Tricky Cad, Jess Collins, 1957 source
41 years ago today, on March 13, 1977, Jan Patočka died from beatings and interrogation by the Czech secret police, the StB .. his disciples rushed to his home to gather his papers and hide them away, just hours before the authorities came to confiscate everything. This event where the authorities seek to destroy a citizen are often associated primarily with totalitarian states and Communist regimes, but parallels can be found in the land of the free as well. The secret police are thought to protect the state from foreign influence, we feel we need the police to stay safe. Espionage is always a part of war, despite their questionable tactics, but when these weapons are turned against a country's own citizens, it's certainly cause for concern. Is it an age old story? The police ought to uphold the law but in truth they are the military arm of the establishment serving their needs to maintain the status quo. We are taught to abhor violence, but violence in service of the State is condoned. The State is the only authority to use sanctioned violence. Basically the police protect borders, socially and geographically. In the old Warsaw Pact countries, the secret police and the military used the threat of death to keep populations inside their borders. Rule by fear was the norm. In the USA the police maintain class and racial borders. Civil rights threatens the status quo. In the era of Trump we can see not much has changed.
"I am not a crook"
My first idea was to compare one of the less discussed events events of Watergate to the raid on Jan Patočka's home. After the so-called Saturday Night Massacre, when President Nixon fired Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor overseeing the Watergate case, the FBI raided the office of the prosecutor shutting it down, although some of the team there tried to sneak documents away. Although these two events are similar, the political drama of Watergate does not reflect the violence found in the repressive Czechoslovak state against the signatories of Charter '77. Instead this fear of dissident rebellion and the brutal crackdown by the authorities finds its echo in the West in the COINTELPRO program overseen by J. Edgar Hoover against the Black Panthers and other "radicals" of the 1960s and early 70s. The tracking of civil rights activists and the explicit links between the FBI, law enforcement and the KKK are well-documented, watch the eye-opening documentary, The FBIs War on Black America. America's dissidents are not often compared to the opponents of communism behind the Iron Curtain, but the search for freedom of expression and belief is the same.
Allen Ginsberg as Kral Majales, Prague, 1968 photo: Fero Tomik
So where do we stand today, almost half a century after these events? With the Snowden revelations and the level of interconnection with the internet, the surveillance state is surely much more powerful today by orders of magnitude. We feel we can say whatever we want, and perhaps that is foolish, but our messages are buried and lost in white noise and disinformation. We certainly live in a time of weaponized information, the internet is turning against the people, not a tool of freedom as we had hoped. And what about the blockchain? Does it promise any greater level of transparency and autonomy? It's just a distributed ledger in the end, and though it may be nearly impossible to hack today, quantum computing could change that dynamic, so blockchain could be seen in 50 years as antiquated as Geocities ...