Brno Cemetery

I walked around the Central Cemetery here in Brno yesterday, and noticed something peculiar -- there are no communists buried in American cemeteries.

I mean, sure, there were (are) communists who happened to be American, and died and were interred in American cemeteries, but they don't get put in the center of the central cemetery with headstones glorifying their service to the proletariat and the state. I found that most of the ones in the little circle of honor celebrated were artists -- opera singers and "writers" -- and the paucity of crosses was jarring. If you had asked me if there would have been crosses, I would have said "of course not," but it still spooked me -- it was empty somehow.

Of course, the rest of the cemetery -- which antedated and survived the rise of the First Republic and the Nazis, as well as the Communists -- is rife with crosses for the proletariat themselves. I reflected on how sad it must be, a communist funeral. It has only a connection to the past, and to the state. It has no interest in the eternal.

Man needs a connection to his past, as well as to the eternal. These are some of the First Things that much smarter people write about. It's not a very liberal thing to say, but freedom works best when we try to look at it as a process, rather than a break.

In this respect, we can start to see how the American Revolution differed from the French and the the Russian. The American Revolution never promised a new man, only a new age for the problems of the same men. The French and the Russians promised new men. Communism wasn't a process -- there were no historical inevitabilities, and the state didn't whither away. It couldn't be a process; it had to be a clean break.

But people burying people don't like clean breaks, even in the Service of The Glorious Proletariat. Part of what makes them human is the relationship and value they give to the generations before and after. That's why, especially between 1948 and 1989, we see "Vzpomínáme" -- "we remember" -- on the headstones in Brno.

We don't want a "new man." We just want the old men to remind us how to do our best, and that we aren't perfect, and we won't become perfect. Why is it that all the "regular" Moravians buried in the Central Cemetery were aware of that?