Mr. Chairman,
Ladies and gentlemen,
A thousand times over the past decades I have seen backs
in my country bent allegedly in the interest of children. A thousand
times I have heard people defend their servitude to a hated regime
by arguing that they were only doing it for their children: so
they could feed them, make it possible for them to study, to afford
seaside vacations for them. A thousand times, both acquaintances
and strangers have confided to me that they were heart, mind,
and soul totally on our side, that is, on the side of the socalled
dissidents, but that they signed various petition campaigns aimed
against us, and organized by the totalitarian government, for
the sole reason that they had children and thus could not afford
the luxury of resistance. Immorality was committed in the name
of children, and evil was served for their alleged good.
But I have seen even greater perversities, if only in
the movies or on television. I saw Hitler waving in a friendly
way to fanaticized little girls of Hitlerjugend*; I saw the mass
murderer Stalin kissing a child wearing the red Communist youth
organization scarf, a child whose parents ended up like so many
others in gulags; I saw Gottwald**, the Stalin of Czechoslovakia,
joking with young miners, the builders of socialism and later
to become cripples; I saw the Iraqi president Hussein patting
the children of his hostages on the head, hostages whom he now
says he is ready to have shot.
I know and have experienced how in Czechoslovakia thousands
of people suffered in Communist concentration camps, how hundreds
of them were executed or tortured to death, and all this for the
false happiness of generations yet unborn in some false paradise.
How much evil has already been committed in the name of
children!
I have also experienced something very different, even
as recently as several months ago, a year ago, two years ago.
I have experienced a beautiful revolt of children against the
lie that their parents had served, allegedly in the interest of
those very children. Our anti-totalitarian revolution was at
least in its beginnings a children's revolution. It was high
school students and apprentices, adolescents, who marched in the
streets. They marched when their parents were still afraid, were
afraid for their children and for themselves. They locked their
children in at home, took them away from the cities on weekends.
Then they started marching in the streets with them. First out
of fear for their children, later because they became infected
by their enthusiasm. The children evoked from their parents their
better selves. They convinced them they were lying and forced
them to take a stand on the side of truth.
And what about the children of dissidents? Although they
could not study and had to endure the arrests and persecutions
of their parents, they did not blame them but instead respected
them. They were more interested in a moral example than in the
advantages stemming from a bent back.
Children in our country have proven that the ideology
of sacrificing truth for the alleged interest of children is false.
They revolted against parents who advocated this ideology, they
joined the few who had been convinced from the very beginning
that they would serve their children best if they did not look
for excuses and lie, but rather live in truth and thus give an
example to their children.
The international community has achieved something unprecedented.
Most of the countries of the world have, within months, joined
an exceptionally good, precise and exhaustive international agreement
for the protection of children. I rejoice, as we all do, in this
achievement and am proud that I had the honor of signing the agreement
on behalf of my country this morning.
At the same time, however, I believe that this agreement
or any other conceivable international document cannot protect
children from pseudoprotection, that is, from their parents committing
more evil in the name and in the interest of children whether
in good faith, in selfdelusion or by deliberately lying and from
hurting themselves more than they can hurt the children.
As with any law, this one too can only acquire real meaning
and significance if it is accompanied by real moral selfawareness,
by which I mean the moral selfawareness of parents.
You cannot put that into a law. However, if it were possible,
I would add another paragraph to the agreement I signed this morning.
This paragraph would say that it is forbidden for parents and
adults in general in the name and allegedly in the interest of
children, to lie, serve dictatorships, inform, bend their back,
be afraid of tyrants, and betray their friends and ideals. And
that it is forbidden for all murderers and dictators to pat children
on the head.
* Hitlerjugend was a fascist youth organization in Germany intended
to train children in the spirit of Nazism.
** Klement Gottwald was a Czech Communist leader and president
of Czechoslovakia from 1948 to 1953.