The Age of Incompetence: Chapter XX

"At the end of a life man notices that he has spent years becoming sure of a single truth. But a single truth, if it is obvious, is enough to guide an existence."
- Alburt Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

PLZEN On October 24, 1985 a 25-year-old sailor named Miroslav Medvid, on the Russian ship Marshall Koniev decided his chance for freedom was at hand and he took it. His ship was anchored in the Mississippi River near New Orleans and Medvid jumped ship. But what followed was one of the strangest attempted defections in the history of the United States.

Medvid, a Ukrainian, was by one press account "returned kicking and screaming to his ship by U.S. Border Agents." From that point on things got even stranger. Medvid somehow by guile and courage jumped ship once again. Same results; he was returned to his ship. But by this time the media had gotten wind of the affair and it became a cause celebre. Against U.S. Law the case was taken over by the State Department instead of the Justice Department. The U.S. Senate Agriculture Committee actually voted to subpoena Medvid to appear in Washington. President Reagan's security team advised him to ignore the subpoena. It was just a week before a summit meeting with the Soviets in Geneva. Reagan who had made a career of saying it was necessary to stand up to the Russians on human rights issues became invisible.

When the Marshall Koniev sailed into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico with a load of 1.5 million bushels of corn and Medvid no one would say who gave the order to allow it to sail. A White House spokesman said only, "The executive branch has carried out its responsibility. We consider the case closed."

Actually the United States had a long history of not walking their talk about Human Rights going all the way back to 1939 when the German ship St. Louis left Hamburg with a load of Jewish passengers for Cuba. They had all their visa papers, but once in Havana they were denied entry, as it was revealed later on arrangement of Mr. Goebbles in Berlin. Then the St. Louis was denied entry into the U.S. It was finally allowed to dock in Antwerp and some of the Jews managed to make it to England, but a good many of them later died in Hitler's death camps. Like Reagan, Pres. Roosevelt was oddly invisible when he could have saved lives.

Milovan Djilas (1911 - 1995)

There was the Hungarian revolution in 1956. In his book about that great upheaval, The Bridge At Adau, James Michener wrote this: "A Polish newspaper reviewed what had happened. He was ashamed that his country had been able to do so little to help the Hungarians, and he was embittered that neighboring Czechoslovakia had actually tried to hamper the Hungarians and help the Russians. He wrote, `Sadly we must admit that the Hungarians acted liked Poles, the Poles acted like Czechs. And the Czechs acted like swine.' An observed added, "But the Americans didn't act at all."

In 1975 when Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn visited the White House President Ford on the advice of his team ducked a meeting with the survivor of the Russian Gulags. You guessed it, he didn't want to offend the Russians. Later that day he had time in his schedule to pose for a photo opt with the Queen of Cotton.

Only recently Pres. Obama ducked a meeting with the Deli lama, you guessed it, he didn't want to offend the Chinese communists.

It is as if we have forgotten how to act like an American or even what it means to be an American. There is a telling passage in Michener's book where he is interviewing one of the Hungarian refugees, a man named Ferenc Kobol. Kobol's words now over a half century old strike at the heart of the matter: "No Hungarian is mad at Radio Free Europe. We wanted to have our hopes kept alive...It was partly our fault for trusting in words. It was partly America's fault for thinking that words can be used loosely. Words like ‘freedom,' ‘struggle for national honor,' ‘rollback,' and ‘liberation,' have meaning. They stand for something. Believe me when I say that you cannot tell Hungarians or Bulgarians or Poles every day for six years to love liberty and then sit back philosophically and say, ‘But the Hungarians and Bulgarians and Poles mustn't do anything about liberty. They must remember that we're only using words.' Such words to a man in chains are not merely words. They are the weapons he can break his chains."

I was living in Washington, D.C. when Miroslav Medvid made his dash for freedom and I asked various officials and un-official sources for several years what happened to him. No one knew and I was often asked why I cared about him, was I of Ukrainian decent? No, I always answered patiently, I'd just like to know.

It's one of those things that require a narrative and a story to get at the truth. Medvid was just one man and a blip so small in history books that today no one remembers him. American school kids aren't taught the significance of the ship St. Louis and its 837 passengers who were counting on freedom and instead many of whom ended up in Nazi ovens. Few Americans today know who or what Solzhenitsyn represented in his time. All these are but dead things of the past.

But words are the weapons we can break the chains that imprison if - but only if we believe in them enough to act on them. The Soviet Union is gone, but its ghost lingers on. For if it is one thing the old Soviets believed in it was words; words as weapons. It was why no matter how patently artificial and unbelievable they always had their high

ranking purge victims stage confessions. It was why they went to such unbelievable efforts to eradicate from history books any of their past words when they became outdated or embarrassingly false. It was why they hated and feared any artist who wrote underground books or journals or documents.

Now I am in the former Czechoslovakia and have for many years been involved with building a library here and people naturally ask me, "So you are of Czech decent?" And, like I answered about Medvid, I say, "No."

"Then why?" is always the next question whether it's asked in America or in Bohemia. But there is no short answer like dispensing an aspirin. Truth requires a narrative and a story like you would find in reading a story by Solzhenitsyn or Milovan Djilas. How many Americans know Djilas, who spent so many years in communist prisons for his writing? I would ask of them to read just one of his stories, The Leper.

"The strongest are those who renounce their own times and become a living part of those yet to come." Djilas wrote in his book, Land Without Justice. It sent him back to prison. No doubt he weighed that option and decided it was worth going back to prison to be a part of the living future. For words have a magical quality: they survive the ages, they survive the fashions, and they survive empires, like the late Soviet empire. They are the weapons to break our chains.

Yes, words have consequences, as the Hungarians learned in 1956. Obama is just the latest in a long line of American politicians who think words are only things to win elections and are without consequences.

I am still wondering what happened to Miroslav Medvid. No doubt he believed in the words he heard about America and its love of freedom. Words can break chains or break hearts.

Next: Communism and how it still influences the toxic culture and politics of today