1968 - Mark Kurlansky [42]
It wasn’t exactly a democracy. There wasn’t exactly free speech. It was a little like German playwright Peter Weiss’s 1964 play, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade or, as it became popularly known after Peter Brook’s British production and 1966 film, Marat/Sade. Not only did this play start a vogue for long titles, but it was one of the most talked-about international works of theater in the mid-1960s. Expressing the sentiments about freedom of young people in much of the world, Marat/Sade takes place on the eve of Bastille Day 1808. It is a little after the French Revolution, and the people are sort of not quite free. In the end, following a song titled “Fifteen Glorious Years,” the inmates sing:
And if most have a little
and few have a lot
You can see how much nearer
our goal we have got.
We can say what we like
without favor or fear
and what we can’t say
we will breathe in your ear.
Polish communist youth, not always in agreement with their parents, felt this “unfreedom,” as another extremely popular German writer of the mid-sixties, philosopher Herbert Marcuse, called it. Poland and much of the Soviet bloc exemplified Marcuse’s theory that the communication of opposites obstructed discourse. To criticize the government or “the system” in Poland required an aptitude for speaking opposites in reverse. Polityka, a weekly considered to be liberal and free thinking, reported on Dubek and Czechoslovakia, though mostly in the form of criticism. It often reported in reverse. If a student protested, Polityka would not report on it. But they might report that the student had recanted his protest letter and might even enumerate some of the lies he told, which he now retracted. From this, the Polish reader could learn of the protest letter and even a bit of its contents. When Mieczys™aw Rakowski, the editor of Polityka who decades later became the last first secretary of the ruling Polish Communist Party, wanted to criticize the government, he would write an article praising the government and then a week later run an article criticizing his article. He would breathe in your ear.
As Polish youth became more adept at being dissidents, they mastered another technique of spreading information. They would leak to the foreign press whatever they wanted the Polish people to know. The New York Times and Le Monde were favorite recipients. But any news media would work, as long as it was read the next morning by Jan Nowak and his staff in Vienna, where the Polish-language service of Radio Free Europe was based. The Polish service and the Czech service would work together, so that the Poles could be informed about events in Czechoslovakia and the Czechs were informed on events in Poland. By 1968 each knew the other had a student movement. They also knew that the United States had a student movement. They had no trouble, even through the Polish press, learning about Martin Luther King and sit-ins in the South and American student movements that used demonstrations to protest the Vietnam War. The leading official Polish newspaper, Trybuna Ludu, the People’s Tribune, contained little news on Poland in 1968, though a great deal on the Vietnam War and the Middle East, which was mostly about how Israel had taken a lot of land and did not plan to give it back. They also reported extensively on the civil rights and antiwar movements in the United