Speech of the Prime Minister of the Czech Republic : T.G.M. – never one to take a shortcut
It is hard to talk about a figure such as Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, keep to a five-minute timeframe, and yet come up with something new, different, and fundamental.
How to encapsulate the legacy of a man of that stature in the three hundred seconds allotted to us on live television? How to wrap it up so curtly? And yet perhaps that is where the key to understanding T.G.M. lies. You see, our first president was not a man of shortcuts. He was no master of half-sentence soundbites in the evening news.
‘Democracy is a discussion.’ Yes, we all know that is one of the myriad Masaryk quotations. In today’s world of prefabricated media sparring this may seem a bit of a cliché. But it is on that and many other ‘clichés’ that our modern statehood is built. Masaryk’s thoughts and ideas literally helped construct our modern political nation. And we can still feel them in its foundations.
Masaryk was a true policymaker. He was a policymaker at a time when ideas were driven forward by their sheer power, not skilful marketing. After Masaryk, the Nazis and the Communists. With them, the end of debate and the launch of the era of modern propaganda. The end of classic politics and the start of brainwashing by the mass media.
Masaryk was a man wielding a pen. His life is littered with hundreds of articles, speeches and treatises. They show that he genuinely made policy, that he was not made by policy. This is why his ideas are so durable and we can still learn from them today. Take this sentence, for example: ‘Where there is no personal responsibility and courage, there can be no true democratic politics of the people’.
Everyone who enters the public arena should remember that. Personal responsibility cannot be replaced by popularity charts. Courage is infinitely more important for democratic politics than eagerness to adapt to the opinion polls.
Masaryk did not rip his grand ideas to shreds. He did not wrap those crumbs up into tasty looking sweeties for the television cameras to bite. Our politicians and journalists must line up shoulder to shoulder and stand up to this mass media diktat. They must make a stand, because democracy is a debate - not a television talk show verging on vaudeville. Let’s revolt against the diabolical brevity of modern times.
T.G.M. was never one to take a shortcut. He was not the sort of politician who would bow to populist pressure. He was not a statesman who would repeatedly alter his vision to harness the winds of the media. Or at the advice of a band of PRs telling him what tie to wear and how to smile at the camera.
‘Tell me what you read and I’ll tell you who you are.’ That was Masaryk’s credo. But just what would the President-Liberator say to his successors in the 21st century? What words would occur to him on studying charts detailing the readership of the daily press and the audiences of electronic media? Would they be at all publishable in today’s political correct era?
I am afraid that today we would not even be able to live by Masaryk’s statement: ‘Overcoming the bad with the good, that’s not so difficult, but what is hard is overcoming the good with the better’. Is that difference at all discernible to us in the haste of our world today? Do we have time for it? Do we want to have the time?
Masaryk founded our modern state and breathed a scheme into it that would outlast two totalitarian regimes and the division of the republic. One of the reasons he managed it was that he never looked for shortcuts. Shortcuts to instant popularity. Shortcuts to success without having to work for it. Those highly popular abbreviated ideas and memory aids – a euphemism for a common lie.
I said the key to understanding T.G.M. lay in the fact that he was not a man of shortcuts. Of course, in doing so I took a shortcut. There is certainly more than one key. But I feel it is important to pick up on a fundamental difference between politics a century ago and politics today.
In those days, politics lived by Masaryk’s observation ‘Let there be disputes, but may they be fought with intellect and honesty’. These days politics is often shaped, to all intents and purposes, on the run. Every trivial squabble is beefed up into something approaching all-out war. Failure is portrayed as a disaster. Ideas are not explained – barely are they served before the person bringing them to the table is assailed. Or wanted to bring them to the table, because there is no opportunity to explain them in the first place.
Shortcuts are an objective part of the real world today. A real world that decent politicians, honest journalists and the disoriented public find it hard to come to grips with. But together we can change that, if we want. After all, as Masaryk said, ‘You can endure a lot if you have a goal’.
