Mark A. Drumbl and Barbora Holá join JiC for this concluding contribution to our Symposium on their new book, Informers Up Close. To access all of the other contributions the symposium, please see here.

So I turned myself to face me

But I’ve never caught a glimpse

Of how the others must see the faker

[…]

Changes, just gonna have to be a different man

Time may change me

But I can’t trace time

[…]

Changes, where’s your shame?

You’ve left us up to our necks in it

Time may change me

But you can’t trace time

[…]

Strange fascination, fascinating me
Ah, changes are taking the pace I’m going through

[…]

I said that time may change me
But I can’t trace time

–David Bowie, ‘Changes’, 1971, from the album Hunky Dory 

Transitional justice is about change. Good change, supposedly. Change from repression or war to sunnier days. About the process, in David Bowie’s words, to face me, to face you, for us to face each other, and then turn to face our collective we. To cleanse the shame in which all have been left up to their necks. Change from venality and secrecy to purity and transparency. Progressive change. Forward change. We come out, in Bowie’s words, as ‘different’ – new and improved, for the better.

The change of transitional justice is to change the we as well as the me and the you. And so it goes for informers. They change from fooling others to becoming fools. Informers Up Close documents how they become scapegoated and revealed as fakers. Informers are put in front of a mirror. They are exposed through file-openings, thereby collaterally damaging all their naked informed-upons. Informers are fired and flattened. They are not considered victims of a regime that had indeed often abused them. Although, as Novak Vučo and Vladimir Petrović note, top state security brass might have been able to broker power in Communist Czechoslovakia, their bevvy of informers largely remained marginal. Many betrayed others for breadcrumbs and scraps; to feel useful; or to find some panache in the pinch of penury. In the end, placing informers in front of a mirror enables many others to avoid self-examination. The others see the fakers very disdainfully and thereby might not grasp the complicity that lurks in themselves.

Cynthia Horne in her erudite contribution delivers the crucially important point that notwithstanding all of the changes of lustration – the old boss out, the new boss in, the old underling out, the new underling in, the informer slipping from insider to the snitch as outsider – it is unclear whether lustrative transitional justice changes the me to you and the you to me by actually cultivating trust within human relationships. Cynthia bluntly notes that ‘[t]rust building did not go exactly as planned’. Which makes one wonder what else lustrations were intended to achieve. We think that this something else was power — political power — which needed to be established by the new regime. Transitional vocabularies can promote the legitimacy of the new regime. This is something of which to be mindful. We believe that in order to try to build trust people need to have ownership and be able to dialogue and not have their relationships hijacked by the newly arrivistepowerholders and their political goals.

The fact nonetheless remains that the fakers, the informers, the lyin’ eyes, well, they really do hurt people. The dance-askance of Theodor Aman’s painting with which we opened this symposium leads to great pain. The need to redress this great pain redounds through a number of the commentaries to this symposium. That said, this is a tough balance. On the one hand, Emma Breeze lauds us for our compassion. Emma’s observation warmed our hearts. This is how we would like to be. Emma praises the way in which we approach informers and try to understand why and how they informed. Irit Dekel situates herself similarly. As Irit beautifully puts it, our intention is to ‘show, rather not tell’ the intimacies and very personal nature of informing. Chrys Kiyala similarly chimes in. In passionate fashion, Chrys links our work to the magnificent African tradition of ubuntu. Chrys maps our book upon his lengthy commitment to reconciliation. He extols the importance of a commitment to humanism. Chrys generously places Informers Up Close within that tradition. 

Indeed, when all is said and done, we hope to listen and learn, not preach or prattle. We hope to center people and persons, rather than best practices and policies, within the flow of transitional justice. We hope to reenergize transitional justice’s rehabilitative, reintegrative, and restorative potential. Our aspiration is to ensure the presence of individuals within the pace of change and also glimpse how the trace of time touches change. We conclude that so much informing is motivated by getting along, getting even, getting things, and socially navigating the strictures of Communist society. Everyday informing is about day-to-day needs and wants and wishes and constraints. Informers are not much in the way of ideological agents and, hence in our estimation, do not pose much danger to the new liberal democratic regime. 

Yet this very compassion may border on naïveté. Patryk Labuda — and to a lesser degree Vladimir and Novak – struggle with this. On the one hand, Patryk extols the virtues of compassion and empathy. On the other hand, he actively and openly worries that our work, however elegant that he finds it, can become misunderstood and misinterpreted by actors in democratic backslides, such as Russia under Putin, to justify veneration of the ‘old days’ and denigration of democratic values. Vladimir and Novak, albeit somewhat more circumspect in this regard, gesture in a similar direction, notably, to Serbia. Sergey Vasiliev, in a stunning contribution to another symposium on our book, also evokes similar worries. In a way, they all seem to sigh and then say: ‘Barbora and Mark, what you wish is noble but, Barbora and Mark, you are also playing with fire or, in the least, you are passing around explosives.

And, indeed, ‘tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner’, to wit, to understand everything is to forgive it all. Is this the case with informers? Clearly, one of our goals is to build the epistemology of informing, to ferret out why rag-tag people slag others to the secret police, and then to channel that knowledge into post-conflict transitional justice mechanisms. So, then, a second question arises. What is the responsibility for the academic – the author, the researcher – for the way in which an idea, an argument, or a conclusion can become misunderstood (or worse yet, appropriated) by others? Should scholarly conclusions become caveated because of the possibility that they can be misused?  We are not so sure. Still, Patryk brings a most valuable caution to the table. This caution moreover epitomizes the inevitable tension between the local and the universal. Our book is about Communist Czechoslovakia, and post-Communist Czech Republic, but indeed, what it says can bear upon other places. While our book is not about Serbia (pace Vladimir and Novak), or Russia (pace Patryk), or Afghanistan (pace Emma), it gestures towards everyday informing everywhere.  

Patryk, Vladimir, Cynthia, Chrys, and Novak are right: doing nothing – having no transitional justice — may simply cause pain to fester. It is for this reason that we develop a heuristic of factors to consider when informers become entangled into transitional justice mechanisms. Our endgame is certainly not impunity. We hope to deflate the coarseness that has characterized transitional justice in the Czech Republic and replace that with a more granular, individuated, and comprehensive framework.

Change is not only triggered by the bump from Communism to democracy. The 1989 Velvet Revolution is not the only prompt. The lives of informers changed during the Communist years. Irit latches onto this. She notes that ‘the authors convincingly show how life and lives changed during Communist rule and how individual lives were connected to a form of political rule that embedded itself within the home and workplace’. Novak and Vladimir for their parts make similar observations. Change, and impermanence, suffused the Communist years which were far from static. This constant flux matters. The relationship between state and society – between what we call participatory dictatorship and the engineering of the soul – was variable. This, too, matters insofar as it contoured the harms, the methods, the incentives, and the compulsion all of which, holistically, infused the social practice of informing. Just as there are backslides from democracy, now, there were backslides from Communism, then.

Yet another change caught the eye of our interlocutors: this being change – alteration — in the StB files as sources. As Patryk and Irit note, throughout the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia bits and pieces of the StB files and documents contained therein were discarded or disappeared. Also, as part of the broader transitional changes in 1989 the StB destroyed many files so as to avoid their ending up in the hands of the new regime.  The StB archive and StB files were thus ever changing – in composition and content – throughout the Communist years and thereafter. Additionally, as we extensively discuss in chapter 1 of Informers Up Close, the facticity of (some of) the StB files is also called into question. So indeed, we agree with Patryk that finding THE singular factual truth – ‘as it was’ – would be impossible What one can however discern, even from files changed as they are, is the interaction – the dynamics and catalysts of informing, to wit, the dance (pace Aman) between the StB and their informers. And that is good enough for us. 

Emma ends her commentary with thoughts on how informing has evolved from the cloak-and-dagger of the Cold War to the modern day where everyone can be an informer even in the absence of any state simply by dint of the iPhone in their hands. For a while we both felt that indeed the ubiquity of decentralized snooping, and the devastation of cancel culture (which has similarities to Communist stigmatizing in that the accusation is the condemnation), might change the entire matrix of how to think about informing. But Emma says something different. For Emma, even in a place of totalizing tech, the touch of the human being – the HUMINT – still really matters. So perhaps indeed our project can bear relevance for the future – even a future that is AI’ed and cybered and X’ed and cellphoned. This, too, heartens us.   

Vladimir and Novak note that, in the end, we propose a dialogue rather than a diatribe or a digression or a diktat. Patryk gestures similarly. So, too, does Chrys with particular gusto. Such dialogue — reconciliatory and reintegrative — could become integral to transitional changes.  In that spirit, then, we wholeheartedly thank all of our interlocutors for taking time to dialogue, turning themselves to face us, and along the way perhaps themselves as well.  

We would like to end with the beginning. And this beginning takes the form of Mark Kersten’s introduction to this entire symposium. Mark’s beginning is an ode to change. Mark notes how attitudes towards opening the archived files – regardless of the exactness of their facticity – themselves change through time. On the topic of open files, Mark poignantly asks his students: would you look? Some say yes. Some say no. Mark intuits an impermanence here, too. Attitudes may change over time. For Mark they would soften. That does not mean that there is an overall change towards either openness or closedness. Rather, it is that where one begins might not be where one ends, attitudinally. The vasodilation of certitude (yes open, yes sealed) might over time lead to vacillation (maybe open, maybe not, maybe sealed, maybe not).

Change does not have to be linear. It can just be change. It can simply be, back to Bowie, ‘strange fascination, fascinating me’.