Milan Kundera: A Fink for the Commies?

Milan Kundera, the great, ex-pat, Czech novelist of modern classics such as The Unbearable Lightness of Being is alleged to have ratted out a 22 year old man out to the Communist authorities in 1950. This is a shocker to readers of his brilliant, humanist books set in Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia. I'm also surprised to learn that the Czechs hate him. (article)

By mid-October, the Tlustý/Morava affair had been bumped from the front pages by a scandal with considerably more gravitas, though no less slavering by the media: a prominent weekly magazine claimed that in 1950, Milan Kundera had sent to prison a 22-year-old Czech who had been spying for the West. The furor this news aroused in the Czech Republic seems inseparable from the Czechs' persistent "allergy" to the expatriate novelist. Ivan Klíma diagnosed the ailment in a 1990 interview with Philip Roth, explaining that Czechs resent Kundera for being "an indulged and rewarded child of the Communist regime [before] 1968," too hands-off in his opposition to the party even after he began to criticize it in the '60s, and all the while presenting his travails under Communism to the world beyond the Iron Curtain in a "simplified and spectacular way." Now people were wondering how Kundera could have suppressed the 1950 incident for sixty years, even as he garnered international prestige for his opposition to Communism and his literary autopsies of the moral rot it breeds in the individual conscience. Perhaps he hadn't kept the episode under wraps. Could he have recycled it in his fiction? After all, his stories and novels are full of the betrayals endemic to a totalitarian regime. Speculating on whether Kundera had pulled off a grand deception, Czech journalists spiced their accounts of the affair with scenes from his novels in which characters seem to play according to the 1950 script.

Kundera denies it, but he was listed in a police report as the one who gave the name. What a terrible disappointment if true.

Globe and Mail Columnist Waxes Nostalgic about Communism

My goodness, how does Rick Salutin still have a column at the Mop and Pail? Disgruntled at the economic times, he marvels at the communist glories that have passed us by:

Another model existed during the last global depression, in the 1930s. The Soviet Union was socialist and the bloom wasn't yet off that rose. Visitors from the West often returned with accounts of how well it worked. That shook up enough powerful people to help make the New Deal possible. In Canada in those years, the leader of Canada's Communist Party, Tim Buck, could draw a bigger crowd anywhere than prime minister Mackenzie King.

During later crises, when the Soviet system had ossified and its stench was unavoidable, there were other models: huge China, little Cuba, all the ex-colonies in Africa and Asia with versions of socialism. They weren't just in the heads of Western protesters and dreamers; they were on a map. You could go and see (or project) the dream fulfilled.

Never mind the millions of innocent people slaughtered by these tyrannies. The confiscation of property, the totalitarianism, the squashing of free speech. The utter failure of their economies. They provided a good example, and helped shake up the Canadian political establishment back in the good old days? Is that what he's saying?

How is this kook employed by a major newspaper?

Non-Story of the Year

Russian ships are visiting Cuba for the first time since the breakup of the Soviet Union. (Drudge Report has a menacing close-up picture of Putin as the lead story.) So what? Are they going to start shelling Miami? (read)

The Admiral Chabanenko, the nuclear-powered cruiser Peter the Great and support ships arrived in the Caribbean last month in a deployment also unprecedented since Soviet times. The voyage is widely seen as a show of force close to U.S. shores and a response to the U.S. use of warships to deliver humanitarian aid to Russia's neighbor Georgia after their war in August.

What I find interesting is the naming of the ship after a Czar. Communism is definately over in Russia.