1979: Vaclav Havel

1979

Vaclav Havel - Czechoslovakia

Imprisoned

Vaclav Havel was born in Czechoslovakia in October 1936. While working as a stagehand he began to study drama at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. His play The Garden Party was published in 1963.

During the "Prague Spring" of 1968 Havel became chair of the Independent Writers Club and was a member of the Club of [Politically] Engaged Non-Partisans. For this he was black-listed by the regime the following year.

In 1975 Havel wrote an open letter to President Husak in which he warned that the country was "plunging ever deeper into a crisis" and the people of Czechoslovakia were living in a state of fear and indifference which was the reason for their "conformity". The regime, he argued had "sacrificed the country's spiritual future for the sake of their present power interests."

In 1977 he co-founded Charter 77 along with Jan Pato?ka, Zden?k Mlyná?, Ji?í Hájek, and Pavel Kohout. The Charter criticized the government for failing to implement its own commitments on human rights as well as the covenants of the United Nations. In April 1979 he helped set up the Committee for the Unjustly Prosecuted; he was incarcerated later that year until 1983.

After the Velvet Revolution Havel became one of the leading figures in the Civic Forum and was elected President of Czechoslovakia in 1989. After the separation of the Czech and Slovak republics he became the first President of the new Czech Republic in 1993 and was subsequently re-elected in 1998 before leaving office in February 2003. He continues to write.

Writing Sample:

Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something suprapersonal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves. It is a very pragmatic but, at the same time, an apparently dignified way of legitimizing what is above, below, and on either side. It is directed toward people and toward God. It is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo. It is an excuse that everyone can use, from the greengrocer, who conceals his fear of losing his job behind an alleged interest in the unification of the workers of the world, to the highest functionary, whose interest in staying in power can be cloaked in phrases about service to the working class. The primary excusatory function of ideology, therefore, is to provide people, both as victims and pillars of the post-totalitarian system, with the illusion that the system is in harmony with the human order and the order of the universe.

From The Power of the Powerless October 1978, translated by Paul Wilson. Featured in The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, edited by John Keane, with an Introduction by Steven Lukes (London: Hutchinson, 1985). Available online at http://www.vaclavhavel.cz/