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of industrialization-half abandoned, living in the streets. He
started taking them hiking, scrubbing them clean, giving them
food, reading them stories. At his trial, his employer testified that
he was a model worker-never absent, always doing his work.
The teachers from the school testified that he had simply turned
around children who were becoming lost in the margins of
society. He received a two-year sentence; the charge was subvert–
ing the state control of cultic activity. Because he was a Catholic,
when he gave food to the children he would make the sign of
the cross before eating. For this he received a two-year sentence.
He became a dissident even though he never wrote anything in
his life.
The second case is even more ironic. This happened only six
weeks ago, again in a provincial town, to a young man who was
a Communist. He had lost most of his family in the last war, so he
wholeheartedly endorsed Brezhnev's peace proposals and spoke
against the nuclear arms race. The court ruled that, while opposi–
tion to nuclear arms should be encouraged in the aggressive
capitalist countries of the West, in the socialist countries it
represents a threat to the worker's movement. They sentenced him
to two years.
What I am trying to suggest by these stories is that the
literary dissidents with whom we are familiar are only the tip of
the iceberg.
If
there is a base of the dissident movement, it's what
the speaker before me was stressing: the unwillingness and
inability-sometimes for reasons of conscience, sometimes
simply out of total exhaustion-to go on with the pretense any
more. The fact is that Czechoslovakia is still a Western country,
under Byzantine rule, where freedom of conscience is both a high
calling and a basic right. I know from experience that when you
try to point this out to an American audience, you usually com–
pletely befuddle people's geographic sense, because the American
perspective of the world is bipolar. There are two centers -the
United States and the Soviet Union-each with its periphery, its
suburbs, its various client states. The Americans have those
areas that are open to American business-and this we call
Western Europe-and the Russians have their little suburbs
where the KGB has free access-and this we call Eastern Europe.
So we think 6f the world as if there were no Europe at all, as if
