Encounters with Oxford dons – 2nd continuation

III. A Surprise on the Internet

In September 1998, after eighteen years in Oxford I returned to Prague. I was offered a Jan Hus Foundation grant for a year with a promise of a flat and a permanent job at the Institute of Philosophy; neither of these promises were honoured. I therefore returned with my wife Doina and our little daughter Nera to England. Shortly after our return my wife found on the internet a Czech report from 14th August 1998, entitled: ‘A Press Conference of the Czech Social Democratic Party’. At the conference a freelance journalist Sedlák addressed Libor Rouček, the Press Spokesman of the Party, as follows:

‘The Czech TV on all its channels presents Tomin. You too lived in England and therefore know that Tomin had received psychiatric treatment – he allegedly suffered from the fixed idea that he was Jan Hus … An unhappy man, who should have no place on a TV screen. And this is public-owned TV, payed for by the tax-payer.’

The Press Spokesman replied:

‘… yes, I believe that Mr Tomin is an unhappy man, and as far as I am acquainted with public-owned TV in other countries, not a single one would produce such a programme. But this is a matter for the Czech TV and for its Council.’

The TV programme which these two men discussed concerned the interview held on the occasion of my protest hunger-strike against the nomination of Jan Kavan as Czech Foreign Minister, of which I have spoken in the preceding chapter. I never saw the programme, but I have good reasons to believe that my discussion with Kavan was cut out of it. It appears that the words of the two men at the Press Conference, quoted above, were taken heed of by the Czech TV. Not only was I not given any opportunity to properly explain on TV or in any public media why I objected so strongly against Kavan’s nomination, but in the archives of the Czech TV was in those days a programme about my stay at Oxford, produced by Jiří Potužník, that was to be presented shortly after my return to Prague; the viewers were never given a chance to see it. It was produced at Oxford and had it been broadcast, the words about ‘unhappy Tomin’ would have sounded very hollow. Most of the filming took place on a punt on the river Cherwell; I was poling, Doina was sitting at the other end of the punt, Jiří and the cameraman were in the middle. Surrounded by the beauty of Oxford Colleges and University Parks, I initiated Jiří into the delights of having the Bodleian Library at my disposal with all its treasures, of enjoying the beauty of the English countryside on my long cycling-rides, and of my daily trips into the treasures of Ancient Greek thought.

The freelance journalist, quoted above, implied that I had received psychiatric treatment in England and that this was well known at least in Czech emigrant circles. How could this ‘information’ have taken hold of the minds of Czech emigrants in Britain in spite of the fact that I have never received any psychiatric treatment?

In Czech we have a saying ‘Na každém šprochu je pravdy trochu’ which amounts to saying that ‘there is no rumour without some truth in it’. What truth is there in the allegation that I had received psychiatric treatment? In 1979, under the direction and supervision of the Czech secret police I was interned in a psychiatric hospital for three days.

The incident took place as follows. At the beginning of October 1979, I was told by dissidents from the ‘underground’ that young people somewhere in north Bohemia invited me to give a talk on philosophy to their group; the group allegedly met in secrecy. The only person to whom I told about it was my wife, Zdena Tomin, who was at that time a spokesperson for the Charter 77. I did not ask for the names of the organizers and participants, I didn’t even know where exactly we were going. On a Saturday afternoon a prominent member of the ‘underground’ came to take me to this unknown destination in his car. When we reached the outskirts of Prague, we were ambushed by the secret police. I was asked to get into their car. I refused, was dragged by them into their car, and taken into a psychiatric clinic in Roudnice, the nearest town outside Prague. A psychiatrist at the clinic wanted to subject me to a presumably routine psychiatric investigation, but I refused to answer any of his questions. For in my view, any answer to his questions would have amounted to participation in the secret police’ attempt to misuse psychiatry. The psychiatrist’s attempt to interrogate me took place in the presence of the secret policemen who carried me into the surgery. I pointed at them and asked the psychiatrist whether it had ever happened to him that he was asked to interview a person under such conditions. Then I told him to try and phone my wife; he would find our telephone number in the Telephone directory, but his attempt would end in failure, for the police had disconnected our telephone. He did not even try. Then I made another suggestion; would he go with me to my flat? In front of our flat, on the third floor of an apartment house in which we lived, he would find two uniformed policemen; in relays, they were sitting there day and night as our unwonted ‘guard’, frightening off any visitors. All this would tell him that there is something out of order. In short, I did my best to encourage the psychiatrist to refuse any further cooperation with the secret police. In the end the psychiatrist ordered my hospitalization and the secret policemen carried me back into the car.

Why did the secret policemen have to carry me? It was because I refused to obey their orders. What gave me the strength to do so was the ten-day hunger-strike with which I defended my seminar in the autumn of 1977. The police tried to enforce the discontinuation of my seminar by summoning me for interrogation on a Wednesday, the day at which I held the seminar. I notified the Minister of Internal Affairs that there were no legal grounds for the summons, and that I would therefore disregard the summons; if the police were to resort to force, they would have to carry me to the interrogation room, I would refuse to answer any of their questions and begin a ten day hunger-strike in protest. The police did resort to force, the hunger-strike was a great success, and from then, for a year, the police refrained from interfering with my seminar.

From Roudnice I was taken to the nearest psychiatric hospital, in Horní Beřkovice; by then it was late at night. The two secret policemen who carried me into the reception stood by while I informed the psychiatrist about the illegality of their action. In the end, with no question in his questionnaire answered by me, the psychiatrist ordered my internment. The two secret policemen had to carry me again from the reception to one of the hospital buildings, up the stairs to the bed that was pointed out to them. This in itself was a hopeful sign; the psychiatrist gave in to the police pressure reluctantly, for he did not involve any of the hospital staff in bringing me in.

Then the nurse in charge ordered me to take off my clothes and put on the hospital outfit. I refused to comply and was given an injection. I remember dry throat; in the night I crawled to the toilet like an animal, on all fours. The next day I received no further injection: it was Sunday and there was no doctor to prescribe one. On Monday morning, I was summoned to the Senior psychiatrist. It was a lady. She looked out of the window and ordered the nurse to give me an injection. I said to her: ‘Doctor, how can you prescribe an injection without talking to me or even just looking at me?’ The psychiatrist told the nurse: ‘Leave it for now, we shall do it after the round.’ After lunch the patients assembled in the dining hall. The Senior psychiatrist with her assistants and a few nurses went from patient to patient, looked at their papers, asked each a few questions. When the procession came to me, I looked the Senior psychiatrist into her eyes and asked: ‘Doctor, can you give me any reason for having me here?’ She said: ‘We shall discuss it after the round,’ – and as she said these words, she fainted. Unconscious, she fell into the arms of the junior doctor who stood behind her and was carried out of the room.

An hour or two later one of the elite patients – each psychiatric hospital in Czechoslovakia had a group of elite patients who were entrusted with performing all kinds of tasks – suggested that I should send a message to my wife concerning my whereabouts. I said I did not want to do so. Then came the head nurse and made the same suggestion. I repeated that I did not want to send my wife any message. Then I was summoned to a junior doctor, who made the same suggestion and received the same reply. The doctor asked me why I did not want to inform my wife about my internment in the hospital. I replied that it was my duty to do my utmost to stop this misuse of psychiatry and that every day I spent in the hospital was the best I could do to stop it. I must confess that I was convinced that not only my wife, but many signatories of the Charter77 on her side, my students, those Czech philosophers whom I had invited to lecture in my seminar, namely Jiří Nemec, Ladislav Hejdánek, and Radim Palouš, as well as Oxford dons, would do their best to learn what happened to me, and when they learnt, would do their best to make the police pay for their attempt to misuse psychiatry in this way.

On Tuesday morning I was summoned to the Senior psychiatrist office. I asked her again to give me any reasons for my internment in the hospital. She admitted that there was no medical reason and said that I would be released from the hospital before noon; she kept her word.

Let me now return to the press conference that took place nine years after the Velvet Revolution and nineteen years after my three day internment in Horní Beřkovice: ‘Tomin had received psychiatric treatment – he allegedly suffered from the fixed idea that he was Jan Hus,’ This was accepted not only by the Press Spokesman of the Czech Social Democratic Party, but even the Deputy Prime Minister Egon Lánský spoke in similar terms. How could such a distortion of facts take place in the country in which an important role was played by men who were well informed about the case, beginning with young Kavan, its Foreign Secretary? As a contribution to finding the answer, I shall point to what took place on Wednesday, a day after my release from the psychiatric hospital.

In the autumn of 1979, my seminar was held in the flat of one of my students, Ivan Dejmal, for in front of our flat two policemen were sitting day and night, as I have already mentioned. On the programme for the forthcoming Wednesday was a lecture by Ladislav Hejdánek, a Czech philosopher and theologian. I was exhausted after the-three day adventure, wanted a rest, and decided to stay at home, thinking that the seminar was in the best hands. It was seven o’clock, the seminar must have started, and I was still at home. But then I began to regret missing the lecture, for I had been looking forward to it. I got up and went to the seminar. The room in which it was held was packed with people, the majority of whom I had never seen. Everybody looked at me totally flabbergasted. Hejdánek asked what had happened to me. So, I narrated my three-day psychiatric-hospital-adventure. When I finished, Hejdánek said: ‘Do you really think that you have been released because of what you did? That’s nonsense. They must have changed their dispositions in Moscow.’ I did not ask Hejdánek what ‘they in Moscow’ had to do with the Czech secret police attempt to intern me in the psychiatric hospital in Horní Beřkovice. One thing was clear, I was unwanted in that room; I stood up and left. I then learnt that the people there in the room were from as far away as Brno in Moravia; ambitious plans had been prepared for the running of the seminar in cooperation with Oxford dons, without me.

The week that followed was perhaps the most difficult week in my whole life. My wife learnt about my internment in the psychiatric hospital on Monday evening; even if Hejdánek had learnt independently, as early as Saturday night, that I was interned in the psychiatric hospital, the time that was left between then and the Wednesday seminar was not sufficient for making any plans and preparations for the running of the seminar without me, with people from Brno, in cooperation with Oxford dons. The organizers must have been informed about my internment well in advance, and nobody could think that the secret police attempt at my internment might end in failure.

For the next Wednesday, one more of Hejdánek’s lectures was planned. I didn’t think I could face going there again, but when the Wednesday and the time of the seminar came, I again became restless, and in the end went there. This time the situation in Dejmal’s flat was very different. No Hejdánek, only a few students were present, and they expected to be taken to the police any minute, a police car was waiting on each corner of the housing block. My arrival was obviously unexpected, the two police cars disappeared. This filled me with the hope that our seminar could become a space in which there was no place for the secret police. I do not mean that they would be physically excluded. I refused even to think who from among my students might by informers. In my seminar there was no place for anything that required secrecy. The principle on which I built it was openness. To make reports on what I or any of my students said on Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle was a ridiculous proposition for any secret police informer.

***

In ‘Out of the East’ Polly Toynbee wrote: ‘Both Oxford and Cambridge had written to Julius in Czechoslovakia when he was in mental hospital praising his work and offering jobs any time he wanted.’ (The Guardian, 6^th January, 1988) In one of the subsequent issues The Guardian published my correction: ‘I have never been offered any jobs by Oxford and Cambridge and to my knowledge no letter was written to me by Oxford and Cambridge during the time when I was in mental hospital. The whole affair lasted 60 hours, 24 of those falling on Sunday. There simply was no time for Oxford and Cambridge to write any letters.’ But was this not the original idea, which thus inadvertently came out? The Czech secret police would intern me in a psychiatric hospital, Oxford and Cambridge would get me out, and I would be given a lucrative job at one of the universities?

Roger Scruton visited my seminar less than a fortnight before the attempt of the secret police to intern me in a psychiatric hospital; he gave us a lecture on Wittgenstein. Barbara Day writes that the next day he met some of my students on the quiet, wooded Shooters’ Island on the river Vltava and ‘wondered how much opportunity they had to express their own ideas; the seminars were dominated by Tomin, and the young students were overshadowed by his powerful personality. In conversation with the students, Scruton began to realise what a vital role the seminars played in passing on to the new generation traditions of independent enquiry; he also thought how much more effective they could be if the teaching were freed from the influence of personality.’(The Velvet Philosophers, op. cit. p. 45)

***

In November 1979, about a month after the unsuccessful attempt at interning me in the Horní Beřkovice psychiatric hospital, I was summoned to a psychiatrist in my Prague district. I wrote to the psychiatrist, asking her to specify the reasons for the summons. In reply, I received threatening summons, without any explanation: if I refused to come, I would be taken to the psychiatrist by force. Thomas Mautner from Australia had a lecture in my seminar just two days before I was due to visit the psychiatrist, so I asked him to come along with me to the psychiatric surgery; together we would ask for the reasons for the summons. He agreed, and so did a Czech writer Eva Kantůrková. When we arrived, we went into the waiting room and I knocked on the door of the psychiatrist: ‘I am here with my friends, a distinguished Czech writer and an Australian philosopher; we want to know why you summoned me for a psychiatric investigation.’ The doctor closed the door in my face. Next, the door of the waiting room was locked. The psychiatrist was obviously contacting the secret police, but the secret police do not like acting in the daylight. We therefore gave the psychiatrist twenty minutes in which it might sink deep into her mind – it was again a lady – that she would get no help from the police. Then I knocked again on the psychiatrist door. She beckoned me in, trying to prevent the entry of my friends. But I kept the door wide open, and my friends came in. I asked the psychiatrist again and again for her reasons in summoning me, translating into English every word I and the psychiatrist said. At last she said: ‘The police say that you write letters to the authorities.’ To this I said: ‘What you just said is very important, I must write it down.’ As I was writing the words, I was translating them into English. But I did not finish my writing for the psychiatrist shouted: ‘Out!’ We went out, elated. With this the attempts of the police to use psychiatry against me ended. Thomas Mautner’s and Eva Kantůrková’s bravery deserved to be noted, but the incident was not even mentioned in the Western mass media.

In ‘The Pub Philosopher’, published in The Independent Magazine on 18th November 1989 – i.e. a day after the Velvet Revolution began in Prague – Nick Cohen quoted an Oxford professor who said about me: ‘you can disguise paranoia in the East. There are so many real conspiracies. There aren’t the same excuses when you come to the West.’ Nick Cohen added: ‘How dare pampered Oxford dons condemn a man who has been sent in and out of jail since he was 18 for standing up for humanist values? It sounds scandalous until you hear Tomin happily accuse classical philosophers of conspiring to destroy him because he could expose their ignorance, or of collaborating with the Czech authorities.’ The article is full of gross inaccuracies and distortions. Consider the quoted sentence. I was imprisoned only twice, both times before I reached my 19^th birthday: I was sentenced to three months in prison for my refusal to undergo the conscription to military service, which was at that time obligatory for all young men, and to four years for leaving the country illegally. (Of these four years I spent in prison only a year, for three years of my sentence were pardoned by an amnesty – president Zápotocký died and Novotný, the new president issued an amnesty. My case was unusual, for I actually did leave the country illegally; I tried to get on a boat in a Polish port Szczetin and was apprehended by the Polish police. Had I unsuccessfully attempted to cross the border to West Germany or Austria, the amnesty would not have applied to my case.)

I never accused classical philosophers ‘of conspiring to destroy me’, nor did I ever say that they ‘collaborated with the Czech authorities.’ I told Cohen what I experienced in very concrete terms, but he put into my mouth his own generalizations, which were false. He did it so that every reader would agree with the anonymously quoted professor: ‘“I don’t wish to sound East European,” said one, “but perhaps he does need psychiatric help.”’

Let me point out a few things I told Cohen. During the first two years in Oxford I lived with my family in a house hired by Dr Kathleen Wilkes, who was the first Oxford visitor in my seminar; we lived on the ground floor, she on the upper floor. We were often visited by Roger Scruton and Alan Montefiore who discussed with Kathy Oxford activities in Czechoslovakia. They divided them into open activities, namely the visits in Ladislav Hejdánek’s seminar, viewed as a smokescreen that shielded their truly important activities in Petr Rezek’s seminar, held in secrecy. I told them that it was naïve to believe that the secret police knew nothing of Rezek’s seminar. Alan Montefiore asked me how I can say that Rezek’s seminar is not secret, when people in Prague are confident that their meetings are secret. In those days I was receiving an emigrant journal Svědectví, published in France. I showed Alan the issue in which a Frenchman wrote about his visit in Rezek’s seminar. I said: ‘Alan, it is still possible that the Czechoslovak secret police knows nothing about the seminar, but only if the KGB gave a strict order that the department in Czechoslovak Ministry of Internal Affairs, which monitors Svědectví, must leave this particular issue untouched.’ I told Cohen that the Czechoslovak secret police was undoubtedly interested in the secrecy of Rezek’s seminar; that’s what secret police is all about, operating in secrecy. It made me sad that Oxford dons adopted this myth of secrecy. On another time Alan asked me: ‘Do you think that we have betrayed you?’ I replied: ‘You cannot betray me; you have betrayed yourselves.’

One affair bothered me in particular. One of my students, Jan Bednář, wrote to me that he would like to get The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Kathy Wilkes promised that the next visitor would bring it to him. A few weeks later I got another letter from Bednář in which he complained that I must have forgotten about him. I showed Kathy his letter. She promised to put it right. And she did. In those days Kathy was giving to me the copies of ‘strictly confident’ reports that each visitor had to write for the JHEF (Jan Hus Educational Foundation). I think it was the fifth report, written by Roger Scruton, in which he wrote that he delivered the Oxford Dictionary to Bednář, commenting: ‘We made it clear to him that we were not amused at his importunity’. And so, I told Kathy that I didn’t want to see any more reports, in fact I didn’t want to have anything more to do with the whole thing. For whatever I had said was disregarded, the mantra of Roger and Alan, and others involved, was: ‘We must do what our friends in Prague wants us to do’. In vain did I tell them that this meant: ‘We must do what the Czechoslovak secret police wants us to do’.

Nick Cohen’s article requires a short explanation. In 1988 I was approached by The Daily Telegraph. Through its offices, Noel Reilly offered me a private grant of £3000 for three lectures a year in The Beehive, his pub in Swindon. The contract was for three years, i.e. for nine lectures in total. I had been unemployed for two years when I received the offer, and I could not refuse it. It was a great challenge; I enjoyed every lecture and every discussion that followed. I invited my Oxford colleagues to each lecture; none of them came. Of the planned nine lectures I gave only three. The last took place in the early spring 1989 and was entitled ‘The demise of Marxism’. In the discussion I was asked: ‘What is the future of Czechoslovakia?’ I replied: ‘Thatcherism. Privatisation. Once you realize the beauty of selling what is not yours, it is irresistible.’ After this I was still receiving the payment for a few months – I was still payed when Cohen’s article was published, in November 1979 – but I was not invited to give any more lectures.

***

During the 1980s I had an opportunity to lecture at the Sub-faculty of Philosophy whenever I applied for permission to do so, but since 1990 I was deprived of this privilege. For several years I tried to regain the permission by informing Oxford philosophers about the progress of my work, sending them texts of the lectures I wanted to give. When my applications were refused year by year, I resorted to a seven-day hunger-strike. I held it on the seventh anniversary of Nick Cohen’s ‘The Pub Philosopher’. Had my protest been unsuccessful, I was determined to hold the next year an eight-day hunger-strike, then a nine-day, and so on. But the seven-day hunger-strike worked. The Philosophy Lectures Secretary granted the permission under special conditions, three of which follow:

‘i. You should be allowed the use of the room in 10 Merton Street to give lectures in;

ii. As last year [she should have written “as seven years ago”], these may be advertised in 10 Merton Street and on the “Lecture Prospectus” sent out just before the start of the term.

iv. You accept that no secretarial, word processing or xeroxing facilities can be made available to you by the Philosophy Sub-Faculty, or any other University department, over and above those involved in advertising your lectures as mentioned in ii. above.’

Reading these conditions, I was thinking of Roger Scruton’s article ‘A Catacomb Culture’: ‘we would smuggle [to Czechoslovakia] printing equipment, photocopiers, binding machines, and the countless other requirements of the “catacomb culture”. We also encouraged our French, German, American and Canadian colleagues to establish sister trusts … ‘ (TLS, February 16-22, 1990)

To regain the energy I needed to give my next course of lectures, I re-read a letter that one of my former students addressed to the Editor of The Oxford Magazine. He wrote it in response to the article ‘The Dons who went out in the cold’ published in Hilary Term 1991, which celebrated Oxford involvement in Eastern Europe:

‘The Oxford Magazine is supposed to publish all the good things about Oxford, but if it cannot admit of self-criticism where it is due, then one wonders what is the purpose of bringing East Europeans to Oxford at all.

I refer to the treatment of Dr Julius Tomin of Prague. It was on Dr Tomin’s invitation to attend seminars on Plato that the academics you describe (mainly from Balliol, one from Cambridge) went to Prague in the first place. On there expulsion, they let Dr Tomin understand that if ever he came to Oxford he would be welcome. He left Czechoslovakia in the early 1980s and since that time has been living in Oxford without ever having been offered academic job of any kind. Indeed, he has been reduced to living in penury, surviving either on Social Security or on ad hoc charity handouts, as at present. He was even reduced at one stage to giving lectures in a pub to earn money. Not only this, but his colleagues in the Philosophy Faculty have completely cold-shouldered him, or worse. Dr Jonathan Barnes of Balliol opined in a newspaper interview (in The Independent Magazine) that Dr Tomin would never have been admitted to Oxford as an undergraduate, let alone as a don, adding for good measure, and in the true Eastern European fashion, that he thought Dr Tomin should be put into a mental asylum. The cause of this unbelievably callous behaviour is a deep-going difference of opinion between Dr Tomin and his fellow philosophers about Ancient Philosophy and the way it is taught in British and American universities today. This is no small topic, and yet instead of agreeing to meet Dr Tomin in frank and open discussion in public, the Philosophy Faculty has closed ranks and dismissed him out of hand. We all know that Oxford can be a bit pompous and stuffy from time to time but the treatment meted out to Dr Tomin is simply intolerable, especially since the issues at stake, and the way they have been handled, raise fundamental questions about the teaching of philosophy at the university.

It is no doubt too much to expect that, of the millions raised by the campaign, some emolument might be made available to Dr Tomin for his teaching and research, but it would be the worst kind of economy with the truth if you failed to bring this shabby affair to the attention of your readers.

I must declare an interest. Dr Tomin gave me countless informal tutorials when I was an undergraduate and we have spent long hours together working on philosophy texts when I was a graduate. He is by far the best philosophy teacher I have ever had.’

***

The invitation I sent to Oxford University on 20th May 1978:

Dear Colleagues,

I would like to inform you of our work and to ask for your cooperation.

We live in Czechoslovakia, I and my friends and students. A year ago, we decided not to respect any more the current illegal practice of state functionaries who arrogate a right to decide who may study and what, who may teach and what he may teach. We decided to study philosophy together. The contents of our work were determined by my long study of ancient Greek literature; we have studied mostly Greek philosophy. As expected, state authorities took interest in our work soon. They manifested their interest in their own way: long questionings in secret police headquarters, duress to stop our work. Our need to work together proved stronger. In our struggle for the right to study we were not alone, we were backed by the Charter 77, a movement which fights for basic human rights in our country, and the world opinion expressed by the free press helped us considerably. Our course of philosophy has run a year. To the honour of state authorities, we must say, that up to now we did not encounter any further direct interference, only individual acts of persecution: some of us were sacked, some get no possibility to study on high-schools or university. From time to time we hear threats: ‘We will destroy you together with your Plato.’ From the moment we tried to enrich our program by inviting friends from abroad my post stopped coming. That is the reason I decided to write an open letter to your four universities; I have been deprived of any usual means of entering into scientific contacts on a private basis.

We cannot put up with a state of affairs where the state power decides to whom we may write and whose letters we may read, who may visit us and who may talk to us, who may share with us their knowledge. We study English and German, our thinking is influenced by Shakespeare and Goethe, Bacon and Locke … Can we acquiesce in being for ever deprived of any living contact with the present cultural and scientific life in Great Britain, U.S.A and Germany? We cannot travel even to GDR (German Democratic Republic), our passports were confiscated. We cannot buy free press, the press which our friends send us is mostly confiscated. But our government needs hard currencies, they cannot live without western commodities, so our country is open to visitors from the West. You have the possibility to come and visit us.

What are the topics in which we are interested? We want to understand the world in which we live and so we cannot neglect the view of natural sciences. Natural sciences, have they become a mere technical tool for explaining the nature or have they retained an ability to mediate an understanding of the world? We would be happy if natural scientists came to us and opened to us a sphere of human struggle to understand the world in which we live. We want to understand the society – we would be glad to have with us an economist, a sociologist … We want to understand human being, welcome would be a psychologist, philosopher, theologian … We want to understand the historical dynamics of human society, welcome would be an anthropologist, historian, futurologist, ecologist … Is there any scientific field or topic which we can a priori eliminate? There is only one precondition –an interest to visit us and to share with us ones’ own understanding.

In view of the fact that I do not get the post and my telephone may be confiscated any day, we cannot rely on normal means of communication. Allow me, please, to make a suggestion which seems to me most practicable. We study philosophy together every Wednesday from September to June, always at 6.p.m. in my flat: Praha 7, Keramická 3. Whenever you come, you are welcome. It would be most convenient, if we had visitors on a fixed day, e.g. every first Wednesday in a month, from October till June.

Dear friends, you will make us happy if you answer our request for cooperation and we are looking forward to have you with us.

Encounters with Oxford dons – a continuation

II. Kavan and Oxford dons

Barbara Day’s The Velvet Philosophers (published by The Claridge Press in 1999 on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Prague Velvet Revolution) sheds additional light on the affair in which Kavan’s perjury played an important role. In 1979 Oxford University began to be involved in Czechoslovakia by taking part in dissident seminars; the Czech participants needed books, which the Oxford dons were ready to supply. According to Barbara Day, early in 1981 Kavan made an offer to the trustees of the Jan Hus Educational Fund – a fund organized by Oxford dons for the sake of supporting Czech intellectuals – to transport a minimum of 700 books for a payment of £3000; the offer was accepted in principle, but it was proposed to Kavan that the initial payment would be £500 for the transport of 100-150 books. On April 28th, a day after the seizure of the van, Kavan wrote a letter to the trustees of the JHEF ‘which shows a scarcely suppressed irritation at what he felt to be parsimonious attitude of the British’ (p. 86). Barbara Day adds that when Kavan wrote the letter he ‘did not know about the dramatic events of the previous day’. On what basis does she make this additional statement? She herself writes that in the Czechoslovak secret police files allegations were found by an agent in the London Embassy that Kavan had been giving information about his emigré compatriots from 1969. She adds that in 1969 he was cleared of the allegations, but she does not say on what grounds and by what means (p. 87); did it happen in the same way as in the case of his perjury?

Careful reading of Barbara Day’s book in itself provides grounds for doubting the ‘clearing’. If I understand it well, after the incident with the van the JHEF trustees began to pay Kavan the money he requested and from then on everything went smoothly. Could that have happened without the Czechoslovak Secret Service turning a ‘blind eye’ on Kavan’s activities? But was it just ‘a blind eye’? It appears from the Adjudication of the Broadcasting Complaints Commission of September 1985 that Rudé Právo, the Czechoslovak Communist Party daily newspaper, maintained on 30th June 1981 ‘that there were code names in the van but no names and addresses’. Rudé Právo thus prepared the ground for Kavan’s perjury, which in the end gave Kavan the victory; in the Adjudication this ‘information’ figures prominently among those circumstances, to which ‘the Commission gave particular attention in deciding the case’ in Kavan’s favour.

The visits of Oxford dons to Czechoslovakia were triggered by my invitation. In 1977, I opened a seminar on Ancient Philosophy for young people excluded from higher education because of their parents’ involvement in the Prague Spring in 1968. On 20^th May 1978, I addressed a letter to Oxford University in which I wrote that I should welcome Oxford dons in my seminar. I wrote openly about the grave infringements of basic human rights in Czechoslovakia and about the harassment to which the police exposed those who attended my seminar. Nevertheless, my seminar had not been directly attacked since I defended it by a ten days hunger-strike in 1977. Posted in May, the letter reached Oxford philosophers the following December. Barbara Day writes that nobody can tell why my letter reached Oxford philosophers with such a delay, but I have no doubts that had I used Kavan as mediator, the letter would have reached Oxford much sooner. I did not use his ‘secret channels’, for I was convinced that they were ‘secret’ at the discretion of the secret police. At any rate, I could not see how true freedom could be achieved in the way of secrecy. By inviting Oxford dons to my seminar, I hoped to enlarge the miniscule island of freedom that I and my students enjoyed at our meetings. I was not prepared to compromise it through my own initiative.

My suspicions concerning Kavan’s collaboration with the secret police have been confirmed. But let me name just one incident. On 2^nd November 1979, one of my students, Ivan Dejmal, was detained ‘on suspicion of preparing a criminal act of terror’. Around that time, I received a telephone call from Kavan; he asked what I could tell him about an alleged bombing of a statue of a prominent politician in South Bohemia. He had been well informed about my seminar, he knew that vulnerable people attended it, and he could not have been so naïve as not to know that my telephone was most certainly bugged by the secret police. Was his telephone call anything but an attempt to provide the police with a good reason for implicating me and my students in ‘a criminal act of terror’?

To my utter consternation, on the occasion of Kathy Wilkes’ first visit to my seminar in Prague I learnt that Jan Kavan became an advisor to Oxford dons concerning their contacts with Prague dissidents. I was particularly alarmed by Kavan’s offer that through his dissident channels he would send me books that Oxford dons would be donating to me. I believed that with the support of Western press and public opinion we were strong enough to win free access to Western literature by legal means, which would have enormously enlarged our freedom.

In an effort to explain why Oxford dons accepted Kavan’s offer of the delivery of books, Barbara Day writes: ‘Seminar leaders warned that books should not be sent through the ordinary post’ (p. 85). This was false at least as far as I was concerned. In my letter of invitation to Oxford dons, I mentioned that my foreign mail had been confiscated by the police for months. This was one of those infringements of human rights that I hoped to tackle openly with the help of visitors from Oxford. There was a way of doing so: I asked Kathy Wilkes to send me books specially registered, so that the Czechoslovak Post would have to pay a heavy fine for every undelivered item. There was a successful precedent; one of the signatories of the human rights Charter 77 had in this way earned good money after emigrating to Sweden; the Czechoslovak authorities had to give in, in the end, and the post started delivering his letters to his friends. But all my entreaties concerning this were in vain.

Concerning the aftermath of the seizure of Kavan’s van by the Czechoslovak police, Barbara Day writes: ‘… whilst still appreciating Kavan’s efforts on their behalf, many of the dissidents decided not to use his channels in future …’ (p.87). This may explain why Kavan committed the perjury. He attempted to explain the matter in an interview for Czech TV on 13^th August 1998. It was an interview in which I took a small part, for it was held on the occasion of my hunger-strike in protest against his nomination as the Czech Foreign Minister. I said that while I fully appreciated his contribution to the fall of the old regime, I was aware of the negative sides of his contribution, especially his pronounced disregard for the truth. Kavan responded by saying that I was telling untruths. At that point the Czech broadcaster intervened – the interview was held via satellite, I was at the Oxford BBC studio, Kavan and the interviewer were in Prague – and said that in a Czech court Kavan was found guilty of having committed perjury during his stay in Britain. Kavan dismissed her intervention by claiming that it was just a Czech court, not a British court, implying that a Czech court should not be taken seriously. At this point I re-entered the debate and pointed to his sworn affidavit of 19^th August 1982, the copy of which I was holding in my hand. Kavan then changed the tack and justified his perjury by the need to protect dissidents in Czechoslovakia. He ended with a rhetorical question: ‘When you were interrogated by the secret police, didn’t you feel fully justified to lie in order to protect others?’

I was not given an opportunity to ask Kavan how he could compare his perjury in a British court with lying to Czech secret police interrogators, and how could Czech dissidents be protected by his falsely claiming in a British court that the van he sent to Prague contained no names and addresses, when the secret service had those names and addresses in their hands, having found them in the van he had sent to Prague.

Let me go back to Barbara Day’s notes on the aftermath of the seizure of Kavan’s van: ‘The Jan Hus Foundation was not directly involved in the crisis … Of a large number of dissidents detained, seventeen were charged with “subversion of the Republic on a large scale in cooperation with a foreign power”; seven of them (including the seminar student Jan Ruml) remained in prison without trial for a year.’ (p. 87). Kavan’s van seized by the secret police was carrying an assignment of books chosen by the trustees of the fund for the seminars, and yet, not a single don protested against the Czech men and women imprisoned because of that. In the spring of 1982, I was invited to give a talk to an Amnesty International group somewhere in East Anglia. I talked about my seminar and about the imprisoned. After the talk, in a break before the discussion, I was given a precious surprise gift. Amnesty International printed a number of postcards with a photo of one of the imprisoned, Jan Ruml; he was one of my students who took part in the decision to invite Oxford dons to our seminar. The idea was that anyone willing to help to obtain freedom for Ruml should buy one, sign it, and send it to the president of the Czechoslovak Republic in protest against Ruml’s imprisonment. I was delighted. I asked for a hundred postcards, for there was about a hundred philosophers at the Sub-Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University. I then sent one postcard to each. Ruml and his fellow prisoners were released from prison shortly afterwards, without trial.

Concerning me and Jan Kavan, Barbara Day writes: ‘Jan Kavan and Julius Tomin represented two completely different approaches to the issue of how to behave within a totalitarian regime: on the one hand, an emphasis on secrecy and disguise; on the other, a determination to carry on “as normal”, to hold to one’s rights.’ (p. 29). On page 35 she writes: ‘Tomin’s guiding principle was that if one’s actions were not illegal or dishonourable, then they should be carried out in the open. To this end he always made public the dates and times of his seminars. When the Oxford dons started arriving regularly, Tomin would take them to lunch talking openly in fluent English – at a time when many Czechs, if they even dared to have English-speaking friends, would ask them to speak in low tones or not at all in public.’ On page 245 she writes: ‘… the philosophers found themselves between the extremes of Julius Tomin’s openness and Jan Kavan’s secrecy.’ Oxford dons found Kavan’s way more congenial. Let me quote from Roger Scruton’s ‘A catacomb culture’, which was published in the TLS, February 16-22, 1990:

‘The publicity-conscious Tomin then emigrated … We decided that, although our purpose was charitable … it should not be openly pursued, and that we could henceforth best help our Czechoslovak colleagues by working secretly … we won the confidence of a large network of people, none of whom knew the full extent of our operations … We therefore began to establish other, purely nominal organizations through which to pay official stipends, so that the names of our beneficiaries could not be linked either to us or to each other … In the mid-1980s, thanks to a generous grant from George Soros (who will surely be commemorated in future years … as one of the saviours of Central Europe), we had expanded into Moravia … the organizer of our work in Slovakia, Jan Čarnogurský, was made Deputy Prime Minister … and another of our beneficiaries [Václav Havel] was President, and within weeks we were to see our friends occupying the highest offices in the land. Among those who worked with us we could count the new rectors of the Charles University, of Masaryk University in Brno, and of the Palacký University in Olomouc.’

My next post will be devoted to part III of the ‘Encounters’, which is entitled ‘A Surprise on the Internet’.

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In the preceding post I mentioned that during my break from Plato I am improving my Latin. As part of this, I am reading Kennedy’s Revised Latin Primer. Today I came across a line from Cicero which expresses well the mood in which I am doing so, and the enjoyment I am deriving from it: Haec studia adulescentiam alunt, senectutem oblectant. (These studies nurture youth and delight old age.) There is only one thing that does not quite fit my case: I began to learn Latin in my late twenties, after I did my PhD.

Taking a break from Plato

I wrote the last entry on my blog two months ago; I have decided to end my work on Plato for the time being.

How do I spend my break? I have decided to improve my Latin, and I read every day an English author aloud. Why aloud? I want to keep my voice in good condition; what if a miracle happened and my Oxford colleagues decided to invite me to give a lecture, or even a series of lectures on Plato?

For several weeks I have been reading Jeffrey Archer’s trilogy A Prison Diary. Today, rummaging through my papers, I have come across ‘Encounters with Oxford dons’ which I wrote after being inspired by the Guardian report on the Archer trial. I shall devote the next few posts to the ‘Encounters’:

I.                    Kavan’s perjury

The front page of The Guardian on 20th July, 2001: ‘A liar’s moment of truth’ – ‘The judge’s every word dripped with loathing and contempt’ – ‘As serious an offence of perjury as I have experience of’. – Reading about Jeffrey Archer, I thought of Jan Kavan, a British citizen, the present Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic and its Deputy Prime Minister. I was asking myself: ‘Will his moment of truth ever come?’

In a sworn Affidavit on 19th August 1982, in The High Court of Justice, Queen’s Bench Division, Divisional Court, Jan Kavan denied that a van which he sent to Prague in April 1981 packed with books to Czech dissidents contained their names and addresses. In 1992, a list of Czech dissidents was discovered in the files of the Czech secret police and proved to be the list sent by Kavan in the van. Is there anyone prepared to take Kavan to task for his perjury? In June 1997, the Foreign Secretary Robin Cook wrote to Jan Kavan: ‘I have taken the precaution of having the official record checked. I can confirm that there is no suggestion that you have ever been guilty of committing perjury in the United Kingdom or, indeed, any other similar offence.’

What were the circumstances that induced Kavan to commit perjury? In April 1981, he discussed with the Thames Television the possibility of broadcasting a programme about Czechoslovakia. In that month he sent to Prague a Volkswagen van with books for Czech dissidents. The Volkswagen was stopped on the border by Czechoslovak customs officers. On 1st May 1981, he told Mr Manyon of Thames Television what had happened. The Thames Television then decided to focus the programme on the sending of the van and the discovery of its contents. It was disclosed in the film that the van contained a list of Prague dissident contacts. On 20th August 1981, Jan Kavan complained to the Broadcasting Complaints Commission maintaining that the van did not carry the alleged names and addresses. On 29th November 1981, the Sunday Times published an article headed ‘TV Lie’ which states that it was untrue that the van carried names and addresses. In response to this article, Thames Television Limited, Mr Townson, the editor of the programme, and Mr Manyon, the reporter, brought an action of libel against Times Newspaper Limited. The Broadcasting Commission adjourned its further investigations for the duration of the libel action. In the ensuing court proceedings Mr Jan Kavan committed perjury.

From the eventual adjudication of the Broadcasting Complaints Commission in September 1985 it appears that Kavan involved other people in his perjury. Thames Television in its statement of 17th November 1981 maintained not only that Mr Kavan said to Mr Manyon on 1st May 1981 that there was a list of names and addresses in the van, but that Mr Unger, Brussel’s correspondent with the International Harold Tribune in a telephone conversation maintained the same; also, that at the press conference on 24th June 1981 in answer to a question by Mr Viney of the BBC Mr Kavan stated that the names of persons to whom books were destined were included in the consignment. On 19th September 1984, Mr Kavan in his reply to the Thames Television statement denied that there had been any statement that there were names and addresses in the van. An affidavit was produced from Mr Unger to the effect that he had been misquoted by the broadcaster. Furthermore, an affidavit and statements were produced from Mr Viney and others stating that the account given of the incident at the press conference in the Thames Television statement was wrong and that Mr Kavan had said in answer to Mr. Viney’s enquiry that there was nothing in the van to identify those who were subsequently arrested. On the basis of all this ‘evidence’ the Broadcasting Complaints Commission found in its adjudication in September 1985 that Julian Manyon invented the claim that the van contained the names and addresses of Czech dissidents.

In the ‘Annulment of previous finding’ on 5th March 1992 the Broadcasting Complaints Commission stated:

‘During the past year new material has been submitted to the Commission. It is now established, and indeed accepted by Mr Kavan, that there were in fact uncoded names and addresses in the van, including those of the intended recipients of some of the literature in it. Furthermore, it is also established and not denied by Mr Kavan that he new that this was so, and that he did not inform the Commission. The Commission do not accept his explanation that he was justified in withholding this information by reason of the need to protect others.’

My next post will be devoted to part II of the ‘Encounters’, which is entitled ‘Kavan and Oxford dons’.