Politics: Authoritarianism and Censorship

I have written about censorship here and here and here. Feel free to read them.

This particular note came from me looking for information on Milan Kundera. I found on LitHub Remembering the Lessons of Kundera and Hrabal’s Czechoslovakia by Nathan Scott McNamara. With America facing an democratic movement we should think of the costs of an authoritarian government:

The history of writers working under tyranny or in exile is long, and each example involves its own particular cruelties. From 1968 until 1989, Czech writers like Milan Kundera and Bohumil Hrabal were put in a particularly impossible position. They spoke and wrote in Czech, a language limited to a very small part of Central Europe—and a language that had fallen under the control of a sensitive and authoritarian government.

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To honor the legacies of these men is important—their books are restored and available now, and you can read them with ease—but the more profound story here is in what happened to these writers while still under an authoritarian government. And lost in any narrative about Czech writers and artists who managed to endure these politics and continued to create are the many who didn’t—those who were forcibly moved to the countryside, made to work in the mills and factories, and silenced.

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...Like the Kundera of 1968, we can opt to have hope now, even for the immediate future. But we should also keep in mind that the immediate future didn’t work out for Kundera the way he once optimistically thought it might. And it didn’t for Hrabal, who complied much more readily, either.

sch

12/29/21