BOOK REVIEW by Wayne Dunn:
Café Europa, Life After Communism by Slavenka Drakulic
In 1937 Ayn Rand wrote Anthem, a novellette that depicted a totalitarian world, a world where the individual was nothing and the group all, where even the pronoun 'I' disappeared from language and one could speak only in terms of 'we' and 'us'.
After reading Slavenka Drakulic's book Café Europa, Life after Communism (1996, Penguin Books), one realizes that Ayn Rand's fiction, written 60 years earlier, unfortunately turned out to be more prophetic than fictitious. Ms. Drakulic, who lived most of her life under the boot-heel of communist rule in then Yugoslavia, writes in the introduction:
"I hate the first-person plural. My resistance to it is almost physical, [because] to me it represents a physical experience. I can smell the bodies pressed against me in a 1 May parade, or the celebration of Tito's [the former Yugoslovian dictator's] birthday on 25 May, the sweaty armpits of a man in front of me....I can feel the crowd pushing me forward, all of us moving as one, a single body...a sort of automatic puppet-motion because no one is capable of anything else.
"I grew up with 'we' and 'us': in the kindergarten, at school, in the pioneer and youth organizations, in the community, at work. I grew up listening to politicians saying, 'Comrads, we must...'...and we did what we were told....
"Those who used 'I' instead of 'we' in their language had to escape. It was this fatal difference in grammar that divided them from the rest of their compatriots. As a consequence of this 'us', no civic society developed....
"[Individuality] begins by saying 'I', thinking 'I' and doing 'I'.
"'We' means fear, resignation, submissiveness, a warm crowd and somebody else deciding your destiny. 'I' means... individuality."
While the introduction to Café Europe is a chilling but eloquent testimony to the individuality-smothering power of a collectivist state, the remainder of the book is merely a patchwork of disconnected observations about life under communism. These real-life observations and personal experiences would have been fine to list had they then been used to inductively arrive at an abstract principle, at a rational value-judgment regarding collectivism.
Amazingly however, Drakulic proves that she herself does not fully understand the underlying philosophical ramifications of the very system that almost destroyed her and succeeded in destroying many of her countrymen. For, apart from the enlightening introductory essay, the book amounts to a series of concrete gripes against the communist state, gripes that are perfectly legitimate, but are left dangling in the abyss, with no attempt to place them in any deeper, philosophical context. Resultantly, a reader can only conclude that the author believes that if Yugoslavia had not been dotted with machine-gun pillboxes, had fixed citizens' teeth, had provided vacuum cleaners and other nifty Western gadgets, had been treated kindly by freer European neighbors and had not inculcated in the citizens a respect for uniforms, then communism would have been perfectly acceptable.
Ms. Drakulic could have easily spring-boarded from these powerful concrete examples to show how individuality is stifled under a system of compulsion, but instead she ends up right back at the same moral premise upon which collectivism depends. "[S]ociety," she writes on page 78, "has to function in such a way as to guarantee people's minimum social and medical needs." The book is sprinkled with assertions such as that one--assertions that Stalin, Mao and Tito would have agreed with wholeheartedly.
A collectivist always starts with the premise that you, an individual member of society, must be required to "guarantee the social needs" of others. And then comes the sacrifice of the individual 'I' to the collective 'we', which the author personally experienced and hated but apparently learned little from.
Ms. Drakulic safely escaped the fire of communism only to preach that we should all hop into the frying pan of socialism, not realizing that the former is merely a hotter (i.e., more consistent) version of the latter.
