Who here has read Vaclav Havel's "Power of the Powerless"?

[deutsey]

I read it for the first time back under Bush I and thought it was amazingly relevant to America in the late '80s, even though it is a harsh critique of Soviet Communism. Here's a synopsis:

"Havel's most important piece of writing was in 1978 when he wrote The Power of the Powerless, a searing analysis of communist totalitarian repression and how it produces, and is dependent on the timid and morally corrupt. Havel showed that moral resistance was the only way to fight this debasement and his work went on to influence other peoples and nations burdened under the yoke of communism. In 1979 Havel helped found and was the head of the Civic Forum, which united various democratic opposition movements in Czechoslovakia leading up to the non-violent Velvet Revolution of 1989."

I'm going to re-read this essay and encourage everyone who feels powerless today against Bush II to do so.

We might want to look to Havel's example and form our own Civic Forum of various democratic movements.

[ngant17]

1. Havel, freedom, Cuba

I know only a little about former Czech president Vaclav Havel, the playwright dissident, who spent five years in communist prisons. I don't share his vision of freedem and democracy in Cuba. He has been influenced by the regime changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and attempts to apply them outside in a totally different historical environment.

But from my personal experience, dDuring my last stay in Eastern Europe(DEC 2001 - JAN 2002), I lived with a Czech family for approx. 2 weeks. I became acquainted with a Czech working class family. The father of the family, Jozef;, worked for almost 30 years in the heavy construction industry, specifically in the underground Metro train lines. During the communist days, before the Czech Revolution and Havel, Jozef believed that in CZ overall things were much better in the communist times. In fact, he owns a very nice 2-story house with a large garden, specifically due to the socialist policies which were in effect back then. He was given this subsidized house as a reward for getting married early and having a family. Today, with the pervasive influence of US capitalism everywhere you go in CZ, to try to acquire a similar kind of dwelling would be prohibitively expensive. It simply would not be possible today.

The Czech working-class family believes that the pervasiveness of US culture is bringing many negative things for the Czech people. There is more greed, more self-centered attitudes. Those kinds of social relationships were unheard of, during the communist time. People were more friendly and helpful. Now the slogan seems to be, "What`s in it for me?" or "In what way does this benefit me first?" Ironically, it seems that many of the former Communist officials in CZ are now the biggest supporters of the capitalist changes taking place today.

Havel writes: "It is time to put aside transatlantic disputes about the embargo on Cuba and to concentrate on direct support for Cuban dissidents, prisoners of conscience and their families."

The socio-economic situation with respect to socialism and freedom is much more complex that what Havel implies. He flunks the Cuba test as far as I'm concerned. Since when was CZ under a 40 year and embargo by the Soviet Union? He has no idea of their reality. He can not understand it. He simply brushes this aside.

Havel: "The Castro regime's response to Project Varela and to other initiatives has been at best disregard and at worst persecution."

When I visited Cuba recently, I talked with Cubans, the response was that the Varela Project was not a problem. It was tolerated. Again, Havel loses his credibilty with me. He has such a narrow focus with this idea of freedom. I simply can't follow his thinking at all. I don't know if his more recent essay(s) will change my mind.

[deutsey]

4. Honestly, I haven't kept up with Havel's thought or career since

the Velvet Revolution and shortly after.

I'm more struck by how his definition in this essay of dissent under Soviet-style communism remains surprisingly relevant under Bush-style American corporatism.

[DesEtoiles]

2. kick

[deutsey]

3. "they must live within a lie"

Much of this applies to our current situation:

The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his or her ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.

Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, *are* the system.

[deutsey]

5. By breaking the rules of the game

(the dissident) has disrupted the game as such. He has exposed it as a mere game. He has shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system. He has upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together. He has demonstrated that living a lie is living a lie. He has broken the exalted façade of the system and exposed the real, base foundations of power. He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor in fact is naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, the (dissident) has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth...therefore, everyone who steps out of line denies (the system) and threatens it in its entirety.

[Bampa]

6. Do you see a parallel path

Do you see a parallel path with the old Soviet Union and the path we now are on where the USSR collapsed under economic fall with a split of regions into different countries? Could it all happen here with personal debts at all-time highs, mortgaged futures of our children, the southern red state post slavery post civil-rights mentalities? Could the US repeat that fate?

[deutsey]

7. I hope not, but with the current regime and the polarized factionalism

in this country, I have to wonder.

[ngant17]

8. internal collapse of US?

The Soviet Union collapsed, but a new Russia (under Putin) rose up from those ashes. I don't know what new empire could emerge after an economic collapse of the USA. There was always a Russia in the Soviet Union. There's not anything that can come up like that here. No one state in the US is that powerful by itself.