ABSTRACT
In this chapter we will explore the topic of political snitching in post-communist countries. Snitching is a complex phenomenon: on the one hand, it expresses personalized aggressive and perverted aspects of social relationships, but, on the other hand, it can be also viewed as an impersonal attribute of large-scale societal, often post-traumatic functioning. In communist countries, political snitching was the regime’s instrument to destroy any attempt for free thought and action. We will suggest that snitching was possible not only because of one’s fear of the regime’s persecution, but because its ideology provided the convenience of submitting to a “collective truth”, instead of one’s struggle to find its own free space. Psychoanalytic and group analytic explanations for aggression in society and snitching will be presented along with our reservations about their limits. We were motivated to find another concept that would approach snitching in the context of totalitarian regime and we found Václav Havel’s essays as relevant. We will propose that the ideological and moral conflict between “living in a lie and living in a truth” presents a powerful individual and collective dilemma that can invite the snitching and its harmful effects upon peers’ relationships.
