Václav Havel, 1936 – 2011
via Ned Resnikoff
When Václav Havel was still a playwright and dissident in Communist Czechoslovakia — before the Velvet Revolution and his ascendance to the presidency of the post-Communist Czech Republic — he would urge his fellow anti-Communist revolutionaries to “live within the truth.” The Communist regime, he argued, perpetuated itself on the basis of lies. By forcing its subjects to go through small daily rituals of deceit, the Communist Party could make everyone culpable in their crimes. They could strangle resistance by turning everyone into a collaborator by default.
But when a regime derives its legitimacy from lies, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. The regime, Havel wrote, “only works as long as people are willing to live within the lie.”
True of us here now in the USA as it was of Communist Czechoslovakia.
