Western journalists and is now generally accepted as the label for a phenomenon peculiar to the post-totalitarian system and almost never occurring - at least not in that form - in democratic societies.

Who are these "dissidents"? It seems that the term is applied primarily to citizens of the Soviet bloc who have decided to live within the truth and who, in addition, meet the following criteria:

1. They express their nonconformist positions and critical opinions publicly and systematically, within the very strict limits available to them, and because of this, they are known in the West.

2. Despite being unable to publish at home and despite every possible form of persecution by their governments, they have, by virtue of their attitudes, managed to win a certain esteem, both from the public and from their government, and thus they actually enjoy a very limited and very strange degree of indirect, actual power in their own milieu as well. This either protects them from the worst forms of persecution, or at least it ensures that if they are persecuted, it will mean certain political complications for their governments.

3. The horizon of their critical attention and their commitment reaches beyond the narrow context of their immediate surroundings or special interests to embrace more general causes and, thus, their work becomes political in nature, although the degree to which they think of themselves as a directly political force may vary a great deal.

4. They are people who lean toward intellectual pursuits, that is, they are "writing" people, people for whom the written word is the primary - and often the only - political medium they command, and that can gain them attention, particularly from abroad. Other ways in which they seek to live within the truth are either lost to the foreign observer in the elusive local milieu or - if they reach beyond this local framework - they appear to be only somewhat less visible complements to what they have written.

5. Regardless of their actual vocations, these people are talked about in the West more frequently in terms of their activities as committed citizens, or in terms of the critical, political aspects of their work, than in terms of the real work they do in their own fields. From personal experience, I know that there is an invisible line you cross - without even wanting to or becoming aware of it - beyond which they cease to treat you as a writer who happens to be a concerned citizen and
begin talking of you as a "dissident" who almost incidentally (in his spare time, perhaps?) happens to write plays as well.

Unquestionably, there are people who meet all of these criteria. What is debatable is whether we should be using a special term for a group defined in such an essentially accidental way, and specifically, whether they should be called "dissidents." It does happen, however, and there is clearly nothing we can do about it. Sometimes, to facilitate communication, we even use the label ourselves, although it is done with distaste, rather ironically, and almost always in quotation marks.

Perhaps it is now appropriate to outline some of the reasons why "dissidents" themselves are not very happy to be referred to in this way. In the first place, the word is problematic from an etymological point of view. A "dissident," we are told in our press, means something like "renegade" or "backslider." But dissidents do not consider themselves renegades for the simple reason that they are not primarily denying or rejecting anything. On the contrary, they have tried to affirm their own human identity, and if they reject anything at all, then it is merely what was false and alienating in their lives, that aspect of living within a lie.

But that is not the most important thing. The term "dissident" frequently implies a special profession, as if, along with the more normal vocations, there were another special one grumbling about the state of things. In fact, a "dissident" is simply a physicist, a sociologist, a worker, a poet, individuals who are doing what they feel they must and, consequently, who find themselves in open conflict with the regime. This conflict has not come about through any conscious intention on their part, but simply through the inner logic of their thinking, behavior, or work (often confronted with external circumstances more or less beyond their control). They have not, in other words, consciously decided to be professional malcontents, rather as one decides to be a tailor or a blacksmith.

In fact, of course, they do not usually discover they are "dissidents" until long after they have actually become one. "Dissent" springs from motivations far different from the desire for titles or fame. In short, they do not decide to become "dissidents," and even if they were to devote twenty-four hours a day to it, it would still not be a profession, but primarily an existential attitude. Moreover, it is an attitude that is in no way the exclusive property of those who have earned themselves the title of "dissident" just because they happen to fulfill those accidental external conditions already mentioned. There are thousands of nameless people who try to live within the truth and millions who want to but cannot, perhaps only because to do so in the circumstances in which they live, they would need ten times the courage of those who have already taken the first step. If several dozen are randomly chosen from among all these people and put into a special category, this can utterly distort the general picture. It does so in two different ways: Either it suggests that "dissidents" are a group of prominent people, a protected species who are permitted to do things others are not and whom the government may even be cultivating as living proof of its generosity; or it lends support to the illusion that since there is no more than a handful of malcontents to whom not very much is really being done, all the rest are therefore content, for were they not so, they would be "dissidents" too.

But that is not all. This categorization also unintentionally supports the impression that the primary concern of these "dissidents" is some vested interest that they share as a group, as though their entire argument with the government were no more than a rather abstruse conflict between two opposed groups, a conflict that leaves society out of it altogether. But such an impression profoundly contradicts the real importance of the "dissident" attitude, which stands or falls on its interest in others, in what ails society as a whole, in other words, on an interest in all those who do not speak up. If "dissidents" have any kind of authority at all, and if they have not been exterminated long ago like exotic insects that have appeared where they have no business being, then this is not because the government holds this exclusive group and their exclusive ideas in such awe, but because it is perfectly aware of the potential political power of living within the truth rooted in the hidden sphere, and well aware too of the kind of world "dissent" grows out of and the world it addresses: the everyday human world, the world of daily tension between the aims of life and the aims of the system. (Can there be any better evidence of this than the government's action after Charter 77 appeared, when it launched a campaign to compel the entire nation to declare that Charter 77 was wrong? Those millions of signatures proved, among other things, that just the opposite was true.) The political organs and the police do not lavish such enormous attention on "dissidents" - which may give the impression that the government fears them as they might fear an alternative power clique - because they actually are such a power clique, but because they are ordinary people with ordinary cares, differing from the rest only in that they say aloud what the rest cannot say or are afraid to say. I have already mentioned Solzhenitsyn's political influence: it does not reside in some exclusive political power he possesses as an individual, but in the experience of those millions of Gulag victims which he simply amplified and communicated to millions of other people of good will.

To institutionalize a select category of well-known or prominent "dissidents" means in fact to deny the most intrinsic moral aspect of their activity. As we have seen, the "dissident" movement grows out of the principle of equality, founded on the notion that human rights and freedoms are indivisible. After all, did no well-known "dissidents" unite in KOR to defend unknown workers? And was it not precisely for this reason that they became "well-known dissidents"? And did not the well-known "dissidents" unite in Charter 77 after they had been brought together in defense of those unknown musicians, and did they not unite in the Charter precisely with them, and did they not become "well-known dissidents" precisely because of that? It is truly a cruel paradox that the more some citizens stand up in defense of other citizens, the more they are labeled with a word that in effect separates them from those "other citizens."

This explanation, I hope, will make clear the significance of the quotation marks I have put around the word "dissident" throughout this essay.

XIV

At the time when the Czech lands and Slovakia were an integral part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and when there existed neither the historical nor the political, psychological, nor social conditions that would have enabled the Czechs and Slovaks to seek their identity outside the framework of this empire, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk established a Czechoslovak national program based on the notion of "small-scale work" (dro6ncí práce). By that he meant honest and responsible work in widely different areas of life but within the existing social order, work that would stimulate national creativity and national self-confidence. Naturally he placed particular emphasis on intelligent and enlightened upbringing and education, and on the moral and humanitarian aspects of life. Masaryk believed that the only possible starting point for a more dignified national destiny was humanity itself. Humanity's first task was to create the conditions for a more human life; and in Masaryk's view, the task of transforming the stature of the nation began with the transformation of human beings.

This notion of "working for the good of the nation" took root in Czechoslovak society and in many ways it was successful and is still alive today. Along with those who exploit the notion as a sophisticated excuse for collaborating with the regime, there are still many, even today, who genuinely uphold the ideal and, in some areas at least, can point to indisputable achievements. It is hard to say how much worse things would be if there were not many hard-working people who simply refuse to give up and try constantly to do the best they can, paying an unavoidable minimum to living within a lie so that they might give their utmost to the authentic needs of society. These people assume, correctly, that every piece of good work is an indirect criticism of bad politics, and that there are situations where it is worthwhile going this route, even though it means surrendering one's natural right to make direct criticisms.

Today, however, there are very clear limitations to this attitude, even compared to the situation in the 1960s. More and more frequently, those who attempt to practice the principle of "small-scale work" come up against the post-totalitarian system and find themselves facing a dilemma: either one retreats from that position, dilutes the honesty, responsibility, and consistency on which it is based, and simply adapts to circumstances (the approach taken by the majority), or one continues on the way begun and inevitably comes into conflict with the regime (the approach taken by a minority).

If the notion of small-scale work was never intended as an imperative to survive in the existing social and political structure at any cost (in which case individuals who allowed themselves to be excluded from that structure would necessarily appear to have given up "working for the nation"), then today it is even less significant. There is no general model of behavior, that is, no neat, universally valid way of determining the point at which small-scale work ceases to be for the good of the nation and becomes detrimental to the nation. It is more than clear, however, that the danger of such a reversal is becoming more and more acute and that small-scale work, with increasing frequency, is coming up against that limit beyond which avoiding conflict means compromising its very essence.

In 1974, when I was employed in a brewery, my immediate superior was a certain Š, a person well versed in the art of making beer. He was proud of his profession and he wanted our brewery to brew good beer. He spent almost all his time at work, continually thinking up improvements, and he frequently made the rest of us feel uncomfortable because he assumed that we loved brewing as much as he did. In the midst of the slovenly indifference to work that socialism encourages, a more constructive worker would be difficult to imagine.

The brewery itself was managed by people who understood their work less and were less fond of it, but who were politically more influential. They were bringing the brewery to ruin and not only did they fail to react to any of Š's suggestions, but they actually became increasingly hostile toward him and tried in every way to thwart his efforts to do a good job. Eventually the situation became so bad that Š felt compelled to write a lengthy letter to the manager's superior, in which he attempted to analyze the brewery's difficulties. He explained why it was the worst in the district and pointed to those responsible.

His voice might have been heard. The manager, who was politically powerful but otherwise ignorant of beer, a man who loathed workers and was given to intrigue, might have been replaced and conditions in the brewery might have been improved on the basis of Š's suggestions. Had this happened, it would have been a perfect example of small-scale work in action. Unfortunately, the precise opposite occurred: the manager of the brewery, who was a member of the Communist Party’s district committee, had friends in higher places and he saw to it that the situation was resolved in his favor. Š's analysis was described as a "defamatory document" and Š himself was labeled a "political saboteur." He was thrown out of the brewery and shifted to another one where he was given a job requiring no skill. Here the notion of small-scale work had come up against the wall of the post-totalitarian system. By speaking the truth, Š had stepped out of line, broken the rules, cast himself out, and he ended up as a sub-citizen, stigmatized as an enemy. He could now say anything he wanted, but he could never, as a matter of principle, expect to be heard. He had become the "dissident" of the Eastern Bohemian Brewery.

I think this is a model case which, from another point of view, illustrates what I have already said in the preceding section: you do not become a "dissident" just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society. This is why our situation is not comparable to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, when the Czech nation, in the worst period of Bach's absolutism, had only one real "dissident," Karel Havlíček, who was imprisoned in Brixen. Today, if we are not to be snobbish about it, we must admit that "dissidents" can be found on every street corner.

To rebuke "dissidents" for having abandoned "small-scale work" is simply absurd. "Dissent" is not an alternative to Masaryk's notion, it is frequently its one possible outcome. I say "frequently" in order to emphasize that this is not always the case. I am far from believing that the only decent and responsible people are those who find themselves at odds with the existing social and political structures. After all, the brewmaster Š might have won his battle. To condemn those who have kept their positions simply because they have kept them, in other words, for not being "dissidents," would be just as absurd as to hold them up as an example to the "dissidents." In any case, it contradicts the whole "dissident" attitude seen as an attempt to live within the truth - if one judges human behavior not according to what it is and whether it is good or not, but according to the personal circumstances such an attempt has brought one to.

XV

Our greengrocer's attempt to live within the truth may be confined to not doing certain things. He decides not to put flags in his window when his only motive for putting them there in the first place would have been to avoid being reported by the house warden; he does not vote in elections that he considers false; he does not hide his opinions from his superiors. In other words, he may go no further than "merely" refusing to comply with certain demands made on him by the system (which of course is not an insignificant step to take). This may, however, grow into something more. The greengrocer may begin to do something concrete, something that goes beyond an immediately personal self-defensive reaction against manipulation, something that will manifest his newfound sense of higher responsibility. He may, for example, organize his fellow greengrocers to act together in defense of their interests. He may write letters to various institutions, drawing their attention to instances of disorder and injustice around him. He may seek out unofficial literature, copy it, and lend it to his friends.

If what I have called living within the truth is a basic existential (and of course potentially political) starting point for all those "independent citizens' initiatives" and "dissident" or "opposition" movements this does not mean that every attempt to live within the truth automatically belongs in this category. On the contrary, in its most original and broadest sense, living within the truth covers a vast territory whose outer limits are vague and difficult to map, a territory full of modest expressions of human volition, the vast majority of which will remain anonymous and whose political impact will probably never be felt or described any more concretely than simply as a part of a social climate or mood. Most of these expressions remain elementary revolts against manipulation: you simply straighten your backbone and live in greater dignity as an individual.

Here and there - thanks to the nature, the assumptions, and the professions of some people, but also thanks to a number of accidental circumstances such as the specific nature of the local milieu, friends, and so on - a more coherent and visible initiative may emerge from this wide and anonymous hinterland, an initiative that transcends "merely" individual revolt and is transformed into more conscious, structured, and purposeful work. The point where living within the truth ceases to be a mere negation of living with a lie and becomes articulate in a particular way is the point at which something is born that might be called the "independent spiritual, social, and political life of society." This independent life is not separated from the rest of life ("dependent life") by some sharply defined line. Both types frequently co-exist in the same people. Nevertheless, its most important focus is marked by a relatively high degree of inner emancipation. It sails upon the vast ocean of the manipulated life like little boats, tossed by the waves but always bobbing back as visible messengers of living within the truth, articulating the suppressed aims of life.

What is this independent life of society? The spectrum of its expressions and activities is naturally very wide. It includes everything from self education and thinking about the world, through free creative activity and its communication to others, to the most varied free, civic attitudes, including instances of independent social self-organization. In short, it is an area in which living within the truth becomes articulate and materializes in a visible way.

Thus what will later be referred to as "citizens' initiatives," "dissident movements," or even "oppositions," emerge, like the proverbial one tenth of the iceberg visible above the water, from that area, from the independent life of society. In other words, just as the independent life of society develops out of living within the truth in the widest sense of the word, as the distinct, articulated expression of that life, so "dissent" gradually emerges from the independent life of society. Yet there is a marked difference: if the independent life of society, externally at least, can be understood as a higher form of living within the truth, it is far less certain that "dissident" movements are necessarily a higher form of the independent life of society. They are simply one manifestation of it and, though they may be the most visible and, at first glance, the most political (and most clearly articulated) expression of it, they are far from necessarily being the most mature or even the most important, not only in the general social sense but even in terms of direct political influence. After all, "dissent" has been artificially removed from its place of birth by having been given a special name. In fact, however, it is not possible to think of it separated from the whole background out of which it develops, of which it is an integral part, and from which it draws all its vital strength. In any case, it follows from what has already been said about the peculiarities of the post-totalitarian system that what appears to be the most political of forces in a given moment, and what thinks of itself in such terms, need not necessarily in fact be such a force. The extent to which it is a real political force is due exclusively to its pre-political context.

What follows from this description? Nothing more and nothing less than this: It is impossible to talk about what in fact "dissidents" do and the effect of their work without first talking about the work of all those who, in one way or another, take part in the independent life of society and who are not necessarily "dissidents" at all. They may be writers who write as they wish without regard for censorship or official demands and who issue their work - when official publishers refuse to print it - as samizdat. They may be philosophers, historians, sociologists, and all those who practice independent scholarship and, if it is impossible through official or semi-official channels, who also circulate their work in samizdat or who organize private discussions, lectures, and seminars. They may be teachers who privately teach young people things that are kept from them in the state schools; clergymen who either in office or, if they are deprived of their charges, outside it, try to carry on a free religious life; painters, musicians, and singers who practice their work regardless of how it is looked upon by official institutions; everyone who shares this independent culture and helps to spread it; people who, using the means available to them, try to express and defend the actual social interests of workers, to put real meaning back into trade unions or to form independent ones; people who are not afraid to call the attention of officials to cases of injustice and who strive to see that the laws are observed; and the different groups of young people who try to extricate themselves from manipulation and live in their own way, in the spirit of their own hierarchy of values. The list could go on.

Very few would think of calling all these people "dissidents." And yet are not the well-known "dissidents" simply people like them? Are not all these activities in fact what "dissidents" do as well? Do they not produce scholarly work and publish it in samizdat? Do they not write plays and novels and poems? Do they not lecture to students in private "universities"? Do they not struggle against various forms of injustice and attempt to ascertain and express the genuine social interests of various sectors of the population?

After having tried to indicate the sources, the inner structure, and some aspects of the "dissident" attitude as such, I have clearly shifted my viewpoint from outside, as it were, to an investigation of what these "dissidents" actually do, how their initiatives are manifested, and where they lead. The first conclusion to be drawn, then, is that the original and most important sphere of activity, one that predetermines all the others, is simply an attempt to create and support the independent life of society as an articulated expression of living within the truth. In other words, serving truth consistently, purposefully, and articulately, and organizing this service. This is only natural, after all: if living within the truth is an elementary starting point for every attempt made by people to oppose the alienating pressure of the system, if it is the only meaningful basis of any independent act of political import, and if, ultimately, it is also the most intrinsic existential source of the "dissident" attitude, then it is difficult to imagine that even manifest "dissent" could have any other basis than the service of truth, the truthful life, and the attempt to make room for the genuine aims of life.

XVI

The post-totalitarian system is mounting a total assault on humans and humans stand against it alone, abandoned and isolated. It is therefore entirely natural that all the "dissident" movements are explicitly defensive movements: they exist to defend human beings and the genuine aims of life against the aims of the system. Today the Polish group KOR is called the "Committee for Social Self-Defense”: The word "defense" appears in the names of other similar groups in Poland, but even the Soviet Helsinki monitoring group and our own Charter 77 are clearly defensive in nature. In terms of traditional politics, this program of defense is understandable, even though it may appear minimal, provisional, and ultimately negative. It offers no new conception, model, or ideology, and therefore it is not politics in the proper sense of the word, since politics always assumes a positive program and can scarcely limit itself to defending someone against something.

Such a view, I think, reveals the limitations of the traditionally political way of looking at things: The post-totalitarian system, after all, is not the manifestation of a particular political line followed by a particular government. It is something radically different: it is a complex, profound, and long-term violation of society, or rather the self violation of society. To oppose it merely by establishing a different political line and then striving for a change in government would not only be unrealistic, it would be utterly inadequate, for it would never come near to touching the root of the matter. For some time now, the problem has no longer resided in a political line or program; it is a problem of life itself.

Thus, defending the aims of life, defending humanity, is not only a more realistic approach, since it can begin right now and is potentially more popular because it concerns people's everyday lives; at the same time (and perhaps precisely because of this) it is also an incomparably more consistent approach because it aims at the very essence of things.

There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight. It seems to me that today, this "provisional," "minimal," and "negative" program - the "simple" defense of people - is in a particular sense (and not merely in the circumstances in which we live) an optimal and most positive program because it forces politics to return to its only proper starting point, proper that is, if all the old mistakes are to be avoided: individual people. In the democratic societies, where the violence done to human beings is not nearly so obvious and cruel, this fundamental revolution in politics has yet to happen, and some things will probably have to get worse there before the urgent need for that revolution is reflected in politics. In our world, precisely because of the misery in which we find ourselves, it would seem that politics has already undergone that transformation: the central concern of political thought is no longer abstract visions of a self-redeeming, "positive" model (and of course the opportunistic political practices that are the reverse of the same coin), but rather the people who have so far merely been enslaved by those models and their practices.

Every society, of course, requires some degree of organization. Yet if that organization is to serve people, and not the other way around, then people will have to be liberated and space created so that they may organize themselves in meaningful ways. The depravity of the opposite approach, in which people are first organized in one way or another (by someone who always knows best "what the people need") so they may then allegedly be liberated, is something we have known on our own skins only too well.

To sum up: most people who are too bound to the traditional political way of thinking see the weaknesses of the "dissident" movements in their purely defensive character. In contrast, I see that as their greatest strength. I believe that this is precisely where these movements supersede the kind of politics from whose point of view their program can seem so inadequate.

XVII

In the "dissident" movements of the Soviet bloc, the defense of human beings usually takes the form of a defense of human and civil rights as they are entrenched in various official documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenants on Human Rights, the Concluding Act of the Helsinki Agreement, and the constitutions of individual states. These movements set out to defend anyone who is being prosecuted for acting in the spirit of those rights, and they in turn act in the same spirit in their work, by insisting over and over again that the regime recognize and respect human and civil rights, and by drawing attention to the areas of life where this is not the case.

Their work, therefore, is based on the principle of legality: they operate publicly and openly, insisting not only that their activity is in line with the law, but that achieving respect for the law is one of their main aims. This principle of legality, which provides both the point of departure and the framework for their activities, is common to all "dissident" groups in the Soviet bloc, even though individual groups have never worked out any formal agreement on that point. This circumstance raises an important question: Why, in conditions where a widespread and arbitrary abuse of power is the rule, is there such a general and spontaneous acceptance of the principle of legality?

On the primary level, this stress on legality is a natural expression of specific conditions that exist in the post-totalitarian system, and the consequence of an elementary understanding of that specificity. If there are in essence only two ways to struggle for a free society - that is, through legal means and through (armed or unarmed) revolt - then it should be obvious at once how inappropriate the latter alternative is in the post-totalitarian system. Revolt is appropriate when conditions are clearly and openly in motion, during a war, for example, or in situations where social or political conflicts are coming to a head. It is appropriate in a classical dictatorship that is either just setting itself up or is in a state of collapse. In other words, it is appropriate where social forces of comparable strength (for example, a government of occupation versus a nation fighting for its freedom) are confronting each other on the level of actual power, or where there is a clear distinction between the usurpers of power and the subjugated population, or when society finds itself in a state of open crisis. Conditions in the post-totalitarian system - except in extremely explosive situations like the one in Hungary in 1956 - are, of course, precisely the opposite. They are static and stable, and social crises, for the most part, exist only latently (though they run much deeper). Society is not sharply polarized on the level of actual political power, but, as we have seen, the fundamental lines of conflict run right through each person. In this situation, no attempt at revolt could ever hope to set up even a minimum of resonance in the rest of society, because that society is soporific, submerged in a consumer rat race and wholly involved in the post-totalitarian system (that is, participating in it and acting as agents of its automatism), and it would simply find anything like revolt unacceptable. It would interpret the revolt as an attack upon itself and, rather than supporting the revolt, it would very probably react by intensifying its bias toward the system, since, in its view, the system can at least guarantee a certain quasi-legality. Add to this the fact that the post-totalitarian system has at its disposal a complex mechanism of direct and indirect surveillance that has no equal in history and it is clear that not only would any attempt to revolt come to a dead end politically, but it would also be almost technically impossible to carry off. Most probably it would be liquidated before it had a chance to translate its intentions into action. Even if revolt were possible, however, it would remain the solitary gesture of a few isolated individuals and they would be opposed not only by a gigantic apparatus of national (and supranational) power, but also by the very society in whose name they were mounting their revolt in the first place. (This, by the way, is another reason why the regime and its propaganda have been ascribing terroristic aims to the "dissident" movements and accusing them of illegal and conspiratorial methods.)

All of this, however, is not the main reason why the "dissident" movements support the principle of legality. That reason lies deeper, in the innermost structure of the "dissident" attitude. This attitude is and must be fundamentally hostile toward the notion of violent change, simply because it places its faith in violence. (Generally, the "dissident" attitude can only accept violence as a necessary evil in extreme situations, when direct violence can only be met by violence and where remaining passive would in effect mean supporting violence: let us recall, for example, that the blindness of European pacifism was one of the factors that prepared the ground for the Second World War.) As I have already mentioned, "dissidents" tend to be skeptical about political thought based on the faith that profound social changes can only be achieved by bringing about (regardless of the method) changes in the system or in the government, and the belief that such changes - because they are considered "fundamental" justify the sacrifice of "less fundamental" things, in other words, human lives. Respect for a theoretical concept here outweighs respect for human life. Yet this is precisely what threatens to enslave humanity all over again.

"Dissident" movements, as I have tried to indicate, share exactly the opposite view. They understand systemic change as something superficial, something secondary, something that in itself can guarantee nothing. Thus an attitude that turns away from abstract political visions of the future toward concrete human beings and ways of defending them effectively in the here and now is quite naturally accompanied by an intensified antipathy to all forms of violence carried out in the name of a better future, and by a profound belief that a future secured by violence might actually be worse than what exists now; in other words, the future would be fatally stigmatized by the very means used to secure it. At the same time, this attitude is not to be mistaken for political conservatism or political moderation. The "dissident" movements do not shy away from the idea of violent political overthrow because the idea seems too radical, but on the contrary, because it does not seem radical enough. For them, the problem lies far too deep to be settled through mere systemic changes, either governmental or technological. Some people, faithful to the classical Marxist doctrines of the nineteenth century, understand our system as the hegemony of an exploiting class over an exploited class and, operating from the postulate that exploiters never surrender their power voluntarily, they see the only solution in a revolution to sweep away the exploiters. Naturally, they regard such things as the struggle for human rights as something hopelessly legalistic, illusory, opportunistic, and ultimately misleading because it makes the doubtful assumption that you can negotiate in good faith with your exploiters on the basis of a false legality. The problem is that they are unable to find anyone determined enough to carry out this revolution, with the result that they become bitter, skeptical, passive, and ultimately apathetic; in other words, they end up precisely where the system wants them to be. This is one example of how far one can be misled by mechanically applying, in post-totalitarian circumstances, ideological models from another world and another time.

Of course, one need not be an advocate of violent revolution to ask whether an appeal to legality makes any sense at all when the laws - and particularly the general laws concerning human rights - are no more than a facade, an aspect of the world of appearances, a mere game behind which lies total manipulation.   "They can ratify anything because they will still go ahead and do whatever they want anyway" - this is an opinion we often encounter. Is it not true that constantly to take them at their word, to appeal to laws every child knows are binding only as long as the government wishes, is in the end just a kind of hypocrisy, a Švejkian obstructionism and, finally, just another way of playing the game, another form of self-delusion? In other words, is the legalistic approach at all compatible with the principle of living within the truth? This question can only be answered by first looking at the wider implications of how the legal code functions in the post-totalitarian system.

In a classical dictatorship, to a far greater extent than in the post-totalitarian system, the will of the ruler is carried out directly, in an unregulated fashion. A dictatorship has no reason to hide its foundations, nor to conceal the real workings of power, and therefore it need not encumber itself to any great extent with a legal code. The post-totalitarian system, on the other hand, is utterly obsessed with the need to bind everything in a single order: life in such a state is thoroughly permeated by a dense network of regulations, proclamations, directives, norms, orders, and rules. (It is not called a bureaucratic system without good reason.) A large proportion of those norms function as direct instruments of the complex manipulation of life that is intrinsic to the post-totalitarian system. Individuals are reduced to little more than tiny cogs in an enormous mechanism and their significance is limited to their function in this mechanism. Their job, housing accommodation, movements, social and cultural expressions, everything, in short, must be cosseted together as firmly as possible, predetermined, regulated, and controlled. Every aberration from the prescribed course of life is treated as error, license, and anarchy. From the cook in the restaurant who, without hard-to-get permission from the bureaucratic apparatus, cannot cook something special for his customers, to the singer who cannot perform his new song at a concert without bureaucratic approval, everyone, in all aspects of their life, is caught in this regulatory tangle of red tape, the inevitable product of the post-totalitarian system. With ever-increasing consistency, it binds all the expressions and aims of life to the spirit of its own aims: the vested interests of its own smooth, automatic operation.

In a narrower sense the legal code serves the post-totalitarian system in this direct way as well, that is, it too forms a part of the world of regulations and prohibitions. At the same time, however, it performs the same service in another indirect way, one that brings it remarkably closer - depending on which level of the law is involved - to ideology and in some cases makes it a direct component of that ideology.

1. Like ideology, the legal code functions as an excuse. It wraps the base exercise of power in the noble apparel of the letter of the law; it creates the pleasing illusion that justice is done, society protected, and the exercise of power objectively regulated. All this is done to conceal the real essence of post-totalitarian legal practice: the total manipulation of society. If an outside observer who knew nothing at all about life in Czechoslovakia were to study only its laws, he would be utterly incapable of understanding what we were complaining about. The hidden political manipulation of the courts and of public prosecutors, the limitations placed on lawyers' ability to defend their clients, the closed nature, de facto, of trials, the arbitrary actions of the security forces, their position of authority over the judiciary, the absurdly broad application of several deliberately vague sections of that code, and of course the state's utter disregard for the positive sections of that code (the rights of citizens): all of this would remain hidden from our outside observer. The only thing he would take away would be the impression that our legal code is not much worse than the legal code of other civilized countries, and not much different either, except perhaps for certain curiosities, such as the entrenchment in the constitution of a single political party's eternal rule and the state's love for a neighboring superpower.

But that is not all: if our observer had the opportunity to study the formal side of the policing and judicial procedures and practices, how they look "on paper," he would discover that for the most part the common rules of criminal procedure are observed: charges are laid within the prescribed period following arrest, and it is the same with detention orders. Indictments are properly delivered, the accused has a lawyer, and so on. In other words, everyone has an excuse: they have all observed the law. In reality, however, they have cruelly and pointlessly ruined a young person's life, perhaps for no other reason than because he made samizdat copies of a novel written by a banned writer, or because the police deliberately falsified their testimony (as everyone knows, from the judge on down to the defendant). Yet all of this somehow remains in the background. The falsified testimony is not necessarily obvious from the trial documents and the section of the Criminal Code dealing with incitement does not formally exclude the application of that charge to the copying of a banned novel. In other words, the legal code - at least in several areas - is no more than a facade, an aspect of the world of appearances. Then why is it there at all? For exactly the same reason as ideology is there: it provides a bridge of excuses between the system and individuals, making it easier for them to enter the power structure and serve the arbitrary demands of power. The excuse lets individuals fool themselves into thinking they are merely upholding the law and protecting society from criminals. (Without this excuse, how much more difficult it would be to recruit new generations of judges, prosecutors, and interrogators!) As an aspect of the world of appearances, however, the legal code deceives not only the conscience of prosecutors, it deceives the public, it deceives foreign observers, and it even deceives history itself.

Like ideology, the legal code is an essential instrument of ritual communication outside the power structure. It is the legal code that gives the exercise of power a form, a framework, a set of rules. It is the legal code that enables all components of the system to communicate, to put themselves in a good light, to establish their own legitimacy. It provides their whole game with its rules and engineers with their technology. Can the exercise of post-totalitarian power be imagined at all without this universal ritual making it all possible, serving as a common language to bind the relevant sectors of the power structure together? The more important the position occupied by the repressive apparatus in the power structure, the more important that it function according to some kind of formal code. How, otherwise, could people be so easily and inconspicuously locked up for copying banned books if there were no judges, prosecutors, interrogators, defense lawyers, court stenographers, and thick files, and if all this were not held together by some firm order? And above all, without that innocent-looking Section 100 on incitement? This could all be done, of course, without a legal code and its accessories, but only in some ephemeral dictatorship run by a Ugandan bandit, not in a system that embraces such a huge portion of civilized humankind and represents an integral, stable, and respected part of the modern world. That would not only be unthinkable, it would quite simply be technically impossible. Without the legal code functioning as a ritually cohesive force, the post-totalitarian system could not exist.

The entire role of ritual, facades, and excuses appears most eloquently, of course, not in the proscriptive section of the legal code, which sets out what a citizen may not do and what the grounds for prosecution are, but in the section declaring what he may do and what his or her rights are. Here there is truly nothing but "words, words, words." Yet even that part of the code is of immense importance to the system, for it is here that the system establishes its legitimacy as a whole, before its own citizens, before schoolchildren, before the international public, and before history. The system cannot afford to disregard this because it cannot permit itself to cast doubt upon the fundamental postulates of its ideology, which are so essential to its very existence. (We have already seen how the power structure is enslaved by its own ideology and its ideological prestige.) To do this would be to deny everything it tries to present itself as and, thus, one of the main pillars on which the system rests would be undermined: the integrity of the world of appearances.

If the exercise of power circulates through the whole power structure as blood flows through veins, then the legal code can be understood as something that reinforces the walls of those veins. Without it, the blood of power could not circulate in an organized way and the body of society would hemorrhage at random. Order would collapse.

A persistent and never-ending appeal to the laws - not just to the laws concerning human rights, but to all laws - does not mean at all that those who do so have succumbed to the illusion that in our system the law is anything other than what it is. They are well aware of the role it plays. But precisely because they know how desperately the system depends on it - on the "noble" version of the law, that is - they also know how enormously significant such appeals are. Because the system cannot do without the law, because it is hopelessly tied down by the necessity of pretending the laws are observed, it is compelled to react in some way to such appeals. Demanding that the laws be upheld is thus an act of living within the truth that threatens the whole mendacious structure at its point of maximum mendacity. Over and over again, such appeals make the purely ritualistic nature of the law clear to society and to those who inhabit its power structures. They draw attention to its real material substance and thus, indirectly, compel all those who take refuge behind the law to affirm and make credible this agency of excuses, this means of communication, this reinforcement of the social arteries outside of which their will could not be made to circulate through society. They are compelled to do so for the sake of their own consciences, for the impression they make on outsiders, to maintain themselves in power (as part of the system's own mechanism of self-preservation and its principles of cohesion), or simply out of fear that they will be reproached for being clumsy in handling the ritual. They have no other choice: because they cannot discard the rules of their own game, they can only attend more carefully to those rules. Not to react to challenges means to undermine their own excuse and lose control of their mutual communications system. To assume that the laws are a mere facade, that they have no validity, and that therefore it is pointless to appeal to them would mean to go on reinforcing those aspects of the law that create the facade and the ritual. It would mean confirming the law as an aspect of the world of appearances and enabling those who exploit it to rest easy with the cheapest (and therefore the most mendacious) form of their excuse. I have frequently witnessed policemen, prosecutors, or judges - if they were dealing with an experienced Chartist or a courageous lawyer, and if they were exposed to public attention (as individuals with a name, no longer protected by the anonymity of the apparatus) - suddenly and anxiously begin to take particular care that no cracks appear in the ritual. This does not alter the fact that a despotic power is hiding behind that ritual, but the very existence of the officials' anxiety necessarily regulates, limits, and slows down the operation of that despotism.

This, of course, is not enough. But an essential part of the "dissident" attitude is that it comes out of the reality of the human here and now. It places more importance on often repeated and consistent concrete action - even though it may be inadequate and though it may ease only insignificantly the suffering of a single insignificant citizen - than it does in some abstract fundamental solution in an uncertain future. In any case, is not this in fact just another form of "small-scale work" in the Masarykian sense, with which the "dissident" attitude seemed at first to be in such sharp contradiction?

This section would be incomplete without stressing certain internal limitations to the policy of taking them at their own word. The point is this: even in the most ideal of cases, the law is only one of several imperfect and more or less external ways of defending what is better in life against what is worse. By itself, the law can never create anything better. Its purpose is to render a service and its meaning does not lie in the law itself. Establishing respect for the law does not automatically ensure a better life for that, after all, is a job for people and not for laws and institutions. It is possible to imagine a society with good laws that are fully respected but in which it is impossible to live. Conversely, one can imagine life being quite bearable even where the laws are imperfect and imperfectly applied. The most important thing is always the quality of that life and whether or not the laws enhance life or repress it, not merely whether they are upheld or not. (Often strict observance of the law could have a disastrous impact on human dignity.) The key to a humane, dignified, rich, and happy life does not lie either in the constitution or in the Criminal Code. These merely establish what may or may not be done and, thus, they can make life easier or more difficult. They limit or permit, they punish, tolerate, or defend, but they can never give life substance or meaning. The struggle for what is called "legality" must constantly keep this legality in perspective against the background of life as it really is. Without keeping one’s eyes open to the real dimensions of life's beauty and misery, and without a moral relationship to life, this struggle will sooner or later come to grief on the rocks of some self justifying system of scholastics. Without really wanting to, one would thus become more and more like the observer who comes to conclusions about our system only on the basis of trial documents and is satisfied if all the appropriate regulations have been observed.

XVIII

Is the basic job of the "dissident" movements is to serve truth, that is, to serve the real aims of life, and if that necessarily develops into a defense of individuals and their right to a free and truthful life (that is, a defense of human rights and a struggle to see the laws respected), then another stage of this approach, perhaps the most mature stage so far, is what Václav Benda called the development of "parallel structures."

When those who have decided to live within the truth have been denied any direct influence on the existing social structures, not to mention the opportunity to participate in them, and when these people begin to create what I have called the independent life of society, this independent life begins, of itself, to become structured in a certain way. Sometimes there are only very embryonic indications of this process of structuring; at other times, the structures are already quite well developed. Their genesis and evolution are inseparable from the phenomenon of "dissent," even though they reach far beyond the arbitrarily defined area of activity usually indicated by that term.

What are these structures? Ivan Jirous was the first in Czechoslovakia to formulate and apply in practice the concept of a "second culture." Although at first he was thinking chiefly of nonconformist rock music and only certain literary, artistic, or performance events close to the sensibilities of those nonconformist musical groups, the term second culture very rapidly came to be used for the whole area of independent and repressed culture, that is, not only for art and its various currents but also for the humanities, the social sciences, and philosophical thought. This second culture, quite naturally, has created elementary organizational forms: samizdat editions of books and magazines, private performances and concerts, seminars, exhibitions, and so on. (In Poland all of this is vastly more developed: there are independent publishing houses and many more periodicals, even political periodicals; they have means of proliferation other than carbon copies, and so on. In the Soviet Union, samizdat has a longer tradition and clearly its forms are quite different.) Culture, therefore, is a sphere in which the parallel structures can be observed in their most highly developed form. Benda, of course, gives thought to potential or embryonic forms of such structures in other spheres as well: from a parallel information network to parallel forms of education (private universities), parallel trade unions, parallel foreign contacts, to a kind of hypothesis on a parallel economy. On the basis of these parallel structures, he then develops the notion of a "parallel polis" or state or, rather, he sees the rudiments of such a polis in these structures.

At a certain stage in its development, the independent life of society and the "dissident" movements cannot avoid a certain amount of organization and institutionalization. This is a natural development, and unless this independent life of society is somehow radically suppressed and eliminated, the tendency will grow. Along with it, a parallel political life will also necessarily evolve, and to a certain extent it exists already in Czechoslovakia. Various groupings of a more or less political nature will continue to define themselves politically, to act and confront each other.

These parallel structures, it may be said, represent the most articulated expressions so far of living within the truth. One of the most important tasks the "dissident" movements have set themselves is to support and develop them. Once again, it confirms the fact that all attempts by society to resist the pressure of the system have their essential beginnings in the "pre-political" area. For what else are parallel structures than an area where a different life can be lived, a life that is in harmony with its own aims and which in turn structures itself in harmony with those aims? What else are those initial attempts at social self organization than the efforts of a certain part of society to live - as a society - within the truth, to rid itself of the self-sustaining aspects of totalitarianism and, thus, to extricate itself radically from its involvement in the post-totalitarian system? What else is it but a nonviolent attempt by people to negate the system within themselves and to establish their lives on a new basis, that of their own proper identity? And does this tendency not confirm once more the principle of returning the focus to actual individuals? After all, the parallel structures do not grow a priori out of a theoretical vision of systemic changes (there are no political sects involved), but from the aims of life and the authentic needs of real people. In fact, all eventual changes in the system, changes we may observe here in their rudimentary forms, have come about as it were de facto, from "below," because life compelled them to, not because they came before life, somehow directing it or forcing some change on it.

Historical experience teaches us that any genuinely meaningful point of departure in an individual's life usually has an element of universality about it. In other words, it is not something partial, accessible only to a restricted community, and not transferable to any other. On the contrary, it must be potentially accessible to everyone; it must foreshadow a general solution and, thus, it is not just the expression of an introverted, self contained responsibility that individuals have to and for themselves alone, but responsibility to and for the world. Thus it would be quite wrong to understand the parallel structures and the parallel polis as a retreat into a ghetto and as an act of isolation, addressing itself only to the welfare of those who had decided on such a course, and who are indifferent to the rest. It would be wrong, in short, to consider it an essentially group solution that has nothing to do with the general situation. Such a concept would, from the start, alienate the notion of living within the truth from its proper point of departure, which is concern for others, transforming it ultimately into just another more sophisticated version of living within a lie. In doing so, of course, it would cease to be a genuine point of departure for individuals and groups and would recall the false notion of "dissidents" as an exclusive group with exclusive interests, carrying on their own exclusive dialogue with the powers that be. In any case, even the most highly developed forms of life in the parallel structures, even that most mature form of the parallel polis can only exist - at least in post-totalitarian circumstances - when the individual is at the same time lodged in the "first," official structure by a thousand different relationships, even though it may only be the fact that one buys what one needs in their stores, uses their money, and obeys their laws. Certainly one can imagine life in its baser aspects flourishing in the parallel polis, but would not such a life, lived deliberately that way, as a program, be merely another version of the schizophrenic life within a lie which everyone else must live in one way or another? Would it not just be further evidence that a point of departure that is not a model solution, that is not applicable to others, cannot be meaningful for an individual either? Patočka used to say that the most interesting thing about responsibility is that we carry it with us everywhere. That means that responsibility is ours, that we must accept it and grasp it here, now, in this place in time and space where the Lord has set us down, and that we cannot lie our way out of it by moving somewhere else, whether it be to an Indian ashram or to a parallel polis. If Western young people so often discover that retreat to an Indian monastery fails them as an individual or group solution, then this is obviously because, and only because, it lacks that element of universality, since not everyone can retire to an ashram. Christianity is an example of an opposite way out: it is a point of departure for me here and now…but only because anyone, anywhere, at any time, may avail themselves of it.

In other words, the parallel polis points beyond itself and makes sense only as an act of deepening one's responsibility to and for the whole, as a way of discovering the most appropriate locus for this responsibility, not as an escape from it.

XIX

I have already talked about the political potential of living within the truth and of the limitations on predicting whether, how, and when a given expression of that life within the truth can lead to actual changes. I have also mentioned how irrelevant trying to calculate the risks in this regard are, for an essential feature of independent initiatives is that they are always, initially at least, an all-or-nothing gamble. Nevertheless, this outline of some of the work done by "dissident" movements would be incomplete without considering, if only very generally, some of the different ways this work might actually affect society; in other words, about the ways that responsibility to and for the whole might (without necessarily meaning that it must) be realized in practice.

In the first place, it has to be emphasized that the whole sphere comprising the independent life of society, and even more so the "dissident" movement as such, is naturally far from being the only potential factor that might influence the history of countries living under the post-totalitarian system. The latent social crisis in such societies can at any time, independently of these movements, provoke a wide variety of political changes. It may unsettle the power structure and induce or accelerate various hidden confrontations, resulting in personnel, conceptual, or at least "climactic" changes. It may significantly influence the general atmosphere of life, evoke unexpected and unforeseen social unrest and explosions of discontent. Power shifts at the center of the bloc can influence conditions in the different countries in various ways. Economic factors naturally have an important influence, as do broader trends of global civilization. An extremely important area, which could be a source of radical changes and political upsets, is represented by international politics, the policies adopted by the other superpower and all the other countries, the changing structure of international interests and the positions taken by our bloc. Even the people who end up in the highest positions are not without significance, although as I have already said, one ought not overestimate the importance of leading personalities in the post-totalitarian system. There are many such influences and combinations of influence, and the eventual political impact of the "dissident" movement is thinkable only against this general background and in the context that this background provides. That impact is only one of the many factors (and far from the most important one) that affect political developments, and it differs from the other factors perhaps only in that its essential focus is reflecting upon that political development from the point of view of a defense of people and seeking an immediate application of that reflection.

The primary purpose of the outward direction of these movements is always, as we have seen, to have an impact on society, not to affect the power structure, at least not directly and immediately. Independent initiatives address the hidden sphere; they demonstrate that living within the truth is a human and social alternative and they struggle to expand the space available for that life; they help - even though it is, of course, indirect help - to raise the confidence of citizens; they shatter the world of appearances and unmask the real nature of power. They do not assume a messianic role; they are not a social avant-garde or elite that alone knows best, and whose task it is to "raise the consciousness" of the "unconscious" masses (that arrogant self- projection is, once again, intrinsic to an essentially different way of thinking, the kind that feels it has a patent on some ideal project and therefore that it has the right to impose it on society). Nor
do they want to lead anyone. They leave it up to each individual to decide what he will or will not take from their experience and work.   (If official Czechoslovak propaganda described the Chartists as "self appointees," it was not in order to emphasize any real avant-garde ambitions on their part, but rather a natural expression of how the regime thinks, its tendency to judge others according to itself, since behind any expression of criticism it automatically sees the desire to cast the mighty from their seats and rule in their places "in the name of the people," the same pretext the regime itself has used for years.)

These movements, therefore, always affect the power structure as such indirectly, as a part of society as a whole, for they are primarily addressing the hidden spheres of society, since it is not a matter of confronting the regime on the level of actual power.

I have already indicated one of the ways this can work: an awareness of the laws and the responsibility for seeing that they are upheld is indirectly strengthened. That, of course, is only a specific instance of a far broader influence, the indirect pressure felt from living within the truth: the pressure created by free thought, alternative values and alternative behavior, and by independent social self-realization. The power structure, whether it wants to or not, must always react to this pressure to a certain extent. Its response, however, is always limited to two dimensions: repression and adaptation. Sometimes one dominates, sometimes the other. For example, the Polish "flying university" came under increased persecution and the "flying teachers" were detained by the police. At the same time, however, professors in existing official universities tried to enrich their own curricula with several subjects hitherto considered taboo and this was a result of indirect pressure exerted by the "flying university." The motives for this adaptation may vary from the ideal (the hidden sphere has received the message and conscience and the will to truth are awakened) to the purely utilitarian: the regime's instinct for survival compels it to notice the changing ideas and the changing mental and social climate and to react flexibly to them. Which of these motives happens to predominate in a given moment is not essential in terms of the final effect.

Adaptation is the positive dimension of the regime's response, and it can, and usually does, have a wide spectrum of forms and phases. Some circles may try to integrate values of people from the "parallel world" into the official structures, to appropriate them, to become a little like them while trying to make them a little like themselves, and thus to adjust an obvious and untenable imbalance. In the 1960s, progressive communists began to "discover" certain unacknowledged cultural values and phenomena. This was a positive step, although not without its dangers, since the "integrated" or "appropriated" values lost something of their independence and originality, and having been given a cloak of officialism and conformity, their credibility was somewhat weakened. In a further phase, this adaptation can lead to various attempts on the part of the official structures to reform, both in terms of their ultimate goals and structurally. Such reforms are usually halfway measures; they are attempts to combine and realistically coordinate serving life and serving the post-totalitarian automatism. But they cannot be otherwise; they muddy what was originally a clear demarcation line between living within the truth and living with a lie. They cast a smokescreen over the situation, mystify society, and make it difficult for people to keep their bearings. This, of course, does not alter the fact that it is always essentially good when it happens because it opens out new spaces. But it does make it more difficult to distinguish between "admissible" and "inadmissible" compromises.

Another - and higher - phase of adaptation is a process of internal differentiation that takes place in the official structures. These structures open themselves to more or less institutionalized forms of plurality because the real aims of life demand it. (One example: without changing the centralized and institutional basis of cultural life, new publishing houses, group periodicals, artists' groups, parallel research institutes and workplaces, and so on, may appear under pressure from below. Or another example: the single, monolithic youth organization run by the state as a typical post-totalitarian "transmission belt" disintegrates under the pressure of real needs into a number of more or less independent organizations such as the Union of University Students, the Union of Secondary School Students, the Organization of Working Youth, and so on.) There is a direct relationship between this kind of differentiation, which allows initiatives from below to be felt, and the appearance and constitution of new structures which are already parallel, or rather independent, but which at the same time are respected, or at least tolerated in varying degrees, by official institutions. These new institutions are more than just liberalized official structures adapted to the authentic needs of life; they are a direct expression of those needs, demanding a position in the context of what is already here. In other words, they are genuine expressions of the tendency of society to organize itself. (In Czechoslovakia in 1968 the best-known organizations of this type were KAN, the Club of Committed Non-Communists, and K231, an organization of former political prisoners.)

The ultimate phase of this process is the situation in which the official structures - as agencies of the post-totalitarian system, existing only to serve its automatism and constructed in the spirit of that role - simply begin withering away and dying off, to be replaced by new structures that have evolved from below and are put together in a fundamentally different way.

Certainly many other ways may be imagined in which the aims of life can bring about political transformations in the general organization of things and weaken on all levels the hold that techniques of manipulation have on society. Here I have mentioned only the way in which the general organization of things was in fact changed as we experienced it ourselves in Czechoslovakia around 1968. It must be added that all these concrete instances were part of a specific historical process which ought not be thought of as the only alternative, nor as necessarily repeatable (particularly not in our country), a fact which, of course, takes nothing away from the importance of the general lessons which are still sought and found in it to this day.

While on the subject of 1968 in Czechoslovakia, it may be appropriate to point to some of the characteristic aspects of developments at that time. All the transformations, first in the general mood, then conceptually, and finally structurally, did not occur under pressure from the kind of parallel structures that are taking shape today. Such structures - which are sharply defined antitheses of the official structures - quite simply did not exist at the time, nor were there any "dissidents" in the present sense of the word. The changes that took place were simply a consequence of pressures of the most varied sort, some thoroughgoing, some partial. There were spontaneous attempts at freer forms of thinking, independent creation, and political articulation. There were long-term, spontaneous, and inconspicuous efforts to bring about the interpenetration of the independent life of society with the existing structures, usually beginning with the quiet institutionalization of this life on and around the periphery of the official structures. In other words, it was a gradual process of social awakening, a kind of creeping process in which the hidden spheres gradually opened out. (There is some truth in the official propaganda which talks about a "creeping counterrevolution" in Czechoslovakia, referring to how the aims of life proceed.) The motive force behind this awakening did not have to come exclusively from the independent life of society, considered as a definable social milieu (although of course it did come from there, a fact that has yet to be fully appreciated). It could also simply have come from the fact that people in the official structures who more or less identified with the official ideology came up against reality as it really was and as it gradually became clear to them through latent social crises and their own bitter experiences with the true nature and operations of power. (I am thinking here mainly of the many anti-dogmatic reform communists who grew to become, over the years, a force inside the official structures.) Neither the proper conditions nor the raison d'etre existed for those limited, "self-structuring" independent initiatives familiar from the present era of "dissident" movements that stand so sharply outside the official structures and are unrecognized by them en bloc. At that time, the post-totalitarian system in Czechoslovakia had not yet petrified into the static, sterile, and stable forms that exist today, forms that compel people to fall back on their own organizing capabilities. For many historical and social reasons, the regime in 1968 was more open. The power structure, exhausted by Stalinist despotism and helplessly groping about for painless reform, was inevitably rotting from within, quite incapable of offering any intelligent opposition to changes in the mood, to the way its younger members regarded things and to the thousands of authentic expressions of life on the "pre-political" level that sprang up in that vast political terrain between the official and the unofficial.

From the more general point of view, yet another typical circumstance appears to be important: the social ferment that came to a head in 1968 never - in terms of actual structural changes - went any further than the reform, the differentiation, or the replacement of structures that were really only of secondary importance. It did not affect the very essence of the power structure in the post-totalitarian system, which is to say its political model, the fundamental principles of social organization, not even the economic model in which all economic power is subordinated to political power. Nor were any essential structural changes made in the direct instruments of power (the army, the police, the judiciary, etc.). On that level, the issue was never more than a change in the mood, the personnel, the political line and, above all changes in how that power was exercised. Everything else remained at the stage of discussion and planning. The two officially accepted programs that went furthest in this regard were the April 1968 Action Program of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and the proposal for economic reforms. The Action Program - it could not have been otherwise - was full of contradictions and halfway measures that left the physical aspects of power untouched. And the economic proposals, while they went a long way to accommodate the aims of life in the economic sphere (they accepted such notions as a plurality of interests and initiatives, dynamic incentives, restrictions upon the economic command system), left untouched the basic pillar of economic power, that is, the principle of state, rather than genuine social ownership of the means of production. So there is a gap here which no social movement in the post-totalitarian system has ever been able to bridge, with the possible exception of those few days during the Hungarian uprising.

What other developmental alternative might emerge in the future? Replying to that question would mean entering the realm of pure speculation. For the time being, it can be said that the latent social crisis in the system has always (and there is no reason to believe it will not continue to do so) resulted in a variety of political and social disturbances. (Germany in 1953, Hungary, the U.S.S.R. and Poland in 1956, Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1968, and Poland in 1970 and
1976), all of them very different in their backgrounds, the course of their evolution, and their final consequences. If we look at the enormous complex of different factors that led to such disturbances, and at the impossibility of predicting what accidental accumulation of events will cause that fermentation in the hidden sphere to break through to the light of day (the problem of the "final straw"); and if we consider how impossible it is to guess what the Future holds, given such opposing trends as, on the one hand, the increasingly profound integration of the "bloc" and the expansion of power within it, and on the other hand the prospects of the U.S.S.R. disintegrating under pressure from awakening national consciousness in the non-Russian areas (in this regard the Soviet Union cannot expect to remain forever free of the worldwide struggle for national liberation), then we must see the hopelessness of trying to make long-range
predictions.

In any case, I do not believe that this type of speculation has any immediate significance for the "dissident" movements since these movements, after all, do not develop from speculative thinking, and so to establish themselves on that basis would mean alienating themselves from the very source of their identity.

As far as prospects for the "dissident" movements as such go, there seems to be very little likelihood that future developments will lead to a lasting co-existence of two isolated, mutually non-interacting and mutually indifferent bodies the main polis and the parallel polis. As long as it remains what it is, the practice of living within the truth cannot fail to be a threat to the system. It is quite impossible to imagine it continuing to co-exist with the practice of living within a lie without dramatic tension. The relationship of the post-totalitarian system - as long as it remains what it is - and the independent life of society - as long as it remains the locus of a renewed responsibility for the whole and to the whole - will always be one of either latent or open conflict.

In this situation there are only two possibilities: either the post-totalitarian system will go on developing (that is, will be able to go on developing), thus inevitably coming closer to some dreadful Orwellian vision of a world of absolute manipulation, while all the more articulate expressions of living within the truth are definitely snuffed out; or the independent life of society (the parallel polis), including the "dissident" movements, will slowly but surely become a social phenomenon of growing importance, taking a real part in the life of society with increasing clarity and influencing the general situation. Of course this will always be only one of many factors influencing the situation and it will operate rather in the background, in concert with the other factors and in a way appropriate to the background.

Whether it ought to focus on reforming the official structures or on encouraging differentiation, or on replacing them with new structures, whether the intent is to ameliorate the system or, on the contrary, to tear it down: these and similar questions, insofar as they are not pseudo- problems, can be posed by the "dissident" movement only within the context of a particular situation, when the movement is faced with a concrete task. In other words, it must pose questions, as it were, ad hoc, out of a concrete consideration of the authentic needs of life. To reply to such questions abstractly and to formulate a political program in terms of some hypothetical future would mean, I believe, a return to the spirit and methods of traditional politics, and this would limit and alienate the work of "dissent" where it is most intrinsically itself and has the most genuine prospects for the future. I have already emphasized several times that these "dissident" movements do not have their point of departure in the invention of systemic changes but in a real, everyday struggle for a better life here and now. The political and structural systems that life discovers for itself will clearly always be - for some time to come, at least - limited, halfway, unsatisfying, and polluted by debilitating tactics. It cannot be otherwise, and we must expect this and not be demoralized by it. It is of great importance that the main thing - the everyday, thankless, and never ending struggle of human beings to live more freely, truthfully, and in quiet dignity - never impose any limits on itself, never be halfhearted, inconsistent, never trap itself in political tactics, speculating on the outcome of its actions or entertaining fantasies about the future. The purity of this struggle is the best guarantee of optimum results when it comes to actual interaction with the post-totalitarian structures.

XX

The specific nature of post-totalitarian conditions - with their absence of a normal political life and the fact that any far-reaching political change is utterly unforeseeable - has one positive aspect: it compels us to examine our situation in terms of its deeper coherences and to consider our future in the context of global, long-range prospects of the world of which we are a part. The fact that the most intrinsic and fundamental confrontation between human beings and the system takes place at a level incomparably more profound than that of traditional politics would seem, at the same time, to determine as well the direction such considerations will take.

Our attention, therefore, inevitably turns to the most essential matter: the crisis of contemporary technological society as a whole, the crisis that Heidegger describes as the ineptitude of humanity face to face with the planetary power of technology. Technology - that child of modern science, which in turn is a child of modern metaphysics - is out of humanity's control, has ceased to serve us, has enslaved us and compelled us to participate in the preparation of our own destruction. And humanity can find no way out: we have no idea and no faith, and even less do we have a political conception to help us bring things back under human control. We look on helplessly as that coldly functioning machine we have created inevitably engulfs us, tearing us away from our natural affiliations (for instance, from our habitat in the widest sense of that word, including our habitat in the biosphere) just as it removes us from the experience of Being and casts us into the world of "existences." This situation has already been described from many different angles and many individuals and social groups have sought, often painfully, to find ways out of it (for instance, through Oriental thought or by forming communes). The only social, or rather political, attempt to do something about it that contains the necessary element of universality (responsibility to and for the whole) is the desperate and, given the turmoil the world is in, fading voice of the ecological movement, and even there the attempt is limited to a particular notion of how to use technology to oppose the dictatorship of technology.

"Only a God can save us now," Heidegger says, and he emphasizes the necessity of "a different way of thinking," that is, of a departure from what philosophy has been for centuries, and a radical change in the way in which humanity understands itself, the world, and its position in it. He knows no way out and all he can recommend is "preparing expectations."

Various thinkers and movements feel that this as yet unknown way out might be most generally characterized as a broad "existential revolution”: I share this view, and I also share the opinion that a solution cannot be sought in some technological sleight of hand, that is, in some external proposal for change, or in a revolution that is merely philosophical, merely social, merely technological, or even merely political. These are all areas where the consequences of an existential revolution can and must be felt; but their most intrinsic locus can only be human existence in the profoundest sense of the word. It is only from that basis that it can become a generally ethical - and, of course, ultimately a political - reconstitution of society.

What we call the consumer and industrial (or postindustrial) society, and Ortega y Gasset once understood as "the revolt of the masses," as well as the intellectual, moral, political, and social misery in the world today: all of this is perhaps merely an aspect of the deep crisis in which humanity, dragged helplessly along by the automatism of global technological civilization, finds itself.

The post-totalitarian system is only one aspect - a particularly drastic aspect and thus all the more revealing of its real origins - of this general inability of modern humanity to be the master of its own situation. The automatism of the post-totalitarian system is merely an extreme version of the global automatism of technological civilization. The human failure that it mirrors is only one variant of the general failure of modern humanity.

This planetary challenge to the position of human beings in the world is, of course, also taking place in the Western world, the only difference being the social and political forms it takes; Heidegger refers expressly to a crisis of democracy. There is no real evidence that Western democracy, that is, democracy of the traditional parliamentary type, can offer solutions that are any more profound. It may even be said that the more room there is in the Western democracies (compared to our world) for the genuine aims of life, the better the crisis is hidden from people and the more deeply do they become immersed in it.

It would appear that the traditional parliamentary democracies can offer no fundamental opposition to the automatism of technological civilization and the industrial-consumer society, for they, too, are being dragged helplessly along by it. People are manipulated in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in the post-totalitarian societies. But this static complex of rigid, conceptually sloppy, and politically pragmatic mass political parties run by professional apparatuses and releasing the citizen from all forms of concrete and personal responsibility; and those complex focuses of capital accumulation engaged in secret manipulations and expansion; the omnipresent dictatorship of consumption, production, advertising, commerce, consumer culture, and all that flood of information: all of it, so often analyzed and described, can only with great difficulty be imagined as the source of humanity's rediscovery of itself. In his June 1978 Harvard lecture, Solzhenitsyn describes the illusory nature of freedoms not based on personal responsibility and the chronic inability of the traditional democracies, as a result, to oppose violence and totalitarianism. In a democracy, human beings may enjoy many personal freedoms and securities that are unknown to us, but in the end they do them no good, for they too are ultimately victims of the same automatism, and are incapable of defending their concerns about their own identity or preventing their superficialization or transcending concerns about their own personal survival to become proud and responsible members of the polis, making a genuine contribution to the creation of its destiny.

Because all our prospects for a significant change for the better are very long range indeed, we are obliged to take note of this deep crisis of traditional democracy. Certainly, if conditions were to be created for democracy in some countries in the Soviet bloc (although this is becoming increasingly improbable), it might be an appropriate transitional solution that would help to restore the devastated sense of civic awareness, to renew democratic discussion, to allow for the crystallization of an elementary political plurality, an essential expression of the aims of life. But to cling to the notion of traditional parliamentary democracy as one's political ideal and to succumb to the illusion that only this tried and true form is capable of guaranteeing human beings enduring dignity and an independent role in society would, in my opinion, be at the very least shortsighted.

I see a renewed focus of politics on real people as something far more profound than merely returning to the everyday mechanisms of Western (or, if you like, bourgeois) democracy. In 1968, I felt that our problem could be solved by forming an opposition party that would compete publicly for power with the Communist Party. I have long since come to realize, however, that it
is just not that simple and that no opposition party in and of itself, just as no new electoral laws in and of themselves, could make society proof against some new form of violence. No "dry" organizational measures in themselves can provide that guarantee, and we would be hard-pressed to find in them that God who alone can save us.

XXI

And now I may properly be asked the question: What then is to be done?

My skepticism toward alternative political models and the ability of systemic reforms or changes to redeem us does not, of course, mean that I am skeptical of political thought altogether. Nor does my emphasis on the importance of focusing concern on real human beings disqualify me from considering the possible structural consequences flowing from it. On the contrary, if A was said, then B should be said as well. Nevertheless, I will offer only a few very general remarks.

Above all, any existential revolution should provide hope of a moral reconstitution of society, which means a radical renewal of the relationship of human beings to what I have called the "human order," which no political order can replace. A new experience of being, a renewed rootedness in the universe, a newly grasped sense of higher responsibility, a newfound inner relationship to other people and to the human community - these factors clearly indicate the direction in which we must go.

And the political consequences? Most probably they could be reflected in the constitution of structures that will derive from this new spirit, from human factors rather than from a particular formalization of political relationships and guarantees. In other words, the issue is the rehabilitation of values like trust, openness, responsibility, solidarity, love. I believe in structures that are not aimed at the technical aspect of the execution of power, but at the significance of that execution in structures held together more by a commonly shared feeling of the importance of certain communities than by commonly shared expansionist ambitions directed outward. There can and must be structures that are open, dynamic, and small; beyond a certain point, human ties like personal trust and personal responsibility cannot work. There must be structures that in principle place no limits on the genesis of different structures.   Any accumulation of power whatsoever (one of the characteristics of automatism) should be profoundly alien to it. They would be structures not in the sense of organizations or institutions, but like a community. Their authority certainly cannot be based on long-empty traditions, like the tradition of mass political parties, but rather on how, in concrete terms, they enter into a given situation. Rather than a strategic agglomeration of formalized organizations, it is better to have organizations springing up ad hoc, infused with enthusiasm for a particular purpose and disappearing when that purpose has been achieved. The leaders' authority ought to derive from their personalities and be personally tested in their particular surroundings, and not from their position in any nomenclature. They should enjoy great personal confidence and even great lawmaking powers based on that confidence. This would appear to be the only way out of the classic impotence of traditional democratic organizations, which frequently seem founded more on mistrust than mutual confidence, and more on collective irresponsibility than on responsibility. It is only with the full existential backing of every member of the community that a permanent bulwark against creeping totalitarianism can be established. These structures should naturally arise from below as a consequence of authentic social self-organization; they should derive vital energy from a living dialogue with the genuine needs from which they arise, and when these needs are gone, the structures should also disappear. The principles of their internal organization should be very diverse, with a minimum of external regulation. The decisive criterion of this self-constitution should be the structure's actual significance, and not just a mere abstract norm.

Both political and economic life ought to be founded on the varied and versatile cooperation of such dynamically appearing and disappearing organizations. As far as the economic life of society goes, I believe in the principle of self-management, which is probably the only way of achieving what all the theorists of socialism have dreamed about, that is, the genuine (i.e., informal) participation of workers in economic decision making, leading to a feeling of genuine responsibility for their collective work. The principles of control and discipline ought to be abandoned in favor of self-control and self-discipline.

As is perhaps clear from even so general an outline, the systemic consequences of an existential revolution of this type go significantly beyond the framework of classical parliamentary democracy. Having introduced the term "post-totalitarian" for the purposes of this discussion, perhaps I should refer to the notion I have just outlined - purely for the moment - as the prospects for a "post-democratic" system.

Undoubtedly this notion could be developed further, but I think it would be a foolish undertaking, to say the least, because slowly but surely the whole idea would become alienated, separated from itself. After all, the essence of such a "post-democracy" is also that it can only develop via facts, as a process deriving directly from life, from a new atmosphere and a new spirit (political thought, of course, would play a role here, though not as a director, merely as a guide). It would be presumptuous, however, to try to foresee the structural expressions of this new spirit without that spirit actually being present and without knowing its concrete physiognomy.

XXII

I would probably have omitted the entire preceding section as a more suitable subject for private meditation were it not for a certain recurring sensation. It may seem rather presumptuous, and therefore I will present it as a question: Does not this vision of "post-democratic" structures in some ways remind one of the "dissident" groups or some of the independent citizens' initiatives as we already know them from our own surroundings? Do not these small communities, bound together by thousands of shared tribulations, give rise to some of those special humanly meaningful political relationships and ties that we have been talking about? Are not these communities (and they are communities more than organizations) motivated mainly by a common belief in the profound significance of what they are doing since they have no chance of direct, external success joined together by precisely the kind of atmosphere in which the formalized and ritualized ties common in the official structures are supplanted by a living sense of solidarity and fraternity? Do not these "post-democratic" relationships of immediate personal trust and the informal rights of individuals based on them come out of the background of all those commonly shared difficulties? Do not these groups emerge, live, and disappear under pressure from concrete and authentic needs, unburdened by the ballast of hollow traditions? Is not their attempt to create an articulate form of living within the truth and to renew the feeling of higher responsibility in an apathetic society really a sign of some kind of rudimentary moral reconstitution?

In other words, are not these informed, non-bureaucratic, dynamic, and open communities that comprise the "parallel polis" a kind of rudimentary prefiguration, a symbolic model of those more meaningful "post-democratic" political structures that might become the foundation of a better society?

I know from thousands of personal experiences how the mere circumstance of having signed Charter 77 has immediately created a deeper and more open relationship and evoked sudden and powerful feelings of genuine community among people who were all but strangers before. This kind of thing happens only rarely, if at all, even among people who have worked together for long periods in some apathetic official structure. It is as though the mere awareness and acceptance of a common task and a shared experience were enough to transform people and the climate of their lives, as though it gave their public work a more human dimension than is seldom found elsewhere.

Perhaps all this is only the consequence of a common threat. Perhaps the moment the threat ends or eases, the mood it helped create will begin to dissipate as well. (The aim of those who threaten us, however, is precisely the opposite. Again and again, one is shocked by the energy they devote to contaminating, in various despicable ways, all the human relationships inside the threatened community.)

Yet even if that were so, it would change nothing in the question I have posed.

We do not know the way out of the miasmas of the world, and it would be an expression of unforgivable pride were we to see the little we do as a fundamental solution, or were we to present ourselves, our community, and our solutions to vital problems as the only thing worth doing.

Even so, I think that given all these preceding thoughts on post-totalitarian conditions, and given the circumstances and the inner constitution of the developing efforts to defend human beings and their identity in such conditions, the questions I have posed are appropriate. If nothing else, they are an invitation to reflect concretely on our own experience and to give some thought to whether certain elements of that experience do not - without our really being aware of it - point somewhere further, beyond their apparent limits, and whether right here, in our everyday lives, certain challenges are not already encoded, quietly waiting for the moment when they will be read and grasped.

For the real question is whether the brighter future is really always so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us, and kept us from developing it?

(Emphasis added by Sarawak Headhunter).

The Facts About Sarawak

2012-01-07T16:17:00.000+08:00

The Facts About Sarawak

ABU People's Rally Tonight At PAS HQ Taman Melewar

2011-12-15T16:43:00.000+08:00

Shahrizat's Beef

2011-12-08T03:01:00.002+08:00

Courtesy of the New Straight Times Malaysia

Is Taib's Family Fortune Actually Worth 5 or 10 Times More Than This?

2011-12-07T17:34:00.000+08:00

Taib family fortune 'RM4.6bil in Malaysia alone'

Keruah Usit
11:56AM Dec 7, 2011

Sarawak's Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud famously boasted that he has more money than he can ever spend.

A Swiss NGO campaigning against corruption in Sarawak, the Bruno Manser Fund, has now fleshed out this assertion. The BMF reports that Taib's family owns US$1.46 billion (RM4.6 billion) in corporate assets in 14 wealthy companies - in Malaysia alone.

According to the BMF, Taib himself, his four children, eight siblings and his first cousin, Abdul Hamed Sepawi, have a stake in 332 Malaysian companies. In the three largest of these companies, the BMF contends, the Taib family owns substantial shares in Cahya Mata Sarawak or CMS (84 percent of net assets of RM2.4 billion), Custodev Sdn Bhd (25 percent of RM1.6 billion) and Ta Ann Holdings Bhd (at least 35 percent of RM1.4 billion).

CMS, popularly known by its nickname ‘Chief Minister's Sons', is a listed conglomerate with construction, cement, steel, property, private education and stockbroking interests. Custodev is a property development company. Ta Ann is a logging and oil palm giant. The BMF also says Taib's family are sole owners of Achi Jaya Holdings, a monopoly holder over log exports, with assets of RM550 million.

These findings contradict Taib's claim that his relatives have grown rich only outside Sarawak, using their entrepreneurship talent.

Taib denied using his family members as his proxies, claiming instead that his relatives are rich because they are "good" and "clever".

"We consider these corporate interests of the Taib family to be illicit assets. There are many clear indications that Taib has abused his public office to build a corruption and fraud-based billion-dollar empire," BMF director Lukas Straumann alleged in a press statement released internationally last weekend.

"We are shocked to see that the Taib family has so shamelessly enriched itself while the people of Sarawak have to struggle with widespread poverty and an appalling lack of infrastructure and government services."

As a yardstick, Taib's recently announced budget estimated a total state revenue of RM4.04 billion in 2012.

The BMF readily admits that the RM4.6 billion figure is an underestimate, saying there are likely to be hidden Malaysian assets, as well as enormous capital flight.

The NGO says its research shows Taib's inner family circle has a stake in 85 companies in 24 countries and offshore jurisdictions worldwide, including Australia, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, Brunei, Cambodia, Canada, the Cayman Islands, Fiji, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Jersey, Saudi Arabia, Labuan, New Zealand, China, the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, the UK, the US and Vietnam, and holds "illicit assets worth several billion US dollars".

The BMF has been a constant gadfly in the side of Taib's family, one of Malaysia's richest. It has collaborated with investigative journalists in the anti-graft website Sarawak Report to trace the financial trail of Taib's self-proclaimed fortune. These human rights campaigners have unearthed astonishing statistics from publicly available corporate and stock exchange documents.

Sarawak Report founder Clare Rewcastle-Brown, during an interview on Family Trees, a Canadian prime-time television programme screened last Saturday on Global News, pointed out that investigating Taib's financial network is highly workable, because Taib family members openly own so many companies and such a huge chunk of international real estate.

Despite the wealth of accumulated information available, numerous reports by local human rights actvists to the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) and the Malaysian police have been futile. However, the governments of Switzerland and Germany have begun graft investigations into Taib's family, and Canada and the United Kingdom have expressed concern.

Rewcastle-Brown alleges that Taib, as state minister in charge of land and forestry for some four decades, dealt out vast land parcels and logging licences to family members and cronies. Ta Ann, for instance, has been awarded over 675,000 ha of logging and plantation concessions, an area the size of Negri Sembilan, in three decades.

"I've seen that most of the companies that have received the lands have been companies owned by his siblings and his children and political allies that he needs to keep sweet... mainly, his own family. I've painstakingly researched what I can of many of these contracts," she said.

"It has been possible for me, sitting in London, to go through the company records online and to trace how this money has gone from Sarawak in the early 1980s to Canada."

Taib has admitted giving ‘seed money' to his eldest daughter Jamilah to finance her Canadian property business, Sakto, said to be worth more than US$100 million (RM310 million).

Her Canadian husband and business partner, Sean Murray (left in photo), wrote a letter to the Global News programme, complaining that "Jamilah and I find these statements about ourselves and our business false, highly defamatory and very damaging".

Curiously, though, Taib and his family have all resisted taking the BMF or Sarawak Report to court. Tactics appear to have changed since the lawsuit brought by Taib against Malaysiakini in 2007, after the news portal reported a scandal in alleged kickbacks during timber exports.

The recent flurry of global news items on his family's ostentatious wealth seems to have overwhelmed Taib's lawyers.

Locally, Sarawakian lawmakers attempting to ask questions in Parliament have been stonewalled. Worse still, opposition representatives in the state legislative assembly have had their microphones silenced, and have seen parts of their speeches deleted from the Hansard.

Even so, Taib's family must not place much hope on being able to silence all their growing critics, throughout the world. They may speak softly and carry a big stick, but they may already have drawn too much attention to their wealth.

The BMF concluded its press statement by calling on anti-corruption and anti-money laundering authorities to investigate Taib's family, and urging international companies to shun doing business with the family, for "legal reasons" as well as to protect their reputations.

KERUAH USIT is a human rights activist - ‘anak Sarawak, bangsa Malaysia'. This weekly column is an effort to provide a voice for marginalised Malaysians. Keruah Usit can be contacted at keruah_usit@yahoo.com