This morning I wrote to Jakub Jirsa, the Director of the
Institute for Philosophy and Religion at the Faculty of Arts (Filosofická
fakulta) at Charles University in Prague:
Dear Mr Jirsa,
Allow me to bring to your attention the recording of my discussion
with Dr Štáhlavský, which was broadcasted on the Czech
Radio on the 7th of December. You can listen to it on
Dr Štáhlavský created a
very good atmosphere for our discussion, for he was clearly interested in what
I had to say about the importance of Ancient Greek literature and philosophy
for a healthy cultural development of our nation, allowing me to express my
conviction that every generation should find an authentic access to the
cultural treasures of the Ancient Greeks. He was clearly convinced that his
audience would be equally interested in it. I should greatly appreciate it if
you listened to the recording, thought again about my offer to present the two
papers on Plato at your Institute, which I wrote in the Czech Republic during
my stay there in February of last year, and revised your rejection of the
offer.
Allow me to use this occasion to present to you a letter I wrote
to President Gorbachov on the 3rd
of April 1989:
Dear Mr Gorbachov,
May I use the opportunity of your
visit to Britain to express support for glasnost and perestroika in your
country, and to protest against the lack of both in Czechoslovakia? In an
attempt to give my support and my protest more weight, I shall begin on
Wednesday, the day of your arrival, a ten-day hunger-strike.
The lack of glasnost and perestroika
in my country is for me not a matter of academic concern. In 1981, while
visiting Oxford University to devote my time to Ancient Philosophy, I was
deprived of my citizenship. The law which made this possible had been enacted
in 1969 in consequence of the invasion of Czechoslovakia by five Warsaw Pact
countries. The responsibility for the decision therefore falls on the Soviet
Union as well as on the Czechoslovak authorities.
Would you join the voices of hundreds
of British students and academics who in recent years have petitioned the
Czechoslovak authorities to restore my citizen’s rights?
In the summer of 1977 I held a
seven-day hunger strike in support of basic religious freedoms. A few months
later I defended, by a ten-day hunger-strike, the philosophy seminar that I had
opened for young men and women deprived of higher education because of their
parents’ participation in Czechoslovakia’s attempt to bring about socialism
with a human face – I was being summoned to the police headquarters every time
I held the seminar. My third, twelve-day hunger-strike was held in 1978 in
support of the right to visit a friend: the police were ‘guarding’ day and
night Ladislav Hejdánek (a leading Charter 77 signatory), banning everybody
except his family from entering his flat.
When my citizenship is restored, I
shall use the expert knowledge in my academic field acquired during my stay in
Britain to the benefit of my country. My ambition is to open at Charles
University in Prague an International Center for the Study of Ancient
Philosophy where academics from Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, and other
East European countries would regularly meet their colleagues from Britain and
other Western countries to maintain our common cultural roots.
The case, which I bring to your
attention concerning an individual, bears on the rights and freedoms of all
Czechs and Slovaks.
With best wishes,
Julius Tomin
My plan to create an International
Center for the Study of Ancient Philosophy at Charles University, of which I
write in my letter to Gorbachov, must sound ridiculous in a situation when I am
not allowed to present two papers on Plato at Charles University. This is why I
am asking you again: please, rethink and revise your rejection of my offer. I
have devoted fifty years of my life to the study of Plato, and my work on Plato
is still going on. The latest series of entries on my Blog has been devoted to Anthony
Long’s and Richard Sorabji’s objections to my dating of Plato’s Phaedrus.
Wishing to you and to all Members of
your Institute all the best in the year 2017,
Julius Tomin
PS The readers of the Daily Telegraph were informed about my
letter to President Gorbachov by R Barry O’Brien on April 5, 1989.
***
I must confess I set great hopes on
my letter to Gorbachov and my hunger-strike. I wrote about it to Margaret
Thatcher, and the Daily Telegraph
informed its readers about both my letters. I held the hunger-strike in Swindon
in the Beehive Public House, in which I had held three lectures in 1988-9.
Duncan Watt, whom I met as a bright student of philosophy during my lectures at
Leeds University, organized ‘The Restore Tomin’s Citizenship Campaign’ during
my hunger-strike. I was visited by people from the BBC Television (or was it
ITV?) and we agreed that they would come with their cameras when I end the
hunger-strike. I started the hunger-strike in the morning of April 5 and ended it
in the morning of April 16. But there came no cameras, no further information
about my hunger-strike in the press. What happened? Let me quote the Wikipedia:
“The Hillsborough disaster was a human crush at Hillsborough football
stadium in Sheffield, England, UK, on 15 April 1989, during the 1988–89 FA Cup semi-final
game between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. With 96 fatalities and 766 injured it is the
worst disaster in British sporting history, The
crush occurred in the two standing only central pens in the Leppings Lane
stand, allocated to Liverpool supporters. Shortly before kick-off, in an
attempt to ease overcrowding outside the entrance turnstiles, the police match
commander chief superintendent David
Duckenfield ordered exit gate C to be opened, leading to an influx of even more
supporters to the already overcrowded central pens.”
The next time the British
Press became ‘interested’ in my work was in Nick Cohen’s ‘The Pub Philosopher’
published in The Independent Magazine
on November 18, 1989, a day after the beginning of the Velvet Revolution in my
country. The article opens with the words: ‘The judgments passed by Oxford dons
on Julius Tomin seem outrageously brutal. “I don’t wish to sound East European,”
said one, “but perhaps he does need psychiatric help … But you can disguise
paranoia in the East. There are so many real conspiracies. There aren’t the
same excuses when you come to the West.” Younger philosophers, who do not have
the personal ties, will go on the record. Jonathan Barnes, Professor of Ancient
Philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford, impatiently brushed aside the suggestion
that the Conservatives’ reduction in funding for British philosophy since 1980
might explain why there was never an academic post for Tomin at Oxford. “That’s
not the point at all,” he said, “He would not be accepted as a graduate here,
let alone be given a teaching job. He’s like a recalcitrant student who can’t
admit he’s wrong.”
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