A Non-Theological Review of Fate (and our ability to do anything about it)

As stated in the title, this is not about Religion. I've been round and round with the Christian concepts of Predestination, the conflict of Free Will in a universe created by an Omniscient God, and all of Neitzsche's fun theorums about a malevolent overlord. I'm talking about personal fate, the degree to which we can (or cannot) affect the course of our own lives. Big concept, Right? Well I haven't had much time to think intentionally about things recently, but there are a lot of riddles rattling around in my skull while I'm out busying myself with other details, and sometimes it just takes the right trigger to coalesce into coherence. In this case, it was a utter train Fiasco on the way out of Prague. here's the short version.

Get on a train. Pull out of station. Train Stops to switch engines. Engines break down. No problem, we'll get another. Back to the station, wait 90 minutes. Wait, all engines stopped working? It's ok, just wait another 70 minutes. What, the entire train station stopped working? No, the entire Prague rail system is suffering major electrical problems, stranding all trains at all 4 Prague stations. Oh shit. What now? Wait 20 minutes. now, get on a bus. If we get out of Prague one stop, the trains can still go, right? Sure. What's everyone else doing (from all trains at all stations?) the same thing? Super. New station, new Train, new destination, no seats. At least we're moving in the right direction, we'll get this all sorted out in Germany. Bingo.

During all of this, especially the long waits followed by the slow trickle of information disseminated (exclusively in Czech) by the train conductors, Shelley was in a bad situation. Not only is she still only a few days out of the states, where things seem to make more sense, or at least are adequately explained and planned for, but this is also her first train trip. Ever. So she wants to know what's going on, she wants to know what the plan is, and she wants to know why I'm not doing anything about it.

Now this sounds a bit harsh, so let me say that she was not in any way out of bounds in these requests. These were rational questions, and in fact what little information I did know was due to her going around and asking the few Czech-to-German-to-English speakers who could translate all the hubub. So in short, she was doing all that could be done, and I was sitting there like a lump on a log. And Why? Because I've been thinking a lot about situations beyond our control, and a FUBAR like this one - full shut down of the entire West-bound train traffic out of Prague - was not something I could solve, circumvent, or in any way defray. It was a unnatural disaster, we were caught in the middle of it, and my plan was to weather the storm as best I could, and eventually see what options arose. I resigned myself (ourselves in this case, which is where the friction came from) to being in a situation in which I had no control, not even much hope of control, and no better choice tha tto wait and see.

And this got me thinking about Communism.

Not actual Communism - not the theory of worker solidarity, the renaissance of the proletariat, communal resources, or hypothetical universal equality - but specifically Stalinism. The awesome scope, inflexibility, seriousness, and finality of the 1940s and early 1950s in Russia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe through the evolving sphere of Soviet ideology and influence.
Why? Many of my travels have been through former "occupied" Communist states (Estonia, Poland, Hungary, Czech, Serbia, East Berlin), and many of these had monuments, exhibits and museums dedicated either to the repressive conquest of Sovietism, or the long (and eventually successful) stuggle to overthrow it.
In addition to this, I've spent many hours investigating remnants and memorials concerning the Holocaust (concentration camps, synagogues, abandoned Jewish Quarters, etc), and while for political or religious reasons it may be uncouth to lump these two world events together, the ideology and socialogical concept of totalitarianism, xenophobia, dehumanism, anti-intellectualism, bigotry, and subjectivism these both exemplified fuses them together irrevocably in my mind. The scope doesn't hurt either. Anytime you talk about mass murder on a scale of millions so large, you aren't even sure what the final count was (between 10-100 million in the case of the original Soviet purges), it's hard not to classify it with other multi-million-member-murder clubs.
Finally, I must admit that a big motivator of this thought process is a book I'm reading by the respected (and unfortunately dead) Polish world journalist Rysard Kapuscinski, in which he travel-logues his journeys through the Soviet Republics in the 1960s and again in the turbulent years of 1989-1993, discussing not large political theorems, but hte eyewitness accounts and memoirs from people he met along the way, describing both their current dispositions and past conditions. He throws in a good chunk of his own cutting observations and analysis to produce a very good read called Imperium, and I strongly recommend it.

So picture this: It's 1939, or 42, or 48, or 51, and you're living in a not-so-small city in Poland, or Hungary, or the Ukraine, or Trajikistan. You're learning Russian, you're learning not to ask questions, you're probably very very hungry, and no matter how you go about living your life (quietly obedient, secretly subversive, enthusiastically Soviet), there is always a chance, a pretty decent one in fact, that any given night you could be forcibly taken captive and sent (with your entire family) by train or foot on a journey of thousands, tens of thousands, or kilometers to a work camp in Siberia. There, after perhaps a year of traveling, you would live out a miserable existence until cold, hunger, torture or fatigue finally killed you, and if you're a 20-30 something man, that means you'll be the last to die of your entire family - unless you look cunning or slightly angry, in which case you'll be the first.

the state is all-powerful, it cannot be resisted, and it is all-knowing thanks to the fearful reports and gossip provided by your friends, neighbors, and even family members. you could escape - maybe into the woods during a march, or off into the tundra at a train stop - but that's just a small act of destiny, choosing your method of suicide, not actual salvation.

So what do you do? What could you possibly do? Ask the hurricane to stop? Take a step to the left so the Tornado doesn't hit you? Put on SPF 50 underneath Vesuvius?

or wait and see? Bide your time, suffer your humiliations, the death of your pride and many acquaintances, all the evils you can endure because someday, maybe, just maybe it will be different.

Fight! you say? "Tis Always Nobler to Fight." To the death. This Far and No Farther. Remember the Alamo. Et cetera, et cetera. But where would that put us today? Eastern Europe suffered a population loss of... 20-30% maybe more? Obviously this was not a mechanism that balked at volume. Nazism was obsessed with efficiency, if it took 3 days to kill and cremate 1200 people, that wasn't good enough, so rather than build more inefficient crematoriums, they went back to the drawing board and redesigned their systems. The Soviets just made more bullets, or devised cheaper, less evidenciary methods. Hunger, starvation, exposure. these leave very little evidence to be destroyed later, and almost no blue prints to vilify the accused. If 10,000 people revolt, a good Soviet kills the top 1,000 organizers, and sends 9,000 people to the camps. If 100,000 people revolt, kill 10,000. In my experience, simple math is key to totalitarianism.

It's hard - no, it's chilling, to the bone, to contemplate the scenario in which millions - Hundreds of Millions - of people found themselves confronted. It has been said that Communism is one of the greatest (here meaning most ambitious) experiments in human history. I'll say that it's one of the most fascinating. A moral Litmus test (Fight the evil and die, or condone it and perhaps live another day, another week) in which no one can pass, implemented on a grand scale across the largest country on Earth and every diverse landscape and culture that it borders.

So I don't know much about Communism, living under Stalin or how it compares to the ages of Kruschev, Brezhnev, or today, an dI don't know abou tht ehard moral choices, irrational charges and instantaneous death, but for a few long hours at the Praha Smichov train station I glanced what it is to be the subject of forces beyond your control, to be stuck in the current for lack of a better option, to feel grudgingly... European? A serf, the reality of my fate no business of my own. and I didn't much like it, but I'm willing to wager that whatever sense I usually operate under that convinces me this is not my situation as well, that I do control my life, my fate, my deathe ror even my transportation destination, that this is most likely an illusion as well, and the greatest luxury I enjoy as an American (aside from Mountain Dew that tastes the way nature intended) is th eability to keep up the charade. I can drive my car where I want, live in the city I choose, say what I want in the appropriate circumstances (No "Fire" in the Theatre, you see), etc.

And that's good enough. This is freedom as much as it can be guaranteed by the powers of men - that it will not be systematically oppressed by men. And so in asking so little - the absence of aggressive repression - we ask too much, for such a state is historically so rare, and even today is not guaranteed or even readily available but for a small percentage of this globe's surface. In fact, spin a globe, close your eyes, and see where your finger stops. It is with only this much destiny that each of us are born into our fate, and with only this much control that we will depart it. I was not born under Stalin, nor did I fall under his influence at any time during my still-young life, but I didn't have any say in that; I can't take any credit and I can't feel anything but guilt for getting such an easy bill while millions - bordering on billions - of others got stuck with a tab too heavy for me to imagine.

And that's fate: it's not about religion, and it's not about Free Will or cosmic luck. It's just fate (for my uncle Marc, "location, location, location"), and you can thank your lucky stars or curse the day of your birth, and it won't matter one stick.

Is this depressing? That depends. not if you have a good fate. And if you have a bad one? Well, you can moan about it, you can check out early, or you can resign yourself to the course of things beyond your control and see if things ever get better. But just don't count on it, because that Could be depressing.

Cheers and all that.

Weber (on the Lamb)