Calgary, September 2022
“Rules are here to break them,” some people say. Others claim that we live in a rule-based society, and everybody must obey the law. Like in all arguments of this nature, both claims are true, and I am a perfect example of that. I have never been in trouble with police or with law, but all my accomplishments in life started by breaking rules. Let me explain.
I always had three goals in my life: to be a scientist, to fly airplanes and to climb mountains. It would appear there is no need to break any rules for those desires, and normally it’s true. But when I was fifteen, I had a bicycle accident and lost my right arm. That didn’t prevent me to be a scientist, but certainly complicated my other two desires. To my knowledge, there were no one-arm pilots, and no one-arm mountain climbers. Therefore, I was faced with a choice: either give up those two goals or to invent some creative solutions to achieve them. The thought that I might not be able to do those activities never crossed my mind.
Flying was probably the most daring of my creative solutions. At that time flight training in Czechoslovakia was conducted by the military, similar like the Air Cadets in Canada. The objective was to train military pilots, and there was absolutely no chance I would pass their medical exams. But it was also the time before computers, when teenagers didn’t have any personal ID cards, and that was the solution to my problem. All the applicants for flight training had to complete the ground school, and then they were given a paper form to bring to various doctors to get the exams done. Since there was no ID check of the applicant, I simply gave the form to my friend. Then, with all the doctor’s signatures filled in, I presented myself at the airport. The head of the flight training was bit surprised to see somebody like me passing the medical, but all pilots hate doctors, so perhaps he was secretly pleased I managed to outsmart them. The flying itself was no problem. I got the glider pilot licence, then in Canada I flew power planes, was competing in aerobatics and kept flying for more than fifty years. There were some people who thought I didn’t belong to the community of flyers, notably one old English military guy who thought I was a disgrace to what he considered to be his gliding club, but there were only few like him. My cheating on the medical exams was certainly worth it.
To participate in mountain climbing didn’t require breaking any specific rule, only to overcome the entrenched assumption that I cannot do it. Since my childhood my parents were bringing me to the mountains, and by the age of 15 I was a good skier and rock climber. After my accident I couldn’t imagine giving it up, so I continued skiing and took every opportunity to climb rocks. Then, while studying at the university, I spent a lot of time during the summer holidays wandering through the mountains of Slovakia. During one of those excursions, I came across a group of people with climbing equipment. The leader of the group told me that it was a mountain climbing course, and when I asked if I could join them, he surprised me by saying ‘yes’. Obviously, he didn’t mind having me as a member of his group. It turned out that I was a better climber than most of the other participants; I took more courses from him, we became friends, and much later I was saddened to learn that he died descending from the summit of Mt. Everest. He was one of the top Czech mountain climbers. Then, in Canada, I met another friend who didn’t mind climbing with me. We did a lot of climbing together and after more than thirty years we are still friends.
That leaves me with a goal of becoming a scientist. I have studied physics at the Prague university, then did the post-gradual degree, and my thesis required the use of a computer. The year was 1966, computers were mysterious machines and hardly anybody new anything about them. I had the foresight to realize that computer was a machine unlike any other. Trains can transport goods, elevators can lift loads, but computers can simulate those activities without actually doing them. To me, computer was a machine of the future, and I was right.
So far, there was no need to break any rules, but the Russian invasion to Czechoslovakia in 1968 changed that. Soon it became obvious that traveling abroad will be prohibited and I didn’t want to be stuck in the little Czechoslovakia. It was also the time of American flights to the Moon, and I was asking myself how they do it. How come they can fly to the Moon while I cannot build even a simple amplifier. I really wanted the answer to that question, and I knew I wouldn’t find it in Prague. Therefore, one day, soon after the invasion, I asked my girlfriend:
“This summer I will go to England. Do you want to come with me?”
“Yes,” she said.
“But I wouldn’t be coming back.”
“We will see.”
We did go to England, then to Canada, we broke the rule prohibiting the unauthorized emigration, and 52 years later we are still together. And yes, I found the answer to my question, and I was right about computers. They were indeed the machines of the future and provided me with employment during all my working career.
The rules I broke were not designed to protect the population, and by breaking them I didn’t harm anybody. However, all countries have laws safeguarding their citizens, and those are the laws I would never break. But there are also laws designed to protect the governments from the unpleasant questions, and the people who break them are called dissidents. The ruling class of a country calls their dissidents traitors, and the nations at the opposing camp call them heroes. We all know the names of famous dissidents: Nelson Mandela from South Afrika; Andrei Sakharov from Soviet Union; Vaclav Havel from Czechoslovakia; Julian Assange from Australia; Edvard Snowden from USA, to name few. They all suffered great personal sacrifices but succeeded in what they were fighting for: ending the apartheid; exposing the oppression in the Soviet Union; restoring the democracy in Czechoslovakia; uncovering the war crimes of US army; revealing the illegal surveillance of citizens by US spy agencies.
Unfortunately, there are other types of dissidents who sacrifice their life for nothing, like the two Saudi Arabia women, Nourah bint Saeed al-Qahtani and Salma al-Shehab. They were sentenced to 45 and 35 years in prison for just writing something on Internet. The Saudi prosecution even didn’t release what the two women wrote, they accused them of "disrupting the cohesion of society" and "destabilizing the social fabric." There was a brief outcry in the medias about those sentences, but nobody seems to be coming to their defence. When the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was assassinated by the agents of the Saudi government, US president Biden proclaimer that he will make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” country which the whole world will despise, but half a year later he went there begging for a bit of oil. Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman laughed at him and perhaps the prison sentences of the two women is his response to the US president.
Why some dissidents succeed, and others fail? To succeed, dissident cannot be alone, he needs a powerful support behind him. Mandela was a head of the armed resistance. Sakharov, a Nobel price winner in physics, had the whole scientific community behind him. Vaclav Havel was a well-known writer. Julian Assange and Edvard Snowden used technology to spread their message. But the two Saudi women are alone, there is no powerful support behind them. They are just victims of a brutal regime.
Returning to the main question of this essay: “Are rules here to break them?” or “Do we live in a rules-based society where everybody must obey the law?” There is no correct response, everybody must find its own answer. The answer I found served me well all my life. Some might say that I am an egoist who never contributed to noble ideas like freedom, democracy and similar. Others might say that I have cheated my way through life. All is true and none of it would make me feel guilty. As Frank Sinatra said many years ago: “I did it my way.”