Happiness

The reasons are a tad too complicated to explain here, but the last three days have been among the most interesting and rewarding of the past 25 or so years.

Behold

The days are already getting longer.

25 Years Ago

More history lesson, this time with video.  Although the winds of revolution were sweeping across the rest of eastern Europe, Romania remained staunchly defiant, and on December 21, 1989, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu mandated a pro-government rally in the capitol city of Bucharest.  Thousands of workers were forced to hold banners and chant praises at scripted intervals, but several hundred protesters in their late teens appeared on the edge of the crowd, chanting "freedom" and "democracy."  Their protest spread to much of the rest of the audience, and you can see Ceausescu realize that the crowd had turned on him at around the 1:05 mark in the video below.

The "someone" that was shooting were Romanian police, who killed 13 of the protesters on the spot. According to some news reports, two soldiers and an officer were also shot for refusing to fire into the crowd of unarmed protesters.

Things tuned ugly fast, and within two days Ceausescu attempted to flee the country.

He didn't get very far.

On Christmas Day, 1989, Ceausescu and his wife Elena were executed by firing squad for their crimes against the Romanian people.

  

It is hard to find any sympathy for monsters like the Ceausescus, but our compassion shouldn't be limited to those whom we like.  We can mourn the dictators as well as the murdered protesters, and wish that Nicolae and Elena could have awakened from their greed for power and wealth.  We could wish that they could have found the opportunity to provide the appropriate reparations for their crimes, but it's also possible that facing the firing squad may have been the greatest reparation and the greatest service to their country that they could have performed.  

But it's hard to find that sympathy. 

Regard the Moon

When the water is still, the reflection of the moon is clear.  When waves disturb the surface, the reflection is also disturbed.

Religion

The one really unsolvable problem that seemingly goes even beyond the ability of science to answer is that of existence itself.  Given all the improbabilities of existence, the fact that there is something rather than nothing, it seems more likely and more logical that there should be in fact nothing.  Yet here we are.  Whether it's a Big Bang, or waves of potential, or the dream of a turtle, that fact that something exists at all, rather than nothing, seems like the most unlikely of miracles.  And to ask the most unscientific question of all, why?

Home

You'll never be lost if you don't have a destination in mind.

The mountains tell stories to those who know how to read the rocks.

"Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and include it within the world we have created, is clearly impossible. That is why Quality cannot be defined. If we do define it we are defining something less than Quality itself." - Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Replace the word Quality with substrate consciousness, or potential, or buddha-nature, and you get the same thing we been discussing here for a while now.

Potential

"In our highly complex organic state we advanced organisms respond to our environment with an invention of many marvelous analogues. We invent earth and heavens, trees, stones and oceans, gods, music, arts, language, philosophy, engineering, civilization and science. We call these analogues reality. And they are reality. We mesmerize our children in the name of truth into knowing that they are reality. We throw anyone who does not accept these analogues into an insane asylum. But that which causes us to invent the analogues is Quality. Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it."

In his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, author Robert Pirsig called "Quality," with a capital Q, what I've been calling substrate consciousness and potential, which in turn roughly correlate to the Buddhist storehouse consciousness and buddha-nature.  I've also called it cookie dough in the past, but that's a long story.

I'm leery, though, of the term "potential" because while it does invoke probability and quantum states, it sounds to too many people like "self-potential" and just another self-improvement scheme, when actually it's quite different.  "Potentiality" works a little bit better, because it refers to the potential itself, not a subject of potential, but it's a little too long and unwieldy.

Sanskrit terms are even longer and turn many people off.

"Becoming," used as a noun, might work, but if it's read as a verb the meaning changes.

So for now, I'm going to have to stick with "potential" until I can think of a better word, and run the risk of being misunderstood.

Falling Water

"When the water returns to its original oneness with the river, it no longer has any individual feeling to it; it resumes its own nature, and finds composure  How very glad the water must be to come back to the original river!  If this is so, what feeling will we have when we die?" - Shunryo Suzuki, from Zen Mind, Beginners Mind

Not Grasping

But all of this, substrate consciousness, potential, waves, and so on, is just mere philosophy.  We're not supposed to "understand" it or "get" it, but instead to experience it.

Sit quietly somewhere and just let your thoughts come and go.  If you get distracted, focus on your breath.  With time, the waves will subside, the differentiation between yourself and your experience will drop away, and the substrate consciousness will transform into potential.  

At the very instant when you think you realize it, it will be over.

Forgotten

Imagine a waterfall.  Above, the water is calm and serene, and below, much the same.  But as the water falls, it separates into individual drops, and each falling drop might worry about what will happen when it hits the bottom.  When the drops were part of the stream, there was no worry, no suffering, no anxiety. It is only when the drops are separate from the stream does all the worrying occur.

But the drops were always water and nothing but water, above the falls, below the falls, and while they were falling.  But separate from the stream, they forget that they're water, and imagine that they are something that should have an existence separate from the rest of the water.

Shunryo Suzuki once wrote that before we were born we had no feeling; we were one with the universe.  After we are separated by birth from this oneness,  then we had feeling.  When we do not realize that we are one with the universe, then we have fear.  "Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact we have no fear of death anymore, and we have no actual difficulty in our life."   

A Surfer's Experience of the Ocean Is Different From a Sunbather's

Okay, Shokai, a week or so ago, if even that, you were saying that everything in the universe was composed of something you called buddha nature, which you described as the potential to awaken, or to put it another way, a probability.  Cool story, bro.  But now you're saying that everything in the universe is composed of something I can't even quite understand that you're calling "substrate consciousness," and that everything is like waves on the ocean of substrate consciousness.  Well, which one is it, huh?

Actually, that's a straw-man question - no one asked me that (or in that tone of voice, which is the internal tone I use in my frequent moments of self doubt).  But the voices in my head (not the schizophrenic kind of voices, but that interior monologue we all engage in) brought that up as something the hypothetical reader of this blog might ask (presuming I even have any readers left anymore).

So, to answer my own question, they're actually the same thing,  It's all just a matter of how one looks at it.  To use some Sanskrit terms (sorry), what I'm calling the substrate consciousness is alaya-vijnana, which is like gazinging at the ocean from some dry vantage point and studying the waves. But if one were to jump into the ocean and directly experience the motion of the currents, the rolling of the waves, and the silence and cold of the subsurface, one would quickly ignore the individual waves and instead experience the actual, undifferentiated ocean.  This is the tathagata-garbha (Sanskrit) or "womb of the buddhas," The tathagata-garbha is the mind purified, the substrate consciousness transformed, the alaya-vijnana in its undifferentiated state.  The undifferentiated womb of the buddhas is where realization arises, and is therefore another way of saying "buddha nature." 

So if I've connected the dots correctly and if you follow me, buddha nature and substrate consciousness are one and the same thing, which is the one thing that is you and I and all the rest of the universe.  But since I don't like using Sanskrit terms or religious terminology, from here on in for alaya-vijnana I'll use the term "substrate consciousness" and for tathagata-garbha and buddha-nature, I'll use the term "potential."  

Okay?

The One Thing

According to Buddhist writer Thich Nhat Hanh, "our mind has eight aspects or, we can say, eight 'consciousnesses.'  The first five are based in the physical senses,  They are the consciousnesses that arise when our eyes see form, our ears hear sounds, our nose smells an odor, our tongue tastes something, or our skin touches an object.  The sixth, mind consciousness, . . . arises when our mind contacts an object of perception.  The seventh . . . is the part of consciousness that gives rise to and is the support of mind consciousness.  The eighth . . . is the ground, or base, of the other seven consciousnesses."  

That is why I call the eighth consciousness "substrate consciousness."  Various teachers over the centuries have used different names.  Thich Nhat Hanh called it by the Sanskrit alaya vijnana, or store consciousness (that term is what is left out by the ellipses in the last sentence).  Translator Red Pine called it "repository consciousness," the receptacle that contains whatever remains from our thoughts, words, or deeds,and is therefore the seedbed from which our subsequent thoughts, words, and deeds arise.  

Substrate consciousness has been compared to the ocean.  Everything we see, hear, smell, taste, touch, feel, or think flows into the ocean of substrate consciousness like thousands of rivers. Individual thoughts, words, and deeds, are like "waves" in the "ocean" of substrate consciousness.

All material things are known to us only by our perception of them; therefore, all things and our experience of all things are one and the same and are just more waves in the ocean of substrate consciousness.  Therefore, the entire material universe - you, me, the sun, the stars, and the sky - are waves of substrate consciousness. arise from substrate consciousness, and eventually resolve back to substrate consciousness.  Everything is nothing other than substrate consciousness.  

Although we can differentiate one wave from another in the ocean, each wave is itself nothing but ocean and is never separate from ocean.  Similarly, we can differentiate between things in the universe - self, other, mountains, rivers, plants, and animals - it's all still substrate consciousness and is never anything other than substrate consciousness.  

Everything is the one thing.  

Winter Mood, 1991

Close Up

Portrait of the City

Fog

Building Atlanta (1990)

"The story of your life is not your life, it is your story," John Barth once wrote, but Simone Weil once said that "imagination and fiction make up more than three-quarters of our real life." We're all spinning narratives, both would agree, and confusing those narratives with the substance of our life.

Post

I promised to keep things light, but 34 years ago today, John Lennon was shot while I was watching Monday Night Football.

20 years ago today, Czech Prime Minister Ladislav Adamec resigned, and was replaced by the relatively unknown Marian Calfa.  In Lithuania, the legislature voted 243-1 to adopt a multi-party system, raising the question of what that "one" was thinking.

In East Germany, author Martin Ahrends declared Ost Frauen, East German women, to be the best lovers "because they are more romantic, less emancipated, and less competitive.  They are also less worn out, because they are less absorbed by their work."  This according to the December 8, 1989 Wall Street Journal.

As for all the previous talk about quantum physics and consciousness, let me just add that over 2,500 years ago, Buddhist thinkers and other contemplatives observed that all the universe was nothing but buddha-nature, and buddha-nature, in turn, was nothing but the potential for awakening.  Connecting the dots and providing a little modern interpretation, they were claiming that all matter was nothing but a potential, a probability, very close to what Heisenberg and Schrodinger would later "discover."

   

So that's it for tonight.  Sweet dreams, y'all, and stay warm.

PostScript:  Oh yes, today is also the day when the Buddha attained his enlightenment.

Manipulated photograph of the Atlanta skyline from  the west side of town, approx. 1990

I didn't mean from my recent posts to sound so didactic.  Between reading the Lankavatara Sutra and my 1989 scrapbook of news clippings, the topics discussed were what has been on my mind, but on re-reading about it all in this blog, it all sounds a little preachy and ponderous.

I'll try to keep it all a little lighter from here on in.

Consciousness

Atlanta, July 2014

The eight forms of consciousness - the six sense consciousnesses, self consciousness, and substrate consciousness - can be grouped into three categories of consciousness - perceiving consciousness, object-producing consciousness, and true consciousness.  

In this simpler, three-fold categorization, perceiving consciousness includes the first five sense consciousnesses (awareness of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch), object-producing consciousness includes the sixth sense (awareness of thought) and the self consciousness, and true consciousness consists of the substrate consciousness.

It should be noted that perceiving consciousness is affected by conditions, object-producing consciousness causes conditions, and true consciousness is free from cause and effect. 

The Two Slit Experiment

Thomas Young's famous experiment over 200 years ago provides about the most compelling evidence yet for all-mind theory - the concept that everything in the universe is composed of consciousness.  How else can electrons be either waves or particles other than how we think about them?  And what waves, if not waves of consciousness, can those electron particles be riding on? And most significantly, how do the electrons know whether or not they're being observed if they lacked consciousness?

Turtles All The Way Down

"At first there was nothing, then nothing turned itself inside-out and became something." - Sun Ra

The Greek philosopher Lucretius wrote in the First Century that "Nothing can be created from nothing" and this assertion held a powerful influence over centuries of subsequent philosophy. For a long time, there was no good explanation for the creation of all the matter in the universe.  The assumption that the matter has simply always existed, a basic premise that we just had to accept, was hardly a satisfying answer.  But the theory that the energy required for a Big Bang just appeared out of nowhere seemed to violate the basic laws of thermodynamics.  

In his book A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking explains that the negative energy of gravity throughout the universe exactly cancels the positive energy represented by matter. So the total energy of the universe balances out at exactly zero.  So before the existence of the universe, there was zero energy and after the appearance of the universe there was zero energy.  Nothing changed - we have always had zero energy.

It was subsequently suggested that the universe may have begun as a quantum fluctuation of the vacuum. It used to be thought that the vacuum was truly nothing, simply inert space. But we now know that it is actually a hive of activity with particle-antiparticle pairs being repeatedly produced out of the vacuum and almost immediately annihilating themselves back into nothingness again. The creation of a particle-antiparticle pair out of the vacuum violates the law of conservation of energy, but the Heisenberg uncertainty principle allows such violations for a very short time. This phenomenon has reportedly been tested and confirmed. 

Edward Tryon, in his 1973 paper, Is the Universe a Vacuum Fluctuation?, wrote:

In any big bang model, one must deal with the problem of 'creation'. This problem has two aspects. One is that the conservation laws of physics forbid the creation of something from nothing. The other is that even if the conservation laws were inapplicable at the moment of creation, there is no apparent reason for such an event to occur. 

Contrary to widespread belief, such an event need not have violated any of the conventional laws of physics. The laws of physics merely imply that a Universe which appears from nowhere must have certain specific properties. In particular, such a Universe must have a zero net value for all conserved quantities.   

To indicate how such a creation might have come about, I refer to quantum field theory, in which every phenomenon that could happen in principle actually does happen occasionally in practice, on a statistically random basis. For example, quantum electrodynamics reveals that an electron, positron and photon occasionally emerge spontaneously from a perfect vacuum. When this happens, the three particles exist for a brief time, and then annihilate each other, leaving no trace behind.   

If it is true that our Universe has a zero net value for all conserved quantities, then it may simply be a fluctuation of the vacuum, the vacuum of some larger space in which our Universe is imbedded.  In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time.

While I like the suggestion that the universe is just "one of those things which happen from time to time," I'm more interested in the implication that the universe is embedded in some larger space.  If so, then the so-called universe is not truly "universal," and what I consider the Universe is our cosmos plus whatever space it's embedded in, and whatever space that's embedded in, and so on. For all-mind theory, which holds that the entire phenomenal universe is simply a thought, a product of some mind, this multiverse theory provides a platform in which that mind can abide.

A monk once asked a great guru what the world rested upon, and the guru answered that the world and the rest of the entire universe was supported on the back of an enormous turtle.  "But what supports the turtle?" the monk asked, and the guru answered that it stood on the back of an even larger turtle.  "But what about that turtle?  What does it stand on?"

"Don't you see?" the guru replied.  "It's turtles all the way down."

The Speed of Thought

Everyone knows that nothing is faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, but it isn’t clear why this is the case. To explain why things can’t go faster with a tautological "because it's the universal constant" is the same thing as saying “because they can’t” and is hardly a satisfactory answer.  

Light slows down in water or glass, and when it moves in water we say the medium is water, and when it moves in glass we say the medium is glass, but when it moves in empty space we fall silent. How can a wave vibrate nothing? There is no physical basis for light to move in empty space at all, let alone define the fastest speed possible.

One possible explanation that comes from all-mind theory is that light moves on waves of consciousness.  Not your consciousness or anyone's else's for that matter, but just pure, unrefined consciousness, the consciousness that pervades - and creates - all existence.

We experience at least six types of consciousness, each associated with a sense - sight consciousness which we call "vision," sound consciousness which we call "hearing," scent consciousness which we call "smelling," flavor consciousness which we call "tasting," touch consciousness which we call "feeling," and thought consciousness which we call "thinking."   Anytime a sensation encounters a sentient being's sense organ, be it eye, ear, nose, tongue, skin, or mind, one form or another of consciousness arises. 

On close examination, though, we realize that there has to be an even deeper consciousness that has created a mental model of a self along with memory, emotion, and desire and aversion, and we can call this deeper consciousness "self-consciousness," and we experience that as well.  In fact, it's self consciousness that more or less defines the whole luminous experience we have of existence.  

Light doesn't move through space on waves of any of the sense consciousnesses or on self-consciousness, though.  On even deeper examination, we can see that there is an eighth consciousness,  a substrate consciousness that is independent of any self, and that exists before we are born and continues after we die.  No being or entity possesses substrate consciousness. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that all beings and entities are conceptions or creations of substrate consciousness, and are in a manner of speaking possessions themselves of substrate consciousness.  

It is this eighth consciousness that brings the universe into existence.  It is this eighth consciousness that rises and falls and creates waves of light in empty space. Nothing moves faster than these waves because they are a direct manifestation of pure consciousness, and just as the hand cannot grasp the fist, consciousness cannot "think" faster than thought.   

I may not be completely correct on my interpretation of the physics (and metaphysics) involved here, or on the eight forms of consciousness, but while it may sound odd at first to think of the entire existent universe as one eternal consciousness, is that any more absurd than a creator that's somehow separate from the creation, or a big bang that emerged out of nothingness?

All Mind

Physical realists contend that the universe is more or less what physics says it is.  In their view, the universe consists of fundamentally physical objects located in space and time, that exist in natural states, and that interact with each other in various but predictable kinds of ways.  Most importantly, the physical universe is independent of the mind of the observer - it exists and behaves as it does regardless of whether or not one is thinking about it or what one thinks about it.

In other words, physical realism is the view that the physical world we see is real and exists by itself, alone. Most people think this is self-evident, but physical realism has been struggling with the facts of quantum physics for some time now.  Experimental results that differ when observed from results with no observer, and quantum waves that entangle, superpose, and then collapse, are physically impossible, but no other theory predicts the experimental results, so physical realists are faced with the problem of a quantum theory that's physically impossible but that successfully predicts physical reality.  To put it another way, the unreal explains reality.

If we take the position which initially sounds absurd that the physical universe is just a conception of mind, then the quantum/realism paradox falls away.  In "all mind" theory, things behave the way that they do merely because we think they behave that way.  If we were to think differently, things would behave differently, just as when we dream we can fly, then we can fly, at least in the dream. 

When we think about things that are very, very small, like sub-atomic particles, or things that are very, very large, like galaxies or clusters of galaxies, that is, things very far from our own typical experiential scale, we think differently and then those very small and very large things behave differently.  The fact that the theories of how things behave at our experiential scale and at imaginative scales don't line up is just a problem of logic, which itself is another object of mind.

This isn't to say that reality is like a dream, where the dreamer exists in the state of true reality and the dream-world exists somehow separate from that true reality.  In "all mind" theory, everything, the dream, the dreamer, and the physical realm of the dreamer, is all in the mind.  And not to take things too far (but why not?), then the "mind" is also a product of mind.

On the Name of the Washington Pro Football Team

Northern Arizona, 2006

I was in a conversation with a colleague the other day, and he asked me in the course of our discussion if I thought that the Washington, DC pro football team should change its name.

Of course it should, I replied.  It's amazing that the racist term has lasted this long into the 21st Century.

My colleague smiled as he thought that I had just stepped into the trap he had cleverly set for me.  By my logic, he concluded, "then the Atlanta Braves and the Cleveland Indians should have to change their names, too," and the smile on his face implied "game over."

Not at all.  "Braves" and "Indians" are not racist, derogatory terms. although there are some historical inaccuracies in the term "Indians," as Columbus had mistakenly believed he had sailed all the way to India, and the indigenous people he had encountered were Indians, not native North Americans.  But that aside, if Italian-Americans aren't offended by naming a team after the error of one of their own, I have no objection to it, either.

But the term "redskins" is irreducibly racial, as it refers to the color (red) of a person's skin.  There's no way of avoiding that it's a direct reference to race, and it's use in history has not been kind but was most often used to categorize an enemy presumed to be savage, hostile, and uncivilized.  It's interesting to note, as Robert Pirsig points out in his book Lila, that the very same things the colonists said about the natives - that they were ill-mannered and uncouth and couldn't hold their liquor, but were surprisingly brave and tenacious in battle - were the exact same things that the Europeans said about the colonists.  The colonists were either transferring the insult onto those they felt superior to, or else they had assumed the characteristics of those whose land they were taking.

In any event, the term "redskins" is a derogatory, racist term rooted in the unpardonable genocide that marked the Europeans' colonization of North America.  It's not a suitable term for a pro football team, which is not to say that any term referring to some aspect or another of the native Americans is inappropriate.

Let me put it this way:  it's acceptable that Notre Dame calls its sports teams the Fighting Irish, and that Boston has chosen the term Celtics for its basketball team.  But it would be inappropriate to call a team "The Micks," or, in a closer analogy to the name of the Washington football team, "The Pasty-Faced Alcoholic Potato Eaters."     

It's fine to call a team The Reds because the term does not refer to a skin color or a political affiliation any more than The Browns refers to skin tone. 

It's acceptable to call a team or biker gang or other organization The Mayans or The Aztecs in reference to historical Mexican cultures, but it's inappropriate to use the slur "The Wetbacks" for anything.

The only reason that "redskins" sounds acceptable to us today is that we're so used to hearing it, having grown up in NFL culture.  I can remember first realizing the implications of the name back in the 80s, and being mildly surprised that people were getting away with it, and like most people I concluded that it must be somehow alright.

But times have changed, and among those changes are greater racial and cultural sensitivity.  What people called a team in the 20th Century may no longer be appropriate, tradition or not.  Atlanta once had a minor-league baseball team back in the era before integration called "the Crackers," a derogatory term for caucasians.   While it's mildly amusing that an all-white team chose to call themselves by an anti-white slur, sort of like black people using the notorious n-word, the term "Cracker" is also offensive to African Americans as one of its origins is supposedly the crackers of whips, e.g., slave owners.  The baseball team has long since been disbanded and no one is calling for the name to be restored, but those who want to maintain the name of the Washington football team are practicing the same outdated insensitivity as would be the case for reviving the Crackers' team name,

So it's time for a new name for the Washington gridiron team, and I'm glad to offer a suggestion. Given the team's location (Washington DC), its host city's role as the seat of government, and the current political climate, the team from Washington should consider calling itself "The Washington Gridlock."

The Pace of History

"History is moving very rapidly in this country where we had 20 years of timelessness," said playwright Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia's new Civic Forum.

Journalist Mike Leary, writing for the Knight-Ridder agency on November 29, 1989, reported that as recently as May of that year, Havel had been languishing in prison and the small band of opposition figures described themselves as a "ship of fools."  Only 12 days earlier, the Civic Forum did not exist and riot police were violently assaulting student demonstrators in Wenceslas Square. 

The rapid pace of progress was demonstrated by a timeline that ran in the previous day's Wall Street Journal:

February 1948  The Communist Party, part of the coalition that governed after World War II, seizes power. 

January 1968  Discontent over the pace of economic reform and cultural liberalization leads to the ouster of Antonin Novotny as party boss.  He is replaced by Alexander Dubcek, a reformer. 

April 1968  A series of reforms, later called the Prague Spring, is adopted, including measures that guarantee freedom of speech, religion, press, and travel. 

August 1968  The Soviet army invades, Dubcek is replaced by Gustav Husak, Czechoslovakia accepts the stationing of Soviet troops and agrees to curb almost all of the Dubcek reforms. 

December 1987  Milos Jakes succeeds Husak as leader of the Communists. 

Oct. 18, 1989 Erich Honecker is ousted in East Germany and replaced by Egon Krenz. 

Nov. 9  East Germany opens its borders. 

Nov. 12  Jakes says he won't tolerate street protests or relax control. 

Nov. 17  50,000 demonstrators march in Prague.  Riot police use tear gas and clubs on them.  

Nov. 20  More than 200,000 people demonstrate in Prague, demanding free elections and the resignations of hard-liners. 

Nov. 24 Jakes resigns and is succeeded by Karel Urbanek, Dubcek returns triumphantly to Prague and addresses a crowd of 250,000 in Wenceslas Square.

On the 25th of November, the crowds in Prague topped 350,000 and then 500,000 on the 26th, and on the 28th, millions of Czechs and Slovaks walked off their jobs and into the streets of Prague, initiating a powerful demonstration and a crippling general strike.

By the 29th of November, 25 years ago today, the Czech Prime Minister turned Prague's lavish Palace of Culture over to Civic Forum for use as its headquarters, and the Communist Party had to immediately move out.  

Other Voices

"Last week, a bust of (former Czech President Vaclav) Havel, who died in 2011, was unveiled at a ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda, in Washington, exactly twenty-five years after Czechoslovakia, in concert with the rest of the Eastern and Central European countries under Moscow’s rule, became free. For decades, this had been beyond imagining. The rupture, seemingly so sudden, had many underlying reasons, not least Gorbachev’s realization that the imperial system was bankrupt, immoral, and without a future. But it was led and shaped by a singular politician—a playwright of the absurd who well understood the comic improbabilities of his life. Havel was a child of the Czech bourgeoisie, a lab assistant, a soldier, a stagehand, a dramatist, a moral philosopher, a dissident, a political prisoner for four years, and, finally, a President for fourteen.

Part of the reason that Havel is so celebrated today is that he radiated a homey brand of intellectual glamour—his passion for the Velvet Underground and for the Plastic People of the Universe, his decision to ride around the Castle on a scooter, his late, smoky nights in pubs and theatre basements. Although he trafficked in footlights and stage makeup, there was nothing false about him. His honesty was so extreme, so theatrically self-exposing, that his aides came to dread it. In April of 1990, less than a year after he became President, Havel visited Jerusalem and spoke at the Hebrew University, where he confessed a “long and intimate affinity” with his countryman Franz Kafka, and the near-certainty that his ascent to the Castle had been illusory and undeserved, and was sure to end in his being found out by the authorities:

I am the kind of person who would not be in the least surprised if, in the very middle of my Presidency, I were to be summoned and led off to stand trial before some shadowy tribunal, or taken straight to a quarry. . . . Nor would I be surprised if I were to suddenly hear the reveille and wake up in my prison cell, and then, with great bemusement, proceed to tell my fellow prisoners everything that had happened to me in the past six months. . . . The lower I am, the more proper my place seems; and the higher I am, the stronger my suspicion that there has been some mistake."

- David Remnick, in The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, December 1, 2014

My Thanksgiving Tradition

Other Voices

"Early in the presidency of George Bush, there came the most dramatic developments on the international scene since the end of World War II.  In the year 1989, with a dynamic new leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, at the head of the Soviet Union, the long suppressed dissatisfaction with "dictatorships of the proletariat" which had turned out to be dictatorships over the proletariat erupted all through the Soviet bloc.

There were mass demonstrations in the Soviet Union and in the countries of Eastern Europe which had long been dominated by the Soviet Union.  East Germany agreed to unite with West Germany, and the wall separating East Berlin from West Berlin, long a symbol of the tight control of its citizens by East Germany, was dismantled in the presence of wildly exultant citizens of both Germanies.  In Czechoslovakia, a new non-Communist government came into being, headed by a playwright and former imprisoned dissident named Vaclav Havel.  In Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, a new leadership emerged, promising freedom and democracy.  And remarkably, all this took place without civil war, in response to overwhelming popular demand.

In the United States, the Republican party claimed that the hard-line policies of Reagan and the increase in military expenditures had brought down the Soviet Union.  But the change had begun much earlier, after the death of Stalin in 1953, and especially with the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev.  A remarkably open discussion had been initiated.

But the continued hard line of the United States became an obstacle to further liberalization, according to former ambassador to the Soviet Union George Kennan, who wrote that "the general effect of the cold war extremism was to delay rather than hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union by the end of the 1980s."  While the press and politicians in the United States exhulted over the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kennan pointed out that, not only did American policies delay this collapse, but those cold war policies were carried out at a frightful cost to the American people:

We paid for forty years of enormous and otherwise unnecessary military expenditures, We paid through the cultivation of  nuclear weaponry to the point where the vast and useless nuclear arsenal had become (and remains today) a danger to the very environment of the planet . . ." 

- Howard Zinn, from A People's History of the United States 

November 25, 1989

A week after the Czech police kill a single protester, Martin Smid, 350,000 people are peacefully marching in Wenceslas Square, and bring down an entire system of government.  Say what you will, but non-violence works.

Also, $0.40 for the day's newspaper.

Perspective

What's the point of this 25-years-ago retrospective, other than historical curiosity?  Two things:

1. Regimes, no matter how powerful, fall if they don't change with the times (impermanence), and
2. People, even under the most repressive of conditions, can bring about non-violent change.

In an interview that ran 25 years ago today in The Boston Globe, Jan Bisztyga, then the official spokesman for Poland's Communist Party, said that as technology had accelerated, even then, at an unprecedented pace, the world simply passed communism by.

Communism's great weaknesses, he maintained, were its inability to perform economically, its inability to reform when changes were obviously needed, and its inability to "change old-fashioned views of society."  The world had become too pluralistic for the kind of black-and-white thinking that had kept the Eastern bloc in a straitjacket.  

In other words, the weaknesses that caused the fall of communism were the same shortcomings political conservatives in the United States suffer today.  Today's capitalist conservatives look at the events of 1989 as a condemnation of socialism, and Bisztyga freely admitted, "There is no future to the kind of bureaucratic socialism I am representing now." But the conservative assessment captures only 50% of what was wrong.  Bisztyga said that he was still optimistic about the future of socialism, "just not this kind of socialism."  The failure of bureaucratic socialism was not in the socialism, but in the inherent inertia of a bureaucracy that could not adapt to the changing times.

In contrast, Bisztyga noted, the West stood up to the tremendous speed of technological change with high flexibility and dynamism.  "You put all your energies into this, and you won."

But there is a price to pay, Bisztyga warned, and the bill will eventually come due in the West.  The United States had badly neglected education, concentrating on an elite instead of on a broad base of educated people that an advanced country needs.  If the United States were to maintain its position as a great country, Bisztyga said, it would have to take money away from right-wing causes, such as armaments, and give some back to education and the environment, just as the Eastern bloc had to dismantle central planning and install individual initiative and free markets.  Thus, the two sides might eventually meet somewhere toward the middle.

Instead, the U.S. has chosen to double down on military expenditures, abandoning even the pretense of equal educational opportunities for all, and has continued to neglect its infrastructure and the environment. As income inequality continues to grow rampant, this kind of inflexible thinking may bring this nation to the same crossroads that the Polish Communist Party found itself in 1989, and people in the West may have to rise up and bring about the same kind of non-violent change that rocked eastern Europe 25 years ago.

25 Years Ago Today

Press clipping from 1989

Although a Warsaw Pact nation, Romania had pursued an independent foreign policy from Moscow since the 1960s, when it banned Soviet troops from its soil and refused to join the other Soviet bloc troops in the 1968 occupation of Czechoslovakia.  In the 1980s, Romania paid back all of its estimated $10 billion foreign debt, but at a substantial drop in the standard of living for the country's 23 million people.  Under the government's rationing policy, Romanians were each allowed only one pound of meat and 10 eggs a month.  

"Political independence, self-sufficiency in economy and increased exports should maintain (Ceausescu) in power now," one western diplomat who asked not to be identified told the UPI in 1989.  But, he said, when the European Union forms in 1992 and foreign investment in Romania tapers off, the nation will be facing tough economic problems.

But 25 years ago today, the Romanian Communist Party congress was continuing into its third day, and praising Nicolae Ceausescu as a visionary and a genius, while denying all of the hardships and troubles its people were suffering under his leadership.  As it will turn out, Ceausescu will not survive to see the 1992 formation of the EU, or even the first day of the 1990s. 

In Hungary, a book, Petty Tyrants, revealed the corruption prevalent in the military, claiming local army chiefs were free to requisition anything they needed from the local population, including clothes, textiles, and food .  The revelations led to resignations of some military chiefs, and Prime Minister Miklos Nemeth ordered former defense minister Gen. Lajos Czinege to vacate his "service apartment."  The apartment was in fact a luxurious, expensively furnished villa on Rose Hill, Budapest's most exclusive residential district.  

In East Germany, the Communist Party agreed to hold talks with rival political groups on free elections and other reforms, a major concession to the opposition, and the unrest and protests that hd continued to grow despite the opening of the Berlin Wall and the lifting of travel restrictions.  But despite the agreement, the reputation of Communist Party Chief Egon Krenz was still plagued by his long partnership with former Chief Erich Honecker, and other party officials suggested that he may have to be replaced as Party Chief if his popularity didn't improve.  

History

Bookmark found in my Grandfather's encyclopedia. 1905: That's Teddy, baby!

On November 22, 1989, according to my collection of newspaper clippings from that date, more than 150,000 protesters filled Wenceslas Square in Prague to protest the former Czechoslovakian government and for the first time, opposition leaders were given access to the loudspeaker system in the square, In five days, since the Bloody Friday events that triggered the massive protests, the government had gone from beating the protesters to grudgingly handing them a microphone.  

Vaclav Havel, a playwright and leader of the Czech opposition, was joined on a spotlighted balcony overlooking the square by other opposition leaders and some of the country's most popular actors and singers, who helped read a declaration demanding the immediate resignation of the Czech leaders responsible for the 1968 Soviet invasion, as well as those who ordered the Bloody Friday crack-down,  They also called for the release of all political prisoners and for free access to the media.

In Russia, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev indicated strong backing to the rapid changes in Eastern Europe, including the new demands for reform in Czechoslovakia, saying, "I think the change is very important, and the importance of the change will be that it will create a better society, a more open society, a more democratic society."  In a related incident, Gorbachev also oversaw the dismissal of conservative Moscow Communist Party chief Lev Zaikov, nearly two years to the day after liberal chief Boris Yeltsin had been removed from the same post.

Meanwhile, a debate was brewing in East Germany over whether or not Communist Party chief Egon Krenz actually prevented a potential massacre by reversing Erich Honecker's orders to Leipzig police to shoot, if necessary, pro-democracy protesters.  While his supporters claim Krenz did reverse the order, his detractors say he did so only after being persuaded by local party officials and church leaders. At the same time, the press, although still under Communist control, had begun reporting to the impoverished East Germans some of the abuses of privilege enjoyed by the party leaders.  Krenz was rumored to be a connoisseur of fine wines and other luxuries, although he claimed to the press that he and his family lived in a small, modest apartment.  What he didn't admit was that he had only moved into the apartment the Sunday before, checking out of a spacious abode at the party's lush Lake Wandlitz compound on the outskirts of Berlin, a settlement blocked off from ordinary citizens by guarded private roads.    

Back in the U.S., the White House announced that refugee status for Poles and Hungarians would be sharply curtailed as political conditions in those countries had improved to the point where the residents "no longer have any reason to fear persecution in their homelands." 

In Romania, where people did still have reason to fear persecution, the ill-fated dictator Nicolae Ceausescu attempted to sir up nationalistic support for his dictatorship by claiming that the non-aggression pact of 1939, in which Stalin and Hitler divided Eastern Europe into spheres of influence, should be cancelled. "First of all," he said, "a clear, unequivocal stand of condemnation and cancellation must be taken on all the accords concluded with Hitler's Germany, practical conclusions being drawn to eliminate all the consequences of those accords and dictates."  The 1939 non-aggression pact ceded the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to the Soviet Union, but Romanians understood that what Ceausescu was really talking about was Bessarabia, a contested sliver of land between Romania and the Ukraine that changed hands many times through history, but had been a Romanian possession from 1919 until 1940, when it was absorbed into Soviet Moldavia.   

A bit of deeper history regarding Bessarabia is necessary here, and my sources for this portion are not my newspaper clipping from 1989, but a 1942 encyclopedia and summary of "current events" inherited from my grandfather.  According to my sources, during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, Romania fought alongside the Russian troops but at the Treaty of San Stefano after the war, Russia demanded the Bessarabian territory from Romania, even though it was largely inhabited by Romanians.  As compensation, Russia offered Romania the Dobjura, a region along the Black Sea. The Treaty held and was reinforced by the 1878 Congress of Berlin, such that Romania lost Bessarabia but gained the Dobjura, 

After World War I, Romania invaded Hungary in 1919 and occupied Budapest, retreating only when Romania had extorted territorial concessions, including the return of Bessarabia from Russia.  To protect the new acquisition, Romania felt the need for foreign security and became a member of the Little Entente, a treaty with Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, to protect her against Russia and possible attack from Hungary.  In April 1939, to further protect its rich oil fields and Bessarabia from Russian aggression, Romania received pledges for assistance from England and France. 

However, after the fall of France to Germany in 1940, Russia did not hesitate to move and delivered an ultimatum to Romania for the immediate return of Bessarabia, and two days later moved troops into the region, meeting "some little resistance."  On July 1, 1940, Romania announced the evacuation of Bessarabia and at the same time the abrogation of the mutual assistance pact with England.  The greater part of Bessarabia was made into the Moldavian Republic and admitted into the Soviet Union on August 2, and the remainder was added to the Ukrainian Republic.  On August 1, 1940, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov boasted of the gains. which largely returned territories taken from Russia in World War I.      

In 1989, with the neighboring countries engulfed in revolutionary protests, Ceausescu appeared to be trying to maintain control and popularity by asserting nationalistic claims to Bessarabia.  Romania's official press published accounts of unrest in Moldova, where 60% to 75% of the people were ethnic Romanians and much of the unrest was due to nationalistic sentiments, and Scinteia, the Communist Party daily, described a crackdown on ethnic Romanina demonstrators in the Moldavian city of Chișinău several days earlier.  Throughout Ceausescu's five-hour speech, delegates reportedly jumped out, shouted slogans, applauded, and sat back down in unison.  There were reports that Ceausescu even urged the Warsaw Pact to consider invading Poland, but those reports were not confirmed.    

"Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it," George Santayana warned us. Ceausescu's appeals to old territorial claims and his concern about the plight of ethnic brothers and sisters in neighboring lands is eerily reminiscent of Putin's more recent comments and actions in the Ukraine.  It seems that Putin is merely following Ceausescu's old playbook, which in turn has been used by dictators throughout history.

Those Who Cannot Remember The Past Are Doomed To Repeat It

Following the dramatic events of 1989 in Germany, protests erupted in the former Czechoslovakia in the greatest threat in decades to the rigid, hard-line communist government, leading 25 years ago today to the largest demonstration in the country since the Soviet-led crack-down on the Prague Spring reform movement of 1968.

Before the massive November 21, 1989 protests, Slovak high school and university students organized a peaceful demonstration in the center of Bratislava on Thursday, November 16.  But the next night, Friday, November 17, an estimated 20,000 to 50,000 demonstrators who had been given permission to march if they avoided Wenceslas Square, a favorite site of past anti-government protests. were viciously attacked by police using tear gas and clubs.  The violence erupted when some of the demonstrators disobeyed the order and defiantly headed for the square, and police beat the demonstrators, forcing them to run a gauntlet down Narodni Street.  

Martin Smid, 20, a student at Charles University, was beaten to death during the crack-down by red-bereted paratroopers of the Czech military.  Smid's girlfriend reportedly told activist Petr Uhl that the paratroopers singled Smid out for unknown reasons and pushed the couple against a wall.  "Two or three (paratroopers) took him into a dark side street and beat him with batons, then kicked him while he was on the ground," Uhl said.  The government denied that Smid was beaten to death, and detained Uhl for spreading "false rumors." Nevertheless, the movement now had a martyr.

The next day, Saturday, November 18, about 2,000 people confronted riot police in Wenceslas Square.  The protesters, undaunted by the crackdown of the night before, were blocked from entering Narodni Street by scores of helmeted riot police, and witnesses said that at least three people were chased, beaten by troops, and taken away in vehicles.  The protesters chanted "Freedom, Freedom" and other slogans and then, before dispersing, called for additional demonstrations.  

The people responded on Sunday night, when tens of thousands of people filled Wenceslas Square to mourn Smid's death.  The protesters built makeshift shrines, lit candles and laid flowers on the Narodni Street site where Smid had been beaten.  They then moved en masse across a bridge spanning the Vltava River, heading toward the ancient Hradcany Castle where government offices were located.  The police, who had stood quietly by during the protest in the square, quickly blocked the marchers' path with police vans on the other side of the bridge.  The crowd, which included parents holding small children and people in wheelchairs, began to jeer the police saying, "You killed the student, will you kill again?"

Eventually, the police gave way, and the crowd, relishing their victory, began clapping as they headed back to the square.  The movement had reached a tipping point of popular acceptance, and the police stayed out of sight as the people continued the massive demonstration, ringing bells and jangling keys.  Someone placed a banner reading "Don't Kill Our Children" at the base of the statue of King Wenceslas.  

Then on Monday, November 21, 1989, exactly 25 years ago today, more than 200,000 people filled the streets of Prague, demanding free elections and the resignation of hard-line leader Milos Jakes. The protests were accompanied by the clanging of bells from sympathetic trolley car drivers and bystanders jangling their keys in solidarity, and in a sharp break with tradition, Czech television devoted extensive coverage to the demonstration.  Some of the protesters carried banners reading "Red Murderers to Court" in reference to  Martin Smid.   Students also began a sit-in strike at Prague universities to protest the police attacks, and television reporters told of strikes at some high schools.

  

The Velvet Revolution was underway in Czechoslovakia.  Meanwhile, in a direct challenge to the Kremlin, the Georgian Supreme Soviet declared that the republic was illegally annexed by military force in 1921 and reasserted its right to secede from the Soviet Union.  In Sofia, a crowd of about 2,000 people listened to fiery political speeches and signed petitions denouncing Bulgaria's communist regime.  In the U.S., a poll found Americans cautious about the changes sweeping Eastern Europe, and indicated that while most felt the changes were permanent, they were not yet dramatic enough to declare an end to the Cold War.       

       

At a major Communist Party congress in Bucharest, Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu made it clear that as long as he was in charge, Romania would not follow other Eastern European countries along the paths toward democracy and capitalism.  By Christmas Day, a secret military trial will have found Ceausescu and his wife guilty of genocide and other grave crimes against Romania, and both will have been executed.

The Always Reliably Incorrect Dick Cheney

Budapest, 2004

Writing in a May 17, 1989 editorial in The Wall Street Journal, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Albert Schweitzer professor of the humanities at the City University of New York and a winner of Pulitzer Prizes in history and biography, lamented the "strange thought floated the other day by Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney that he doesn't expect Gorbachev to last and, because 'somebody who will be far more hostile' may replace him, we should be in no hurry to deal with him."  

Actually, when you think about it, Schlesinger pointed out, Cheney advanced an argument for reaching agreements with the Soviet Union while Gorbachev is still around, not an argument against agreements with him.  "The prospect of hostile leadership should spur us on to institutionalize arms control agreements while there is still time," Schlesinger advised.

One has the impression that President George H.W. Bush, "a man of unimpeachable good will," according to Schlesinger, "is the prisoner of a bunch of foreign policy hacks whose idea is to meet every new problem with old cliches."

I've stated here before that conservatism is a neurological condition marked by an inability to form new mental maps and models in the face of new conditions.  Schlesinger's view of Bush's 1989 cabinet reinforces that view.    

History of the World, Part Two

Budapest, 2004

November 19 headlines from my notebook of press clippings documenting the Eastern European revolutions of 1989:

"Czechs brave riot cops"

"Bulgarians protest abuses of old leader"

"Latvians hold rally against Soviet rule"

More than 1.6 million East Germans went sightseeing and shopping in West Berlin that day, fueled by $54 per person in "welcome money" from the West German government.  West Berlin's shopping avenues were transformed into pedestrian malls, and people in West Germany reportedly greeted the tourists with free lodging, well-stocked store shelves, and just plain curiosity.  

Communist Party chief Egon Krenz, who had averted the bloodbath in Leipzig the month before, strongly indicated that a panel convened to investigate cases of corruption, personal enrichment, and abuse of power would investigate the activities of his predecessor and former mentor, Erich Honecker.

But probably the best quote in the 11/19/89 news was by the always reliably incorrect Dick Cheney, then George Bush's Secretary of Defense.  On CNN's Evans & Novak, Cheney "reiterated his long-held position that the odds are against Gorbachev being able to transform the Soviet Union into a modern society,"

"I remain of the opinion that the likelihood of that happening is still remote, that the obstacles he has to deal with are, in fact, enormous," said Cheney.  "I wish him the very best, but I don't think we could base our policies on the assumption that he will be successful."  

Ah, Dick Cheney - on the wrong side of history then, wrong on current events now.