Vaclav Havel's Advice

 A world war began in 1939 when Adolf Hitler sent his nazi fascist war machine across the Czech/German border. That firestorm of destructive militarism flamed for six years before Allied armies drove the damn nazis out.

In 1945, the Russian Soviets occupied most of eastern Europe when Allied troops drove the nazis of Germany and the fascists of Italy back into their holes.

That Czech nation where World War II had first erupted was occupied during the wars’ conclusion by the Soviet army. The Russian Soviets established their oppressive communist regime in Czech lands and the adjoining land of Slavakia, as they did throughout the entirety of eastern Europe.

In 1968, the Soviets extinguished a nascent democratic liberation movement in the Czech lands when they sent military tanks into Prague to forcefully show the Czechs who was in charge. It was a bloody frickin’ mess when the Russian militarists squelched Czech rebellion at that time.

But in 1989, the 50-year military oppression of the Czech and Slavakia lands was concluded when a popular groundswell of peaceful protest persuaded the Soviet communist regime to withdraw back to Russia. With nary a shot fired, that so-called Velvet Revolution returned the Czech lands and Slavakia to their own people.

The success of that peaceful revolution became manifest largely through the peacefully effective leadership of one gifted man, Vaclav Havel.

In his 1997 book, The Art of the Impossible, Vaclav published a collection of speeches that he had delivered in the early ’90’s when he was serving as the President of  a free, democratic Czech nation.

Reading his speeches, you will find: In 1992, serving as President of the Czech Republic,  Havel delivered a message to the World Economic Forum in which he explained our changing world in this way:

“The fall of communism can be regarded as a sign that modern thought—based on the premise that the world is objectively knowable, and that the knowledge so obtained can be absolutely generalized—has come to a crisis. This era has created the first global, or planetary, technical civilization, but it has reached the limit of its potential, the point beyond which the abyss begins. I think the end of communism is a serious warning to all mankind. It is a signal that the era of arrogant, absolutist reason is drawing to a close, and that it is high time to draw conclusions from the fact.

“Communism was not defeated by military force, but by life, by the human spirit, by conscience, by the resistance of Being, and man, to manipulation. It was defeated by a revolt of color, authenticity, history in all its variety, and human individuality against imprisonment within a uniform ideology.”

 

And I would add . . . oppression is defeated by a rejection of any uniformed jihad.

And one more thing . . . oppression is  defeated with a peaceful conversion away from of our hyper-capitalistic  transformation of this planet into a trash heap. 

Glass half-Full