By Leonardo Padura and - -
HAVANA, Nov 19 2008 (IPS)

The lamentable scandal that broke a few weeks ago about the alleged denunciation by the young Milan Kundera of a seemingly possible \”western\” spy in then Czechoslovakia, can be examined from every angle, but there has been little comment about the ethical component of this probable act of denunciation, writes Leonardo Padura Fuentes, a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into a ten languages. In this article, Padura writes that opportunists abroad and inside the country are waiting for just a glimpse of weakness to release the avalanche of hatred fermented in cowardice, frustration, envy, and mediocrity. Such figures are always lying in wait. But how many of them have asked themselves whether Kundera lived ethically, whether he was a decent man in his thinking and character? This world in crisis -and not only financial- is in desperate need of more decency. To fell great trees for presumed sins and so fan doubt and cause pain involves more mean-spiritedness than political uprightness. There are enough rotten trees that deserve to be chopped down to stoke their fury. Certainly the truth deserves its place. But the truth is that many of those casting the first – and second and third – stones should consider how they would have behaved in similar or even less dire circumstances than 1950s Czechoslovakia. Stones thrown often turn into boomerangs. But unfortunately, this type of zealot usually has no familiarity with the notion of decency. And too often they have little concern with another concept: truth.

In the end, what everyone seems to forget is a detail that in my view is the very essence of the matter: ethics, or what my parents used to call ”decency” back in the 1950s. I would even argue that the question of truth comes second, and after that responsibility for acts in the sacrosanct and always weighty zone of “historic circumstances”.

A few years ago, when a far more serious accusation was levelled at German writer Gunther Grass -which, moreover, Grass admitted was true- strangely the real and more lasting effect of the scandal was that his recently published biography sold millions of copies, a shining example of the force of people’s morbid curiosity.

And no one seems very concerned about the fact that, for whatever reason, the rebellious and almost red Ernest Hemingway collaborated on occasion with the FBI of his bitter enemy J. Edgar Hoover, and that according to certain sources George Orwell had contacts with the British secret service. These are but two of innumerable similar examples involving renowned figures in the arts and letters.

There are, without a doubt, two elements driving the furious and rank outrage that certain media and individuals are venting over a story that took place almost sixty years ago and was denied by the accused: first, the fact that Kundera has scorned the media of our day and retreated into a nearly impenetrable, almost Salingerian, silence. Second is the no less significant fact that Kundera would have committed this sin not in a chat with a British or American agent, or working for an organisation as loathsome as Hitler’s SS, but rather in a newly-communist country, part of that 20th century system patented by Stalin -far more than by Lenin or Trotsky- and consecrated by the Great Leader with the deaths of some twenty million people and a political and economic disaster that brought the world more or less to where we are today: the loss of the great utopias of equality, the economic and ecological crucifixion that followed its disappearance, and to top it off, the state of domination by a handful of media outlets that prefer scraps of decomposing flesh to all other material.

Add to this the fact that many of Kundera’s compatriots never forgave his exile, and that many mediocre figures at home and abroad cannot not bear his considerable literary success, and that in his time he had the courage to write what he should have written – a more potent range of motivations than would accompany a crucifixion.

The great eternal opportunists (a breed Cubans know all too well), whether abroad or inside the country, are waiting for just a glimpse of weakness (real or not) to release the avalanche of hatred fermented in cowardice, frustration, envy, and mediocrity. Such figures are always lying in wait. How many of them have asked themselves whether Kundera lived ethically, whether he was a decent man in his thinking and character?

A few years ago the Cuban writer Eliseo Alberto, living in Mexico, published a book titled, “Report against myself” in which he recounted -perhaps preemptively to keep someone from ambushing him later – certain murky circumstances during which he was asked even to inform on his father, the great Spanish language poet Eliseo Diego. Eliseo Alberto, or Lichi, as we all called him in Cuba, poured out his heart in this book in an act of supreme decency, “informing” on himself with a courage that people very rarely summon, particularly those who go around judging others.

This is why in the case of Kundera – though it is very important whether or not he denounced an ex-friend and agent of a foreign government – it is so painful that various bottomfeeders in the media pounced on him in the way that I am certain some will pounce on me for thinking that, despite everything, Kundera remains more than ever a great writer who in his time unveiled such a range of human mysteries in novels like “The Joke” and “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”.

This world in crisis -and not only financial – is in desperate need of more decency. To fell great trees for presumed sins and so fan doubt and cause pain involves more mean-spiritedness than political uprightness. There are enough rotten trees that deserve to be chopped down to stoke their fury. Certainly the truth deserves its place. But the truth is that many of those casting the first – and second and third – stones should consider how they would have behaved in similar or even less dire circumstances than 1950s Czechoslovakia. Stones thrown often turn into boomerangs. But unfortunately, this type of zealot usually has no familiarity with the notion of decency. And too often they have little concern with another concept: truth.(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

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