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Continuing the Revolution
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17863 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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Date : |
3 / 1990 |
2,024 Words |
| Author
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Arnošt Lustig
Arnošt Lustig is a Czech novelist whose books include Darkness
Casts No Shadow, Diamonds of the Night, and A Prayer for
Katerina Horovitzova. He teaches literature and film at
American University. |
The Czechs are calling their 1989 revolution the gentle, or velvet, revolution. The revolutionaries did not kill or beat a single person - or even break a window. Intellectuals, religious people, students, and others concerned with morality were able to overcome a government hostile to their interest by using civil means. Throughout the 12-day upheaval, the revolution's leaders insisted that if the toppled communist tyranny was met with revenge, another tyranny would take its place.
Václav Havel, the nation's new president, called the upheaval a revolution of understanding because he wanted Czechs to understand even their enemies. When former Stalinist Antonin Čapek, who supported the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, shot himself in a suicide attempt after the communists lost control of the government, Havel sent his best wishes for Čapek's recovery.
This gentle revolution was the result of many factors, but prominent among them was Havel's own political thought. In his political writings, such as The Power of the Powerless, Havel stressed the values that finally manifested themselves in the Czech revolution. He called for people to support each other's efforts to live within the truth regardless of their diversity in the hope that the sphere of truth would expand until it overpowered the communist lie that opposed it. He chose this approach to change over a more narrow, and potentially more confrontational, political opposition. Havel represents an ethical approach to public affairs.
This approach is also embodied in Charter 77, the famous statement about human and civil rights drafted and promoted by Havel and a handful of other
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