A Tale of Two Revolutionaries

This past weekend, the world witnessed the deaths of two very different men: Vaclav Havel and Kim Jong-il. Kim inherited a throne of tyrannical revolution from his Communist dictator father. Havel ushered in a peaceful democratic revolution against the forces of Soviet-influenced Communism in his native Czechoslovakia. Kim perpetuated the stark oppression of his people, and his inhumane crimes are widely recognized and demonized. Havel was an intellectual, playwright and activist/dissident who became the first president of Czechoslovakia, and then the Czech Republic.

I find it delightfully providential that these two men would leave this earth within one day of each other. Their beliefs, actions and legacies could not be more antithetical. This occurrence serves as a prodigious reminder that the gift of freedom is precious. There truly are forces of good and evil at work in this world. It is our solemn obligation, as human beings, to condemn and combat those who enslave while embracing and empowering those who liberate.

I recommend that you take the time to read Havel's essay "The Power of the Powerless", which you can find on his website here. (Note: the translated version contains some spelling errors). This famous manifesto begins with the memorable words "A specter is haunting Eastern Europe", which perhaps you recognize.

However, I'd like to share some compelling excerpts of that essay, written in 1978, eleven years before the Velvet Revolution which overthrew the Communist regime:

"If the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living the truth. This is why it must be suppressed more severely than anything else."

"The profound crisis of human identity brought on by living within a lie, a crisis which in turn makes such a life possible, certainly possesses a moral dimension as well; it appears, among other things, as a deep moral crisis in society. A person who has been seduced by the consumer value system, whose identity is dissolved in an amalgam of the accoutrements of mass civilization, and who has no roots in the order of being, no sense of responsibility for anything higher than his own personal survival, is a demoralized person... Living within the truth, as humanity's revolt against an enforced position, is, on the contrary, an attempt to regain control over one's own sense of responsibility." 

"For the real question is whether the brighter future is really always so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us, and kept us from developing it?"