 Welcome back to the Gora Cafe for water and philosophy, because I'm filming, well, recording this video and the last two back-to-back, even though I'll be posting them spread out over three weeks to keep you tantalized like Scheherazade. But, you know, so I've already gone through my coffee and I don't feel like making more tonight. So I'm throwing back on water. Coffee and water are the only things I have to drink in the house. That's kind of depressing. I need to get some more groceries delivered, I guess. It's no alcohol in the house either. That is, well, I've got some rubbing alcohol underneath the sink, but I'm not that desperate yet. Anyway, so this is part three of a three-part series, or turned out to be a three-part series, my expanded version of my, though not the final, as yet to be fully expanded version that I hope to complete at some point between now and the grave, but for now the expanded version of my presentation on Austro-libertarian themes in three Prague authors. So part one was on Karl Chopek, part two is on Franz Kafka, and part three is on Jaroslav Hasek. As I mentioned before, Kafka's very popular. You can find many editions of his writings, many translations, lots of work on him. Chopek and Hasek, although there certainly is stuff written on them, they're a bit more obscure. Most of this stuff is out of print in English. I imagine more of it is in print in the Czech Republic, but that's no help to those of us who do not read Czech. And so this guy's not quite the same as, although just as Chopek is famous for one major work, RUR, Austro-libertarian Universal Robots. So Hasek is famous for one major work, the good soldier Schveik, which people often call the good soldier Schveik, giving it the German spelling and pronunciation, but in Czech, it's Schveik, as they say in Romulan. Some of you will get that. There was also a pretty faithful movie or a pair of movies made in that book. Also, Orson Welles made an interesting movie of Kafka as a Trial. I'm not showing clips from any of these things, any of these movies, because when I had my video with clips from the Serenade de Bergerac film, which is in the public domain in this country, it got blocked in France, and in various French-speaking countries, legally entangled with France. And I don't want this blocked anywhere, so I won't show any clips. But anyway, a number of these works have been made into movies. The White Plague Chopics novel, was a novel or a play, whatever it was. Actually, it's not one of his best works again, but his parable about the rise of fascism and treat it like a disease, was actually shown at the Mises Institute, at the instigation of Jeff Tucker and myself. But that's not one of the best movies, not one of the best books, despite the value of its message. And anyway, that was a long time ago. Anyway, so, on to our third character. Okay, so now we come to the third and last of our three Prague authors. Jaroslav Szasek was actually an anarchist. He wasn't just someone who flirted with anarchism, the way that Chopik and Kafka quietly did. He was actually a full-fledged anarchist. He was more the communist than the individualist variety. He used to... He tried to get his wife to read Kropotkin. She wasn't particularly interested. But his story is resonate with Austro-libertarian themes. In any case, it's this little parrot who's Hasek's biographer. And we sort of was the... For a long time, and maybe in some sense still is, the chief anglophone authority on Hasek. He wrote Hasek's biography. He wrote a book on Hasek's literary work. He's the translator and editor of a number of Hasek's works. He's a bit of an ass. Here's a quotation from parrot. Most of us, at least those of us who have been used to living under stable governments, can with difficulty repress a shudder of horror when we read the word anarchist. And he refers to Hasek's anarchism as a symptom of utter irresponsibility, a pathological craving for exhibitionism, and psychopathy. You know, so you wonder why he decides to devote so much of his career to translating, editing, and writing about the works and the life of someone he seems to have such a poor opinion of. Well, I mean, I'm reminded of a... I think it was Robert Sharples who devoted his career to writing about the leading Aristotelian of late antiquity, Alexander Efrodisius. It was a whole crew that was devoted to writing about the late antiquity, Alexander Efrodisius. It was a whole crew that was devoted to him. And one time I remember Sharples saying, I can't remember whether you said it, whether I heard him say it, or whether I just read this somewhere. He said he didn't think that much of Alexander Efrodisius. I thought, well, very odd to devote your career to someone you don't care about. I mean, you are sort of carving out an area of specialization of no one else's working on it to the same extent. I would hate to devote a substance of all or most of my career to some thinker that I thought so poorly of, but anyway. So in 1907, he becomes editor of the Anarchist Journal, Komuna, which from the name you can guess is a communist Anarchist Journal. And in 1911, he founded the party for moderate progress within the bounds of the law, which was basically with lampooning electoral politics. He ran sort of mock campaigns, sort of like Anarchist Street Theater. In a way, he was sort of like the vermin supreme of his day. The demands of the party included things like down with freedom of speech and voters use your ballot to protest against the earthquake in Mexico. And some other examples that aren't on this list here. He said that alcoholism should no longer be optional. It should be legally mandatory. He said that the state should nationalize all the janitors the way they are in Russia where every janitor doubles as a police informant. He said that everyone who votes for the party for moderate progress within the bounds of law should receive a pocket aquarium. And he put on an advertisement in the paper saying wanted a respectable young man who was willing to defame members of the opposite parties. Also, he had this protest that it was unjust for a milkman's dog, which patiently and faithfully draws a cart with revisions to be called Nero, or Yorkshire Terrier, which has never injured anyone and has never torrentialed anybody to be called Caesar. These are injustices. And so one of the demands of the party was to redress this injustice toward animals. Hashik himself was apparently involved in a kind of somewhat illicit trade in dogs himself. As one of his examples of moderate progress within the bounds of law, he talked about some famous bridge who was named after, I forget who was named after. He said, here's what I mean by moderate progress. This guy had to be born. Then he had to live his life. Then he had to die. Then there had to be urban renewal. And then the bridge got named after him. He said that's the basis which progress should proceed. Anyway, so this whole thing was a sort of lampooning politics. And not all of the writings and speeches associated with this movement are in print, but in English. But some of them are. Some of them are collected in Paris anthology, the Red Commissar and other stories. Others are collected in a hard to find communist publication called Little Stories from Great Master. And I think some of the other ones that have been published in some other source are worth tracking down. They're quite funny. Anyway, in 1915 he gets drafted into World War I. People often think he volunteered for it because they read that he was a one-year volunteer, but this was a rather Orwellian term. A one-year volunteer was not a kind of volunteer. It was a kind of draftee. What it meant was that if you were willing to pay for the costs of some of your own supplies. So if you volunteered in that sense, if you could afford to do that, then your term of enlistment would be reduced from three years to one. So if you volunteer some money, you only have to serve one year. So you're a one-year volunteer. But you have to serve in the army just whether it's one year or three years depends on whether you can manage to cuff up the dough. So if someone managed to cuff up the dough, I'm not sure how, but probably through some illicit or dubious means. So again, he's drafted into World War I. He gets captured at the Russian Front, whereupon he defects the Bolsheviks and the Bolsheviks actually make him a minor Soviet official. And some of his adventures real or imaginary are chronicled in a series of stories called the Red Commissar, which is the same book that has some of those part of modern progress pieces. It also has some prequels to the good soldier's fate, which are far inferior to the actual good soldier's fate. In 1920, the Russians send him back to Prague, telling him that he was his job to build the proletarian revolution. And so he returns to Prague and what he did was write a bunch of satirical stuff and drink a lot, which I guess was his contribution to building the proletarian revolution. It's not clear to exactly what his attitude was toward the Soviet Union. I mean he was willing to serve as a commissar for them and he would rather be a commissar than a prisoner of war. He seems to have been an adaptable and flexible guy. But not someone who really took that kind of duty very seriously, apparently. There's an interesting contract. By the way, here's another... I had post stamps from the last two. Here's a postage stamp from for him, although in this case the other ones were Czechoslovak postage stamps. This one is a Soviet postage stamp. You can see it says post to SSSR at the top. USSR post and the bottom, Yaroslav Gasek because things that are G in Russian in Czech. That's one of the systematic changes when you go from one Slavic language to another. That's why Prague, which is Prague in Czech is sort of this. And Kniegi, which is the word for books in Russian is Kniegi in Czech. That's why when I was in Prague I was able to recognize a bookstore because it said Kniegi in front and I had had a year of Russian, mostly forgotten in college, but I remember Kniegi as books and I saw Kniegi and I thought, aha, this must be a bookstore. And I was right. So I remember it a little bit. Anyway, so that's why it says Gasek rather than Hasek if you can read the Cyrillic there, which I can still read Cyrillic even if I can't tell you what the words mean. Anyway, and I said Posta up there, of course it's not Posta, it would be Počta. I'm assuming Počta means postal, but I don't know. Anyway, so difference among our three authors, interesting difference is in Čopek they tend to be well-meaning blunderers who are inevitably out of their depth. And Kafka authority figures are terrifying omnipresent anonymous ciphers. And in Hasek there are buffoons, rascals, idiots, sharpers and lunatics. So Hasek and Čopek are maybe a little bit closer to each other. Remember Čopek's line the problem is not that most people are evil it's that most people are oafs. I don't know what the Czech words being translated there or German depending on whether that passage was written in Czech or in German. Čopek wrote them both. So Hasek may be a little closer to Čopek on that point. But these sort of represent three different ways that libertarians and anarchists tend to think about authority figures like judges and police. And you can say that each of those is true at some level or in some respect each of those is picking out some genuine feature of the power system. Anyway, so Hasek most of Hasek's work is in the form of short stories he wrote one novel unfinished the adventures of the good soldier Švejk Kafka wrote three novels I would say the trial with Castle the German for trial the trial, the castle and either America or the disappeared man all unfinished Čopek wrote lots and lots of novels plus other stuff plays and so forth but all three of them wrote lots of short stories but short stories were Hasek's main output he has a short story called the traditional reform of Mr. Zakon where this is Birokrat who notices that although convicted criminals habitually promise the court that they will reform such promises are very rarely kept and the reason he figures is that criminal regards the judge as merely the representative of a system of justice which is penal and therefore hostile to him so as Birokrat proposes the appointment as judges of criminals who would be the best known in the ones in their circles on the grounds that the feeling of solidarity among criminals would make that promise binding and so bring about the reform of those unfortunate the project is initially successful lowers the crime rate when the criminals are responsible to other criminals rather than to the judges for their promise to give up the life of crime they give it up you know when you when you make criminals into judges except that the incentive is that law abiding people start taking up lives of crime in the hope of being appointed as judges so a lot of the short stories are about some odd little strangeness of incentives of imaginary bureaucratic laws or sometimes real ones but often sometimes they're exaggerated we know once and they're just fantastic ones but various laws and so forth where the incentive turns out to be some kind of perverse incentive those are very very libertarian thing very public choice kind of thing even more delicious stories of criminal strike so the criminals go on strike for fair treatment it doesn't mean for criminals to go on strike well they refuse to commit any more crimes so you might think that would be great but actually this is a disaster for the government the importance of the counselors and officials of the criminal court starts to dwindle rapidly as all authorities officials as well as prison employees become redundant so the when criminals go on strike crime rate falls and the crime rate falls then it seems like there's no more need for these government officials so the government even gives serious thought to encouraging crime by awarding government grants to criminals but fondly a mob of all classes who are suffering as a result of the criminal strike which includes counselors of the law courts secretaries investigating magistrates assistant judges probationary lawyers assistant prosecutors police officials defense councils they all start to riot demanding work because they've been thrown out of work from the fact that there aren't any more criminals however hurray riots are illegal because riots are illegal you've certainly got a whole bunch of new criminals they could try these rioters and so the courts go back into session and the justice system is saved so here you have like a fairly cynical suggestion that the government far from wanting to abolish crime desperately needs crime in order to justify its own existence there's a short story called an investigative expedition which is a police spy who is trying to trick a suspected male content into making disloyal remarks about the empire but without success as the intended victim keeps singing the empire's praises what's precisely his absurd insistence that he's living under an efficient administration that proves his obvious insincerity and this story is sort of it's of a piece with the good shoulder shake it's a very similar kind of dynamic yet another one of these catch 22 stories is psychiatric puzzle where a patient is confined indefinitely to an insane asylum because the doctors have not yet been able to detect in him that awareness that he is mentally ill which according to the psychiatric textbooks is the first sign of an improvement in a patient's mental condition of course they had no evidence he's mentally ill to begin with his only only evidence they have that he's mentally ill is that he hasn't yet admitted to being mentally ill and only if you admit to being mentally ill can you show that you're on the sign of recovery from being mentally ill of course if you admit he's mentally ill then they'd be justified in keeping him until they judge him cured so it's damned if you do damned if you don't they're like a rigged game as Jack Nicholson says and one of the local groups in this another short story an embarrassing situation in oxenhausen so the cabinet council suspects that their prince's mental health may not be all that it should be so they call on a medical expert and sure enough the medical expert testifies yep the prince has gone field-minded so the council of health who's separate from the cabinet council has the physician arrested for using insulting language towards his serene highness since it's insulting to call the serene highness people-minded even if that's a legitimate medical diagnosis assuming that it is who knows and so since the cabinet council is the one that hired this physician the council of health declares the cabinet council conspirators and persons guilty of high treason so the cabinet council responds by having the council of health arrested in turn on the grounds that he's the one who's insulting the prince by suggesting that our ruler would take into his confidence conspirators and traders of course the other ones have just been claiming that the prince was feeble-minded in which he might very well do that but you know it's insulting to the prince to suggest that our ruler would take into his confidence conspirators and traders so by accusing us of being conspirators and traders you're accusing the prince of poor judgment and therefore you're the one who is who is guilty of insulting the prince even though we're the ones who've been claiming these people-minded so now there's a stalemate you can't get any more medical experts to testify on either side because they fear of being arrested whichever side they take if a medical expert testifies that the prince is feeble-minded they worry that the council of health will have them arrested he testifies that they're not that implies that the cabinet council is unreliable which implies that the prince has chosen an unreliable cabinet council which is insulting to the prince so no medical expert wants to say anything so the prime minister decides well so what we don't need to do anything we don't need to replace the feeble-minded ruler just even power because after all his middle state has remained like this for a while now and it hasn't actually made any difference everything runs pretty much the way it did before the the middle state of the prince doesn't really seem to have that much impact in the way society runs everything runs pretty much okay so we'll just stick with our feeble-minded ruler Kaushik was constantly in trouble with the law as you may have suspected by now more than Kafka because Kafka didn't publish most of his stuff during his lifetime so he wasn't in too much danger and Chopek was good pals with the president Thomas Mazarek and so it wasn't really in danger but Kaushik was constantly running a file of the law the Austrian customs while he's visiting Germany from the I'm not sure whether it was Czechoslovakia by that point or whether it was so anyway from the Czech region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire has a serious accident requiring emergency surgery and part of what happens is he ends up with a silver plate in his skull and a pig's kidney transplanted to replace his own when he tries to return to Bohemia which is the region of the Czech area where Prague is he's denied re-entry by the customs officials since the importation of silver and of swine are both pre-hooded so this is sort of a little parody about customs duties the Bakura scandal and the Bakura scandal happens is there's this bar whose toilets are decreed by the local regulators to have inadequate ventilation so the owner is instructed to introduce windows into the toilets so he says all right but I can't I'm not allowed to do it unless I first receive a building permit so he's been ordered to put in the windows but he hasn't gotten permission to put in the windows he's been ordered by these regulators to put in the windows but he hasn't gotten permission actually they may even be the same regulators I forget he has to get permission he says here you are you're the state telling me that I can't reopen my bar until I get ventilation in the toilets but you won't give me the paperwork I need to put the windows in and the response to him is just you calm down or you might end up insulting an official person you think it's a joy ride for us going around looking into urinals so week after week the owner begs for the authorization to put the windows into the restrooms in his bar so that he can then be legally allowed to reopen it and in fact the official paperwork is already ready but the official who's in charge of sending it to him just delays he just leaves it on the shelf and doesn't send it and the reason is it's only an inkeeper let him wait a bit we've got to keep these people firmly in their place in other words the bureaucrat could send the paperwork this guy needs but he wants to keep him hanging because he doesn't want to jump to the jump to the command of this common person he wants the common person to jump to his command so just keep him waiting and can't hurt him can't hurt me anyway we've got to keep him in place let him know his place but then the same official is going out on a walk in town and suddenly he has to use a toilet and the nearest toilet is a pay toilet as most toilets in Prague were and are still today that's sort of interesting features that in capitalist America most public toilets are free and in all these supposedly more socialist countries you have to pay but when I was younger they used to they didn't have a person sitting in there taking your money whereas in the Vatican they have a nun sitting in the men's room not just in front of the men's room but actually in the men's room and she turned around she could look right at the urinals but they used to have automatic they used to have on each stall on the door there would be a little dime in which you would I mean a little slot we stick a dime in and that would enable you to unlock the door and and get in they don't seem to have those very much in the US anymore in fact that line it used to be on the restroom walls here I sit broken hearted paid a dime and only farted the reason they're broken hearted is that they waste to their dime and now that that people have have forgotten about the dimes now it's turned into here I sit broken hearted came to shit and only farted which rhymes better but it's not clear why they're broken hearted if you're broken hearted we thought you had to go to the bathroom the original reason was when I was a kid you'd see these these dime payment public restrooms but now you don't maybe some economists watching this can tell me what the reason for that is but anyway so he's so he doesn't have any money to pay for the public toilet but he really needs to use it so happens the attendant at the toilet is the sister of this barkeeper that he's been keeping on 10 drugs all this time and so she lets him in for free not out of the goodness of her heart but hoping that this will this will make him ease up on her brother and it works out of gratitude toward her he finalizes the paperwork that he's been sitting on for a month and then of course he's dismissed for taking a bribe the bribe being that he did his job that he was supposed to do in exchange for the bribe being allowed to use the public toilet so kind of a general this is a general satire of the bureaucratic mentality another short story by Hasek Emperor Franz Joseph's portrait so during the war this man is selling portraits of the emperor and he advertises them with the blurb in these difficult days no check home should be without its portrait of our severely tried monarch this is during the war and then the police come and reprimand them because this is a very pessimistic assessment of the war effort we talk about our monarch as being severely tried and we talk about these difficult days suggests that the war is going badly that's unpatriotic so you have to change it so you change this difficult and severely tried to glorious and victorious in these glorious days no check home should be without its portrait of our victorious monarch then the police threaten them once again saying well given that obviously the war is going pretty badly for us describing this as glorious and victorious Gloria Victoria Victoria Victoria there's a musical digression for you anyway he's trivializing the empire's losses and so I'm in trouble for that so he's not allowed to use any blurb because one blurb if you're honest and say that the war is going badly you you're being unpatriotic but if you say the war is going well then you are trivializing the the war losses of the empire so he's not allowed to use either ads so nobody buys the portraits so reduces the price to two crowns which I think is also a play on words I think it's a play on words that works in in Czech as well as in English because a crown is the basic currency of Czech Republic Czech Republic or Czechoslovakia or Bohemia or whatever it is at any given point in this story but two crowns is also a reference to the Kaiserlich and Kuhnich character of the Austro-Hungarian Empire which combines the Austrian crown with the Hungarian crown but anyway he reduces the price to two crowns which is much cheaper than what he'd been doing for and so now he's finally imprisoned because he's insulting the emperor for selling the these portraits at such a low price of course he can't find any takers at the higher price particularly since he's not allowed to use either of the two advertisements that he had developed so then the good soldier Schwaeck has a similar story another one of these catch-22s that Schwaeck loves so there's a barkeeper who has a portrait of the emperor on the wall but he discovers that flies have been pooping on it and so he thinks well I don't want to keep this up there because it's got fly poop on it and somebody might be so free as to pass a remark about it and then there could be unpleasantness should be then there although there I'm not sure why he can't clean the fly poop off but anyway so he takes it down and puts it away but then of course he gets in trouble with the local police spies for having taken the emperor's portrait down seems unpatriotic you had the portrait up and I've taken it down how dare you, what does that mean it's not like you know when politicians get in trouble nowadays in the US for not wearing their flag pin he gets in trouble for having taken the emperor's portrait down so he explains this reason for taking it down well it was covered with fly poop so I had to take it down so he's arrested because he referred to fly poop in connection with the emperor and you know that is offensive so if he doesn't explain why he did it then he's interpreted as taking it down out of disrespect for the emperor and so he gets in trouble but if he does explain why he did it then he's the explanation connects the emperor with fly poop and that's disrespectful so any whatever explanation he gives or any or none is disrespectful and so he will be arrested well this brings us to the good soldier's fake which is hashek's best known work that's an anti-war classic it's often known by it's german title the good soldier schweig spelled S-C-H-W-E-I K or C-K I forget which but anyway schweig is the proper and correct Czech spelling and pronunciation the good soldier the good soldier schweig is in one respect reminiscent of Kafka's the trial and in both cases the main character ends up at the beginning of the story being arrested and seized by various authorities and being subjected to various kinds of interrogation by bureaucrats and so forth but the big difference is that unlike K Kafka's story and a number of Kafka stories actually schweig doesn't wriggle helplessly in the clutches of bureaucrats instead he outwits and frustrates them by playing the role of an amiable, bumbling idiot it's never quite clear to what extent he's playing the role and what extent he really is one it's sort of a systematic ambiguity in the book but he blocks his periods at every turn through verbatim and compliance he does exactly what they say and what sort of work to rule you slow everything down by doing exactly what they tell you in a systematic way as possible also he's constantly misunderstanding the orders or at least pretending to it's not clear always whether he really misunderstands them or he's pretending to but anyway he keeps obeying the orders in ways that they did not intend which is sort of way of dramatizing the ruler's dependence on the rules that the rulers orders depend on the ruled playing along with the same game and schweig is always playing a different game again whether by intention or by accident is systematically unclear is he really this naive sort of pure fool who just slides through all these authoritarian stuff because he's too naive to understand what's going on and so he doesn't pick up on the signals and so he just slides around them or is he crazy like a fox and deliberately trying to deceive them he could read it either way systematically you know on the left there I've got you know throughout it's a bar in Prague that has famous image of a couple of famous images of schweig on it but you can find lots of bars in in Prague that have famous images of schweig it's a very common thing and I think that probably Hasek would appreciate that tribute from Hasek was very fond of the raising of the wrist so to speak anyway they after interrogating him they finally decided that he's mentally ill and the grounds are these the undersigned medical experts certify the complete mental feebleness and congenital idiocy of Joseph Schweig who appeared before interesting parallel between Joseph K Kafka's protagonist and Joseph Schweig and Joseph K I think it's just a coincidence kind of a cool coincidence Schweig appeared before the aforesaid commission and expressed himself in such terms as long live our Emperor Franz Joseph I which utterance is sufficient to eliminate the state of mind of this should be of not as of Joseph Schweig as that of a patent imbecile in other words his very expressions of patriotism show what an idiot he is this is catch-22 thing but anyway it means he ends up in the military hospital for a while instead of instead of being conscripted into the army and we just get conscripted into the army eventually but he ends up in the middle hospital for a while because he they're convinced that he's mentally ill so during the the communist regime in the time of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia Gustav Husak who was the general secretary of the communist party in the 1970s he used to command the population to stop shvaking so the idea is that this this kind of pretending to obey the rules but obeying them in some sort of evasive way where it's not open defiance but are sort of sliding around the rules and not really complying with them but you seem so earnestly to be complying with them but you're doing everything you can to screw them up that became known as shvaking and the communist regime didn't like it and so it was complaining about this as a as a problem in Czech society so now I want to stop that's the last of the slides but as with the previous two videos I want to supplement the slides with some excerpts from the unfinished written version of this paper that has more stuff and will eventually have still more stuff so Hasek writes this semi-autobiographical a lot of his stories are semi-autobiographical it's not as clear how far they are and how far they aren't but in his story my friend Hanushka he tells about being cross-examined about a street demonstration during which a police officer had by an unfortunate coincidence hit his head which you may think is not the most accurate description of what happened another of the the proposals of his party of the moderate progress within the bounds of law which was this is from the manifesto of the party explains that the party drew inspiration from Christopher Columbus who showed himself to be guided by the principles of moderate progress within the limits of the law by the fact that he first asked the royal authorities for permission before sailing to America only afterwards was it necessary to kill off the Indians to introduce slavery and thus bring about progress everywhere slowly and gradually so more of his political satire and in one of his electoral campaign speeches he urges party members to cultivate the sextons of neighborhood churches since these have free access to the funeral offices and consequently to the lists of dead voters for when a campaign is generously financed then a dead voter knows very well what his duty will be at the ballot box then another one of his catch 22 stories is that a robber carries out his crime with more than usual brutality the reason he's so cranky in the case of the crime is that prior to his crime he hadn't eaten for three days but the reason he hadn't eaten for three days is he wanted to be able to maintain he had stolen the loaf of bread out of hunger and if he ate before stealing it then it would be clear he wasn't stealing out of hunger so he deliberately refrains from eating it so in order to get the in order to be able to say that he stole it out of hunger but then that makes him extra cranky because he carries it out of crime with more than usual brutality so this is another one of these sort of weird bureaucratic incentive things which doesn't seem to be parodying any particular provision of weird bureaucratic misunderstanding of incentives but seems to be sort of parodying the general idea in in Father Andre's sin a priest arriving at the pearly gates he sentenced to 15,000 years in purgatory and the sin that for which he's been punished is that he posted a letter to Australia why is that a sin? because it's in contravention of Saint Augustine's denial of the existence of the antipodes and when he's upset the angel tells him in order to console him don't cry you could have had something like that happen to you in any court on earth so that's sort of similar to Kafka's line about this unfair thing that happens to the elevator boy could have happened in any courtroom in any country although the mood is different the mood of the Kafka story is one of grim despair whereas the mood of the Hasek story is one of the satirical although I say that in fact Kafka himself apparently thought of his own stories as hilarious he would read them aloud to people he couldn't stop laughing so Kafka seems to have experienced his stories somewhat differently from the way his readers often experience them when you're reading Hasek it's clear this is funny when you're reading Kafka you feel this mood of grim despair but Kafka himself seems to have thought that his stories were a laugh riot anyway there's another there's another short story by Hasek the unfortunate affair of the Tomcat in which there's a bureaucratic decree that a cat be euthanized but because of an ambiguity of the wording or some problem with the punctuation by those charged with enforcing it it's read as inquiring that the cat's owner be euthanized so of course you have to follow the letter of the law or their interpretation of it and so they had to euthanize the owner of the cat rather than the cat because of this bureaucratic error then in short story the party treasurer Eduard Drobilek this vagabond encounters a police officer who inquires the vagabond's business with that gentle sarcasm of which only gendarmes are capable when they meet a suspicious individual in the night hours but the vagabond turns the tables on the officer telling them that he suspects that the gendarmes know gendarmes at all but some rogue in disguise since he has failed in his first sacred duty which was to ask to see my documents moreover the officer is apparently unaware of the recent decree of May 12th 1901 which the vagabond is presumably making up on the spot which requires police officers to pay five crowns for traveling officials and so the vagabond ends up walking off with the intimidated officer's apologies and a spare change too and this theme of someone being interrogated by the authorities and turning the tables on them and someone convincing them to be more afraid that they're violating some bureaucratic rule is something that happens in several of his stories then going back to the good soldier's fake the the famous opening line of the good soldier's fake has Mrs. Mueller come to deliver him the news that Archduke Ferdinand has just been assassinated in Sarajevo which of course is the act that ends up triggering the chain of events that results in the first world war and what she says is and forgive my mispronunciation I do not speak Czech Taknam Zabeli Ferdinand which is a difficult to translate nuance of Czech grammar there the literally the nom in there literally means you know that it describes the killing of Ferdinand as something specifically done to us and us that presumptively includes both fake and Mueller as those who are saying something like so they've killed Ferdinand at us which doesn't make sense in English but that's sort of a way of capturing it they've done this to us that they've killed Ferdinand one popular translation has so they've killed our Ferdinand another translation has sort of expanded so they've done it to us they've killed our Ferdinand neither of those quite captures the nuance of the Czech but it's hard to do it in idiomatic English anyway Shrek immediately responds in such a way as to dismiss the suggestion that he is part of any us for whom Ferdinand is ours and his loss our loss so he says which Ferdinand Mrs. Mueller I know two Ferdinands one is a messenger at produces and once by mistake he drank a bottle of hair oil there and another is Ferdinand Kokoska she's a dog manure neither of them is any loss so Mrs. Mueller explains that she means none on either of them she means the Archduke Ferdinand which very quickly shows by his decidedly un-tierful response in regards to this Ferdinand is no great loss either he says potting at an imperial highness is no easy job you know it's not like a poacher potting at a gamekeeper the question is how you get at him you can't get near a fine gentleman like that you know there's some revolvers Mrs. Mueller that won't go off even if you bust yourself there are lots of that type I'd buy a browning for a job like that it looks like a toy but in a couple of minutes you can shoot 20 Archdukes with it you know and then you know I'm not going to go through all the various amusing things to be found in that novel but one other humorous thing is there's this when you find the ends up in the you know in the military there's this guy who insists that that latrine duty is the most important thing because this kind of discipline is what's going to make a victory possible and he says victory will crawl out of the Austrian victory will crawl out of the latrines one of the best descriptions of Hasek's writings is a description of Chopik that is not a description of Hasek a description of the impudence of Sparrows but I'm going to quote it here because it so perfectly describes the spirit of Hasek so here's what Chopik says about Sparrows and I don't think that he had any I don't think this was a code for anybody I think he's just talking about Sparrows Chopik has many things he talks about the sparrow is the most human of birds he has no personal property he has for other sparrows a feeling of equality and comradeship as a consequence of this he enjoys fighting and quarreling with them his society has no deeper organization he has only a small group something with a bunch of regular clients at a restaurant held together by common ownership of a dung heap residents in the same neighborhood reciprocal exchange of jokes sexual promiscuity and innate love of chatter although he has no sense of property he is a local patriot and flings himself with yells and curses on sparrows from a couple of streets away he is full of public interest his world is the street he hates to be alone but is not capable of collective discipline or barrack life he has a nest of his own but his life is shared with his fellow diners he is too carefree to succeed in developing in himself a more logical egoism if he shares every dung heap with his comrades it's not from a feeling of duty but so as to have someone to chat with it's a kind of sparrows the choc pick gives does remind me of hachek one last point about shvaking a couple of passages one from james van hyze's article civilian resistance in checos avakia and one from john keen's book on a political tragedy in six acts describing the way that the Czech populace responded to the invasion of the Soviet tanks as the termination of the Prague Spring. Traveling in Czechoslovakia was a nightmare for the Warsaw Pact troops. The Czechs had removed street signs and painted over building address numbers. Many small villages renamed themselves Dubcek or Svoboda. Dubcek was the name of one of the leading politicians behind the Prague Spring, Svoboda means essentially freedom. So the villages all give themselves the same name so that the people in the tanks can't figure out where the heck they are. In rural areas it was not uncommon to see a troop convoy stalled across the road, the commander scratching his head over an open map. And then once they got into Prague, wrong directions and information about the town's buildings were given systematically, helping to foil the invaders, forcing them to retrace their steps, and even on one occasion to fire on themselves. During the first night of occupation, the populace carefully removed all the street signs and neatly stacked them in front of the town hall. So this kind of, it's not like taking up arms to fight the oppressor, but just sort of screwing with the oppressor and subverting them and sabotaging them in a sort of a playful but at the same time very serious way. That sort of fits a lot of, you know, what happens in a lot of Hasek stories in particular with Svak, although as I said, it's not always clear whether Svak is doing this intentionally, pretending to be an idiot in order to misunderstand commands and evade whatever is that just the authorities want and just to mop or whether he really is a naive fool. It's really supposed to be, I think it's supposed to be ambiguous throughout, but the point is that the authorities simply cannot maintain their authority when people act that way. And so once again, you get the same message, although in a more lighthearted vein than in Kafka, despite Kafka's own gales of laughter over his own writings, in a more lighthearted vein seemingly at any rate, this idea that the power of the rulers depends on the ruled playing the game, and Svak, whether intentionally or unintentionally, the systematically fails to play the game. And one clear implication is that if enough people were systematically failing to play the game the way that Svak is failing to, then the ruling authorities would not be able to maintain their power, which is a very anarchist message from the only one of these three writers who actually was a committed anarchist to accept that Tashek was committed to anything besides drinking. He was actually a convinced anarchist anyway, in a way that that Kafka and Chopin weren't, although they both were sympathetic to anarchism. So anyway, those are my three Prague authors that they're quite different from each other, but they have a lot of Austrian and libertarian and anarchist themes. Some of them, you know, more sort of capitalist oriented, some of them more social story headed, some of them kind of hard to categorize, but authors I find really fascinating and although Kafka is pretty widely read in the West, Chopin and Hasekar left so I mean people do read them but they're not completely obscure but not as widely read as they should be and I am a big fan of all three authors and I'm a big fan of Prague and I'm a big fan of the Prague conference and political economy where I presented a much, much, much, much shorter version of this presentation. But it's also when I get a chance to go to Prague for that conference, or for any reason but it's so it's for the conference that I go both because it's a delightful conference. And I'd like, I like talking to libertarian oriented students from all over Europe that I get to hang up with those conferences and talking with Joseph Schema who's the head of that outfit. But also if I'm going to the conference then my department will will pay my way to Prague. Otherwise I don't so easily get there. But anyway so I love Prague I love these authors. I, you know, I love their, their libertarian connections but even apart from that they're just really fascinating. They can be written more than one level, or maybe Hasek not as much as Kafka and Chopin Hasek may not be quite as complex, but still delightful. And, you know, so I want to put in a plug for them. And also just a plug for the, the Prague conference and political economy if you're going to chance to go to it go. You're going to get a chance to present to it if you're, if you're an academic then you can, you know, get some funding to go forward if you're a, if you're a student or maybe you could get funding from I don't know the Institute for Humane Studies or something like that to go there. It's delightful conference it's delightful city. You know it's a, you know, I mean, the conference is, you know, it's more right libertarian on the whole than I am. They have a wide range of sort of right libertarian things from, you know, sort of from the, from the Mises crowd to the GMU crowd it's, and so on it's, it's not just one flavor. But it's still a lot of fun and Prague is great. Anyway, so I guess that is all I have to say on those three authors and Prague and so until next time, like, share, subscribe. Consider supporting on PPL on Patreon, and I will see you next time.