Here is an eloquent article in Standpoint about claims that back in 1950 a youthful Milan Kundera gave a statement to the communist regime which caused others opposed to it immense suffering.

The article has prompted some revealing comments. Here is one asserting that ‘context is everything:

… It is further evidence of the insanity latent in human nature.Judging and admonishing Kundera to "come clean" as several commenters have, is evidence of ignorance. Nuanced empathetic processes escape these self-righteous types. They are the same types who would proudly announce they would never work as a guard at concentration camp. How childish. Context is everything.

Post-modern Relativism Alert!

Don’t you all see?

That there is no real difference between those who are weak or evil and serve as concentration camp guards, and those who refuse to do so, even if that refusal costs them everything?

That in the ‘insanity latent in human nature’ it is just a matter of luck who is sane and who is insane?

That accordingly it is of no significance who decides what is sanity and insanity?

And that therefore it is childish to give any credibility to the arbitrary judgements and admonitions of those claiming to be sane?

Don’t you all see that Honesty and Integrity are all just a trivial result of Context? 

Here is my Comment:

I disagree with Kormac68. In this profound question ‘context’ matters little – honesty and integrity are everything.
 
These issues came up almost every day when I served in Poland with the FCO from 2003-07, and no doubt still do.
 
There were various broad types of collaborators with the secret police in communist Europe:
 
  • Those (few) who collaborated because they believed in the Marxist/Soviet project
  • Those who took the bribe to get something for themselves (foreign travel, better job)
  • Those who wanted or needed something for someone else (medical treatment for a close relative, a scholarship for a child)
  • Those who could not stand it any more and who caved in under unrelenting pressure
The astounding feature of such collaboration was that often the communists did not use any material gleaned from such collaborators, or even seek such material. What they wanted was the act of submission by the collaborator to the principle of collaboration – that little signature confirming on paper willingness to do so. An act at once small and furtive and dirty and secret, and all the more powerful and absolute because the potential collaborator knew that it is was so small and dirty and furtive and secret.
 
In this case, Kundera is said to have made a statement which caused huge suffering to others. Obviously this is at least plausible.
 
The comments are revealing. Of course a lively industry still exists in progressive circles aimed at relativising these horrors – throwing up a smokescreen of apparent confusion and complexity which helps the friends and ideological descendants of communism tip-toe nonchalantly away from the scenes of European Leftism’s massive crimes.
 
This is a deep dark moral minefield. Whom do the schoolchildren hate more? The villainous brutal headmaster? Or the sneak in their own ranks who gets them into trouble?
 
Havel understands these issues better than anyone in plump Western Europe might do. Which is why he is graceful and magnanimous, but also extending an implicit invitation to Kundera to unburden himself. A strong, honest man closer to the end of his life than the beginning who has made a name for himself in denouncing Big Lies maybe has to show just how strong and honest he is in confronting some Big Lies from his own past.
 
So even if some people succumbed to the ‘insanity latent in human nature’ as Kormac68 curiously describes it, what does one make of the people who did not do so? Those who refused to yield to psychological and other blandishments, and who suffered accordingly? Are they not entitled at the very least to expect that those who were, maybe understandably, weaker or less wise than themselves admit that weakness now?
 
Honesty and integrity are not context-specific. Insisting on that principle is not to ‘judge or admonish’, but rather to hold tight to the best available source of support when entering the cesspit communism created. And condemning those who look to Kundera to come clean about this episode amounts, in the end, to helping the perpetrators of all that evil get away with it.
 
This story needs to turn away from being a Tale of Sadness and Forgetting to a Tale of Courage – and Remembering.