Jan Šinágl angažovaný občan, nezávislý publicista

"If, then, man is a member of an evolving, ascending series, is it not clear that his destructiveness is an evolving and ever-increasing feature of the same series? And does this not in fact prove the destructiveness not only of history but also of the natural past? Instead of 'from the less perfect to the more perfect', we should describe the evolutionary march in terms of 'from a very diverse life to an immobile death'.

"With this observation we may turn again to theScriptures of the New Testament. Two statements strike us: not only Jesus' doubtful reflection on how little faith will still remain among men at his final coming, but also the apostle Paul's very unsparing prediction of a latter-day generation which will be 'incapable of rational reflection' and which, in spite of all the research on which it will expend its energies, will be unable to 'approach the truth'."

When we consider, after these statements, Solovyov's subtle pointing out how the meaning of words is twisted and twisted, or when we find that the Bishop of Rome wants to "support" Christian moral doctrine with the philosophical gossip of one Max Scheller, we can hardly avoid the conclusion that the end of the historical drama is approaching faster and faster.

(Bohdan Chudoba: Člověk nad dějinami ´Man over History´ p. 579)

P.S..

Truth on earth is necessarily relative. Therefore, man necessarily repeats the same mistakes over and over again, otherwise he would deny his nature, cease to live and just exist idly in a valueless world. JŠ

"By the application of certain principles, civilizations are first led to flourish - and then, by persisting in these principles in their later, hypertrophied form, to perish."

The so-called Heracleite's Law formulated by Miroslav Bárta

***

The personality of Bohdan Chudoba was virtually unknown in Czechoslovakia after 1990, as if not, almost nobody knew what was really going on behind the barbed wire, in the West. Of course, there were various people trying to keep the exile alive, there was the Voice of America, Free Europe, Škvorecký with his Toronto publishing house... But we had our own worries, plans, ideas. In our everyday life, however, "exile" began to be remembered, we began to see it as part of our culture. And so there were personalities who were not such household names as Ivan Medek ("Voice of America, Vienna", as many have heard it). In 2000, under the care of Milan Drápala, the publishing house Prostor published a meritorious (and voluminous) book, On the Lost Gate of the West: an anthology of Czech non-socialist journalism from 1945-1948, with an introductory essay on Bohdan Chudoba and excerpts from his work. The chapter entitled "On a Crusade through the Twentieth Century" was written by Zdeněk Beneš and Milan Drápala; the article itself suggested that in Chudoba's case it was a bit of a "hot potato"; we learned about someone who was almost unknown until then, but we learned little enough about him to understand the nature of why he "could not be swallowed."

Full Article in Czech>