Background to my 2007 Protest continued...
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part 2...
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Part 5
XV
On September 1, 1989 I invited Jonathan Barnes to my paper on ‘The Misplaced Key to Plato’, which was to be devoted to my dating of the Phaedrus and its importance for the interpretation of Plato, and which I was to present on November 22 in the Philosophy Centre at 10 Merton St in the big lecture room. In my invitation I wrote: ‘I should appreciate it very much if you would kindly consider chairing the event ... I hope very much that you will be able to come to the talk, and I would be greatly honoured if you would chair it.’
Professor Barnes did not answer my invitation. Instead, shortly before my talk, on 18 November 1989, Nick Cohen published in The Independent Magazine an article in which he gave prominence to Barnes’ views concerning me:
‘THE PUB PHILOSOPHER
When Julius Tomin, the then celebrated Czech dissident, fled to Oxford nearly 10 years ago, he was welcomed as a hero and an intellectual star. Now he is reduced to giving his philosophy lectures in a Swindon saloon bar.
BY NICK COHEN
The judgments passed by Oxford dons on Julius Tomin seem outrageously brutal. “I don’t wish to sound East European,” said one, “but perhaps he does need psychiatric help.”
Philosophers who were prepared to risk arrest and deportation in order to visit him behind the Iron Curtain will not pop round the corner to his dismal bedsitting room now he is in Britain. As “the pub philosopher”, whose poverty forced him to earn a living by delivering lectures in a Swindon saloon bar, Tomin is once again being written about in the newspapers, but as a curiosity rather than a hero.
The Czech dissident fled to Oxford in 1980 and was received as an intellectual star. He came to join the university’s philosophers who for two years had gone to Prague to lecture at the “unofficial” seminars Tomin organized in his flat – a snub by the world community of scholars to the neo-Stalinist Czech state. That community is now generally too embarrassed to speak about Tomin openly. “We bent over backwards to help him when he came here,” is a phrase used so often that it sounds like an official line.
One professor gave him full credit for his boldness in reviving the spirit of intellectual freedom in the terrorized atmosphere which pervaded, and continues to pervade, Czechoslovakia after the crushing of the Prague Spring reform movement by the Russians in 1968. Then he added: “But 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.”
Younger philosophers, who do not have the personal ties, will go on the record. Jonathan Barnes, Professor of Philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford, impatiently brushed aside the suggestion that the Conservative’s reduction in funding for British philosophy since 1980 might explain why there was never an academic post for Tomin at Oxford. “That’s not the point at all,” he said. “He would not be accepted as a graduate here, let alone be given a teaching job. He’s like a recalcitrant student who can’t admit he’s wrong.”
How dare Oxford pampered dons condemn a man who has been sent to a psychiatric hospital for his beliefs and who has been 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.’
Cohen’s article is full of gross inaccuracies and distortions. I was imprisoned only twice, both times before I reached my 19th birthday: for three months for refusing to be enrolled for military service, for a year because of my attempt to leave the country. I never accused classical philosophers ‘of conspiring to destroy me’ and I did not say that they ‘collaborated with the Czech authorities’. I told Cohen what I experienced and what I knew in very concrete terms, but he put in my mouth only his own generalizations so that any reader would agree with him and with the anonymously quoted Oxford professor, that I must be a paranoiac. The anonymously quoted professor was obviously unhappy that the Czech psychiatrists failed to find me insane, which chimes strangely with Cohen’s 'information’ that Tomin ‘has been sent to a psychiatric hospital for his beliefs’.
It must be said, in ‘defence’ of the Czechoslovak secret police, that they did their best to hospitalize me. But it was not because of my political beliefs, but because I defended my unofficial philosophy seminar with a ten day hunger strike, as it becomes clear from the secret police document devoted to it. I print in bold the passages directly referring to their attempt to put me in a psychiatric clinic:
2. department
Prague, 7. 11. 1977
TOMIN Julius – a report
PhDr TOMIN Julius, born 2. 12. 1938 in Prague, of Czech nationality, Czechoslovak citizenship, married, not a member of a political party, address Prague 7, Keramická 3.
A signatory of Charter 77 Julius TOMIN was detained by members of VB [Public Security, i.e. police] on 18. 10. 1977 for disruption of public order in the Court-building in Prague, where he intended to attend the court trial of ORNEST, LEDERER, PAVLÍČEK and HAVEL. In order to prevent him from attending the continuation of the trial, he was again summoned, on 19.10. 1977 to the MO – VB [City Section of Public Security] in Vyšehradská street.
According to information obtained from press agencies, on 21. 10. 1977 in the flat of Julius TOMIN a lecture was to take place of the so called ‘University of Jan Patočka’, which was to be attended by prominent right-wing persons.
With the aim of preventing the meeting of these hostile elements, it was decided to detain TOMIN and bring him to the building of the FMV. But Julius TOMIN refused to obey the summons by the Public Security Members; he justified his refusal by alleging that his wife was away on business and he must take care of the children. He proclaimed that he would not go voluntarily and if we wanted to take him away, we must carry him away.
Because of this, the attempt to detain TOMIN was given up and the next day a summons was delivered to him to come to the building of the FMV to provide an explanation for his refusal to obey the previous summons. But Julius TOMIN failed to obey even these further summons.
Instead, on 20. 10. 1977 he sent a ‘Notice of a Contemplated Ten Day Hunger-strike’ to ten addressees: Rudé Právo [the Communist Party paper], Philosophical Faculty of Charles University, Svobodné Slovo [a paper of one of the minor political parties, but with wide circulation], the Federal Ministery for Home Affairs, Lidová Demokracie [another paper of a minor political party with wide circulation], Práce [the Trade Unions paper), Socialist Union of Youth, Czechoslovak Television, Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, and the writer Ivan KLÍMA. In this pamphlet Julius TOMIN says that he pledges to undertake a ten day hunger-strike, the beginning of which depends on a decision of the Security officials at the FMV. He then points out all the wrongs that he had suffered during his detentions and summons in the hands of the Security officials of FMV. In the end he says verbatim:
"And so I decided: as long as this police lawlessness lasts, not a step and not a word with the police or at the police station voluntarily. At the moment when the Members of the Public or Secret Security put their hands on me to detain me, to carry me or to drag me to their car or to their building, at that moment I shall begin a ten day protest hunger-strike.
I shall hold the hungerstrike both in the case that I were to be released – even after being detained only for a short while – and in the case that I were to be imprisoned. In both cases I shall welcome any expression of public solidarity."
On 3. 11. 1977 it was ascertained from intelligence sources that Julius TOMIN in the evening intends to participate in a meeting of right-wing persons in the flat of MSc. Petr UHL [a prominent left-wing signatory of Carter 77]. In this situation a proposal was put forward and accepted not to allow TOMIN to enter into the flat of Petr UHL; in case he would not obey the instructions of Public Security officers and would thus disrupt the public order it was decided to detain him according to § 23 of the law No. 40/74 and the next day, because of the hunger-strike that would thus begin, to transfer him – according to an agreement with the Health Minister of the Czech Republic [Czechoslovakia was a federal republic; the Czech and Slovak Republic had their separate Health and other Ministeries] – to the hospital in Vinohradská street to the clinic of Professor VÍŠEK, where artificial feeding will be given to TOMIN.
Because Julius TOMIN advised his friends how they could put an end to all the bother with the Security, if they followed his example, he was detained on 4. 11. 1977 by Public Security officers in Prague 7 and brought to the FMV building. In the course of his detention he completely ignored the officers who were detaining him and said that he would not go with them anywhere voluntarily and would not speak to them. His wife verbally attacked the officers, calling them flics [this is false, my wife Zdena Tomin was very careful not to use any abusive language against the officers for which she could be charged with defamation, J.T.], and said that the officers used terror tactics against her husband. In the end one of the Security officers took TOMIN by his arm and TOMIN, without making any resistance, was led to the police car. When the car arrived at the FMV building he refused to leave the car and remarked that he will succumb only to force. The Security officers therefore took TOMIN out of the car and carried him to the door-keeper’s place where they laid him on the floor in the hall, for TOMIN refused to stand up and to walk. After being carried to the office, where he was to be subjected to security proceedings, he responded to the questions of the interrogation officers with silence.
Because it became manifest that TOMIN from then on began the ten day protest hunger-strike we tried our best to transfer TOMIN to the hospital to the above mentioned clinic on the basis of the preliminary agreement with the Health Minister of the Czech Republic Dr. Jaroslav PROKOPEC. But Professor VÍŠEK refused to accept TOMIN at the clinic because he did not receive any such instruction from the Health Minister and because he could not guarantee our request that any unauthorized visits, especially those of foreign journalists, must be prevented. After this, the leadership of the X. section of FMV decided to release TOMIN at 1 pm. from the building of FMV. On his release TOMIN did not say whether he was undertaking the hunger-strike, but because of his written proclamation it is assumed that on this day he began the hunger-strike.
Since in the house where TOMIN lives there are unavailable any intelligence sources, intelligence was obtained from those persons with whom he is in contact. It appears that TOMIN after his release from the FMV has not visited any any right-wing persons and according to unverified information he stays in his flat.
In the given situation I propose to organize the measures concerning TOMIN in two ways:
a) through his wife and his other relatives, that is his brother Mikuláš TOMIN and his brother-in-law Zdeněk TRHLÍK, the Deputy Foreign Minister, to exert influence on TOMIN so that he stops the hunger-strike and desists from any further hostile activity.
b) in case that TOMIN or his wife reject these requests, to apply against them repressive measures, that is to dismiss TOMIN’s wife from her job in the Prague Information Service and thus force TOMIN to find a job.
Drawn up by:
Captain Václav ŘÍHA
The attempt of the secret police to hospitalize me did not end there. Roger Scruton visited my seminar in September 24, 1979 and gave us a lecture on Wittgenstein. Barbara Day writes in The Velvet Philosophers 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 Czechoslovak police did not lose much time in their attempt to respond to Roger Scruton’s thoughts.
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 lecture on philosophy to their group; the group allegedly met in secrecy. I did not like it, for in my experience the secret police had their agents in all such ‘secret’ groups, but my rejection of the invitation would have willy-nilly involved me in the general fear of the secret police, which had crippling effect on people’s thoughts and actions, and so I accepted. The only person to whom I told of the event was my wife, Zdena Tomin, who was at that time a spokesperson for Charter 77. I did not ask for any names of the organizers and participants of the group; I did not even know where exactly we were going. On Saturday afternoon a prominent member of the ‘underground’ came to take me to this unknown destination in his car. As we left the outskirts of Prague, we were ambushed by the secret police. I was asked to step in their car; I refused, was dragged by the plain-cloth secret policemen into the car, and taken to a psychiatric clinic in Roudnice, the nearest big town.
A psychiatrist at the clinic wanted to subject me to psychiatric examination, but I refused to answer any of his questions; any answer to his questions would have amounted to cooperation with the secret police’s attempt to misuse psychiatry in their efforts to subject dissidents to their will. The psychiatrist’s attempt to examine me took place in the presence of two secret policemen who carried me to the surgery. I pointed at them, and asked the psychiatrist whether he ever examined 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. Then I made another suggestion: ‘Would you go with me to where I live? In front of our flat, on the third floor of an apartment house in which I live, you will find two uniformed policemen; in relays, they are sitting there day and night as our unwonted ‘guard’, not allowing anyone to visit us. All this will tell you that there is something else than my mind that is out of order.’
In short, I did my best to encourage the psychiatrist to refuse any further cooperation with the secret police, but he succumbed to the pressure to which the secret police subjected him and ordered my hospitalization; the two secret policemen, who brought me in and were in the room during the whole ‘examination’, carried me back into the car.
Why did the secret policemen have to carry me? It was because I refused to obey their orders ever since the ten day hunger-strike with which I defended my seminar in the autumn of 1977. From Roudnice I was taken to the nearest psychiatric hospital, in Horní Beřkovice; by then it was late in the night. The two secret policemen carried me into the Reception Room and stood again impassively there while I informed the psychiatrist about the lawless actions of the secret police against all those who simply insists on upholding their basic human rights. In the end, with no question in his psychiatric questionnaire answered by me, the psychiatrist ordered my internment. The two secret policemen had to carry me again from the Reception Ward to one of the hospital buildings, up the stairs, on to the bed that was pointed out to them. This proved to be of great importance. Obviously, the psychiatrist gave in to the police pressure, but he did so reluctantly, and did not involve in the case any psychiatric nurses, which under the normal circumstances handle any patient from the moment they enter the Reception..
When the secret police left, the nurse in charge of the ward ordered me to take off my clothes and dress myself in the hospital outfit. I refused to do so, and was given an injection of chlorprotixen. I remember a dry throat; in the night I went 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: ‘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 were assembled in the dining hall; the Senior psychiatrist with her junior assistants went from patient to patient, looking at their papers, asking them a few questions. When she came to me, I looked her in the eyes and asked: ‘Doctor, can you tell me the reason why you are keeping me here?’ She said: ‘We shall discuss this after the round,’ and fainted; unconscious, she fell into the arms of the junior doctor who stood behind her and was carried away.
An hour or two later one of the patients came to me and suggested that I send a message to my wife concerning my whereabouts. I said I did not want to do so. Then came a 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, surviving it undamaged, was the best I could do in the given circumstances. I must confess that I was convinced that many signatories of Charter 77, my students, and especially those Czech philosophers whom I had invited to give lectures in my seminar, namely Jiří Němec, Ladislav Hejdánek, and Radim Palouš, as well as the Oxford dons, would do their best in getting me out of the psychiatric hospital. I had no doubt that my wife would learn soon where I was without my sending her any messages. Next day, on Tuesday morning I was summoned again to the Senior psychiatrist. I asked her again to give me any medical reason for my having been interned in the hospital. She admitted that there was no such reason and promised that I would be released from the hospital before noon; and on that day at noon I was released.
In those days my seminar was held in the flat of Ivan Dejmal, for in front of our flat were two policemen day and night, as I have already mentioned. On the programme for Wednesday was a lecture by Ladislav Hejdánek, a Czech Philosopher and Theologian. I was exhausted after the preceding adventure, I needed a rest and thought of staying at home, believing that the seminar was in the best hands. It was past seven o’clock, the seminar must have started, and I was still at home. But then I began to regret my 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 before; I learnt only later that there were people from as far away as Brno in Moravia: ambitious plans were laid out for the future running of the seminar, without me, in cooperation with Oxford dons. Those people never came again to my seminar. Hejdánek asked me what had happened to me. I narrated my psychiatric-hospital-adventure, upon which Hejdánek said: ‘Do you really believe that you have been released because of your behaviour in the hospital? It’s nonsense. They in Moscow must have changed their directives!’ I did not ask what Hejdánek meant by ‘they in Moscow’; I stood up and left the room.
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. She did immediately contact the Western media, but even if Hejdánek had learnt about it there and then, the time that was left between then and the Wednesday seminar was not sufficient for any preparations and plans for the future running of the seminar without me, in cooperation with Oxford dons and with people from Brno. I thought that I would never visit Dejmal’s flat again, but when the next Wednesday came, after seven o’clock I again became restless, and in the end went there. This time the situation in the flat was very different; there were only a few of my students; Hejdánek, who was to have another lecture, was detained by the police. My students expected to be taken to the police any minute; there was a police car waiting at each corner of the housing block, but after I came, the police evaporated. Obviously, my unexpected return from the psychiatric hospital through the cooperation between the secret services of East and West into disarray, as far as it was focused on my seminar, in disarray. It must have generated a great distrust, for like Hejdánek, Oxford dons could hardly believe that I was released against the will of the secret police.
In The Guardian of January 6 1988 in an article ‘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.’ In one of its 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 not this perhaps the original idea, which thus inadvertently came out? The Czech 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 somewhere in Australia, having been softened and bent by the internment, happy to keep my mouth shut and be out of the way?
But let me return to Cohen’s Pub Philosopher:
‘“They’re [Oxford dons are] getting more and more fraudulent,” he [Tomin] said. “They all pretend to their students they can read and understand Ancient Greek, but none of them can.” ...
His most serious accusation is that British classical scholars cannot understand Ancient Greek and are deliberately misleading their students. “I’m the only classical philosopher in Britain who can read Plato without having to translate it in my head,” he said. “They all put barriers between their students and the texts. They force their students to read the books they have written rather than the texts themselves.”
As philosophers at Oxford are among the few left in the English-speaking world who still insist that students must study Greek philosophy in the original, Tomin’s criticism has not been well received.
“It’s crap,” said Jonathan Barnes. “I have absolutely no idea how he can say it. One of the relatively decent features of this university is that people have to read the original texts, not the translations.”
Nick Cohen misquoted me ‘They [i.e. Oxford dons] all pretend to their students they can read and understand Ancient Greek, but none of them can’. I said that Oxford dons do not understand Greek directly, that in order to understand a sentence in Plato or Aristotle, they must analyse it grammatically, translate it into English, and only then they can fully grasp its meaning. This point became the subject of an exchange between a parent of an Oxford student of classics and Jonathan Barnes. The parent wrote:
‘With all respects, Professor Barnes, both you and I and many others know that it is not “crap” to claim that academics today no longer make regular use of the Greek language in their teaching and research. We know that Greek, unlike modern languages, is taught in our best schools and by our best teachers through the medium of English and that this restricts permanently the student’s and the academics’ ability to make the language their own. I have the closest contact with some of the best of your students, and even now they are adamant that the man or woman who understands ‘Greek Greek’ does not, with the exception of Julius Tomin, exist: certainly they do not recognize their tutors at Oxford as doing so. You yourself and your colleagues know this, you admit it among yourselves: why then, do you not have the confidence of the privileged to allow it to be told at large?’
Jonathan Barnes replied: ‘You say that “the best and the most senior of Oxford’s classical philosophers” don’t understand Greek properly. You name no names, but I am vain enough to imagine that I must be included in your charge. What you say is a false and foolish calumny - had you made it public it would, I think, have been libellous. I do not know why Julius Tomin makes these grotesque accusations - but they certainly do his cause no good at all.’
After learning about this exchange of letters, I wrote to Professor Barnes on November 26, 1989:
‘As I understand, you deny my claim that you and your colleagues - that is classical philosophers in Oxford - do not understand Greek Greek, that when you read Plato in the original you must translate him into English in your head. Nothing would please me more than if I learnt that I was wrong and you were right. For that would put you in a position of being able to help us transform radically the teaching of Ancient Greek and Ancient Philosophy in Czechoslovakia and put it on a sound footing. Since the matter is of paramount importance, would you agree to submitting yourself to a test that would establish the truth about it?
The test that I have in mind is open to public scrutiny; any intelligent person with a good grasp of English would be competent to judge it. The test in itself would be a valuable educational experience for those students of Ancient Greek and Ancient Philosophy who would attend. The test is as follows: A third person reads aloud a passage of Plato in Greek to us - let us say half a Stephanus page in length - and we then reproduce the content in our own words in English. The passage would be chosen at random at the moment of our undergoing the test. The audience would follow our performance with Plato’s text in the English translation in their hands.’
Why did I offer Jonathan Barnes this test? If the Greek text were read aloud by a third person, neither Barnes nor I would have time to translate the text into English while listening. We could reproduce the text in our own words only if we understood it directly, without translating. Jonathan Barnes did not respond to my suggestion.
As the first anniversary of Cohen’s article was approaching, I again invited Jonathan Barnes to a discussion on Plato. He replied:
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