‘Standing Up for All the Birds’ Rights to Fly’

Academy Award-winning director MILOS FORMAN was given the American Civil Liberty Union’s Torch of Liberty award at a dinner last week in Los Angeles. The Czech-born director, who won Oscars for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” in 1975 and “Amadeus” in 1984, was cited for his body of work and especially for the film “The People vs. Larry Flynt,” which dramatized the 1988 landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision on free speech. Forman’s acceptance speech:

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I really don’t know if I should call the fact that I lived half of my life in two different totalitarian regimes fortunate or unfortunate.

I certainly learned a lot about the humiliation, absurdity and cruelty of a life in a society in which civil liberties are suppressed to the point of extinction.

I learned how to survive.

I will never forget how I, as a young student, had to laugh, when I was assigned by Czech television, in the time of its infancy, to introduce on a live variety show a couple of Soviet jugglers.

In those times, every line, every word, had to be submitted to the censors and then be followed verbatim. Otherwise you could be in big trouble.

But these jugglers weren’t saying anything.

“They just juggle,” I told the producer when he asked for the text.

The producer, an old pro, meditated for a while and then he said: “Well, write something, anything about nothing. If you sent the censors a blank page they might start thinking, and that’s dangerous. Never let the censors think.”

So I wrote down the shouts the jugglers yelled at each other during their performance, “Yeyee . . . Hop . . . Uaaaaa . . . .Hop!,” sent it to the censors and waited to see what would happen.

The page came back with four signatures and a big stamp: Approved!

I also learned how humiliating it is and how much hatred can be provoked in a normally decent citizen like me who, in the effort to protect his children’s future, is compelled to say one thing in the privacy of his home and the opposite in public.

I learned about fear when a high school classmate of mine, forced by the Communist apparatchiks into denouncing his own father for betraying the country, was pressured into calling for a death penalty for him, only to be told a few years later that his father was innocent.

The rehabilitated father was dead and can’t forgive his son, but my schoolmate is now an adult and has to live for the rest of his life with the anguish of patricide.

I learned that, in the hands of those in power, individual civil liberties are very fragile and can be easily crippled. Only when bound together, like feathers, are they strong. Bound together feathers allow the bird to fly.

When Josef Stalin was on his deathbed--this is how the folk tale goes--he called in two likely successors, to test which one of the two had a better knack for ruling the country.

He ordered two birds to be brought in and presented one bird to each of the two candidates.

The first one grabbed the bird, but was so afraid that the bird could free himself from his grip and fly away that he squeezed his hand very hard, and when he opened his palm, the bird was dead.

Seeing the disapproving look on Stalin’s face and being afraid to repeat his rival’s mistake, the second candidate loosened his grip so much that the bird freed himself and flew away.

Stalin looked at both of them scornfully. “Bring me a bird!” he ordered.

They did.

Stalin took the bird by its legs and slowly, one by one, he plucked all the feathers from the bird’s little body.

Then he opened his palm. The bird was laying there naked, shivering, helpless.

Stalin looked at him, smiled gently and said, “You see . . . and he is even thankful for the human warmth coming out of my palm.”

The image of that little bird, stripped of all of his feathers which God gave him to fly, haunts me. I understand that frightened look of his, searching around for someone to stand up and speak on his behalf.

That’s why I have such a deep admiration for the ACLU, for standing up for all the birds’ rights to fly: the sparrows, the eagles, even the vultures.