Vaclav Havel describes how he came to know "the Plastics" in his book length interview Disturbing the Peace (p.125 ff of the Faber and Faber 1990 English translation - according to Wikepedia, the translator was the band's lead guitarist/singer). Havel's characterisation of the music of the already banned Plastic People of the Universe and that of other bands forming an "underground" in the then Communist controlled Czechoslovakia, was:
..... I immediately felt that there was something rather special radiating from these performances, that they were not just deliberately odd-ball or dilettantish attempts to be outlandish at any price, as what I had heard about them before might have suggested; the music was a profoundly authentic expression of the sense of life among these people, battered as they were by the misery of this world. There was disturbing magic in the music, and a kind of inner warning. Here was something serious and genuine, an internally free articulation of an existential experience that everyone who had not become completely obtuse must understand ...Not long after Vaclav Havel came to know them, "the Plastics" and other members of the "underground" were arrested by the authorities. Havel orchestrated a campaign of support for the band, drawing a distinction between the nature of this trial in 1976 and trials earlier in the 1970's when an essentially political motiviation governed the imprisoment of those opposed to the regime.
.. I realized that, regardless of how many vulgar words these people used or how long their hair was, truth was on their side. Somewhere in the midst of this group, their attitudes, and their creations, I sensed a special purity, a shame, and a vulnerability; in their music was an experience of metaphysical sorrow and a longing for salvation. It seemed to me that this undergound of Jirous' was an attempt to give hope to those who had been most excluded.
What was happening here was not a settling of accounts with political enemies... This had nothing whatsoever to do with a struggle between two competing policial cliques. It was something far worse: an attack by the totalitarian system on life itself, on the very essence of human freedom and integrity.... They were simply young people who wanted to live in their own way, to make music they liked, to sing what they wanted to sing, to live in harmony with themselves, and to express themselves in a truthful way.The international attention given to the case surprised the authorities, led to the release of all but four of the detainees and, Havel suggests, moderated the sentences given to all but the artistic director of the band.
How far is the comparison between the predicament of Pussy Riot and that of the Plastic People of the Universe justified? Certainly the terms of the charges laid against Pussy Riot (hooliganism and public disorder) are similar to those pursued against the Plastics. They also share the use of a vulgar language (an interesting point for someone such as myself who has a particular sensitivity in that regard) - but I suspect there is a study to be made of the use of such language in the context of samizdat writing and culture - think perhaps of the visciousness of the sarcasm employed in The Gulag Archipelago. Pussy Riot do seem to have engaged in an explicitness of political intent that does not seem to have featured for the Plastics (Sebestyen perhaps adds a gloss by seeing the Plastics as having sparked a revolution that, via Charter 77, led to the fall of Communism in 1989); and to have engaged in an anti-religious statement that, too, does not appear to have been there for the Plastics.
But, to follow a line of analysis that Havel suggested with regard to the Plastics: when you cut through all the details of the case, each worthy of its own distinct evaluation - see Cranmer here and here, who covers most of the details; or Fr Ray reflecting some other comment from a Catholic angle; the question arising from the apparent close relationship between the Patriarch and the President here; or, for a comparison between the sentences given to the three girls and those given to participants in last year's riots in England, here; or my own reflection which would be about the place of vulgar language in any form of art - are we looking at "an attack by the totalitarian system on life itself, on the very essence of human freedom and integrity"?
And to follow Havel again, who regularly identified in the free West the same moral crisis that he saw in the (then) Communist states, have the liberal Western nations really understood the point? Are the cultural elites of these Western countries not just as intolerant of anything that is different to their own point of view as the authorities in Russia have been towards Pussy Riot, and as the Communists in Czechoslovakia were towards the Plastics in 1976? Are they not just as guilty of having governing apparatus' that do not admit the space that is due to individual conscience?
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No, we Western liberals aren't "just as intolerant." We don't imprison people, which would seem to be a rather significant different between us and the Russians. Does liberalism sometimes suffer from a cloistered worldview that leads to hypocrisy? Of course it can, and often does, as it does with anyone whose particular worldview is threatened. But liberals by their nature are more likely to listen to people we disagree with. For example, we are far more likely to engage with (and affirm with our money) the rather blunt ideas of justice, law, order and Americanism as seen in Clint Eastwood movies than social conservatives are to witness Martin Scorsese's "The Last Temptations of Christ" or the left-leaning films of Jonathan Sayles. Though liberals may have abetted with their silence and cowardice the evil forces of McCarthyism, we weren't the progenitors, practitioners or defenders of those forces; conservatives were (see "Spellman, Francis Joseph Cardinal"). Though Mr. Eastwood's performance at the Republican National Convention was, to my ears, incoherent, he did touch upon something that you allude to here. Conservative "film tradesmen" (his term) in Hollywood are afraid to speak their minds, or simply keep their own counsel, owing to the true meaning of the term "conservative." That's a shame, and folks besides Jon Voigt, Kelsey Grammar, and Gary Oldman should feel free to speak their minds. Perhaps Mr. Eastwood has at last provided them the cover they need. But to equate the muddle-headed or censorial political correctness of present-day Hollywood (or any other allegedly liberal-cultural outpost of the West) with the outright viciousness and immorality of present-day Russia, or 1970s Czechoslovakia, or 1950s America, is to engage in a pernicious form of moral relativism. Oftentimes this moral relativism comes from rather entrenched, doctrinaire and regressive forces who feel threatened by the ideas and voices that emanate from variegated forms of culture, both high and low.
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