Disturbing the Peace

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We Americans tend to forget that Vaclav Havel was an Artist, poet, writer and existentialist thinker long before we seized upon him as our own private "anti-communist hero extraordinaire." And as with most other things, we in the West tended to "fixate" on Havel as just the one-man anti-Communist sideshow: the singleton hero of the Prague Spring. That is to say, we saw in him only what we wanted to see -- only what was comfortable for our myopic vision and only what tended to calm our democratic sensibilities. For had we looked and drank just a bit deeper, there was a lot more of this self-made "artist turned political activist," to see than just our knee-jerk recreation of him through our own eyes as our own larger-than-life anti-Communist hero. This book offers another vision of him that looks deeper into his very troubled, but nevertheless very important soul. Having had this book on my bookshelf, left unread for almost 20 years, this oversight alone makes me as guilty of seeing only the "shadow Havel as anti-Communist caricature," as the rest. In this very thoughtful series of autobiographical interviews, the "deeper Vaclav Havel," comes through loudly and clearly. And here I mean of course the one just beyond the popular anti-Communist Western created veneer. Havel has always used his very subtle, supple and artistic mind to become more than just an Anti-Communist firebrand. In the grand tradition of other Europeans, and more than anything else, he is an existentialist humanist thinker, with much practical advice for democrats. However his primary concerns have never been just with the fetishized political games that superpowers play. Whether they be the brutal class-based politics of Communism which, before it committed suicide, had morphed into a softer form of equally fetishized version of socialism; or about the equally brutal racist-based capitalist consumer-driven democracies, which as they begin to see their own self-inflicted deaths just over the horizon, have also morphed into a "kinder and gentler" form of American racism, or what amounts to about the same, Mandela's softer version of South African Apartheid: Either way, none of these has been Havel's primary concern. In this book we see Havel's real concerns spread out on the table, as he tells us how his keen sensibilities evolved until he learned to reject his own bourgeois class-based Communist upbringing. He learned to reject it because as he puts it "it gave me unearned privileges and alienated me from myself and from the rest of society in ways that could not be undone until I became aware enough to develop a refined sense of fairness, and until I could develop a "social emotion" that was antagonistic towards the class privileges I had inherited." Havel's "social emotion" was one that was also antagonistic towards unjust social barriers, and towards any pre-determined status awarded at birth, or based on the "false consciousness" of race superiority or any other forms o

Edit of 17 Apr 08 to add links. This book should be read as an adjunct to the author's other major book along these lines on power to the powerless. The most gripping and troubling conclusion that I drew from this book is that the United States of America is today much closer to where Czechoslovakia was in 1968 than anyone other than the Chomsky's and Vidal's might be willing to admit. We have both a federal government and a national corporate economy that thrives on elitist secrecy and blatant lies--even our non-profit sector is corrupt, from the Red Cross to United Way to many others. The people, the citizen-voters, truly have lost all power, as well as access to the information that might give them back the power, and this is indeed a black, absurdist-realist situation. On a more positive note, the author offers up, in the course of a long series of interviews, a number of ideas that are relevant to America today, as well as to any other emerging or re-emergent democracies in the making. 1) Model of behavior. When arguing with the center of power, do not get side-tracked with ideological debates over right or wrong. Focus on very specific concrete things (e.g. term limits, campaign finance reform, neighborhood economics) and stick to your guns. 2) Popular coalitions. Non-violent non-partisan popular coalitions are the core means of taking back the power. They represent a means for bring together groups of people from widely divergent backgrounds, with genuine social tolerance. 3) Informal networks. Even under conditions of repression and censorship, informal networks of dissidents and quasi-dissidents can be effective in sharing information through samizdat publications. [With the Internet, these possibilities explode, although caution must be taken on the fringes since the Internet is easily monitored and the more radical leaders could be declared seditionist "combatants" ineligible for their rights as citizens...speaking of the Soviet Union, of course, not America.] 4) Man versus Machine. Havel reaches his own conclusions founded in Czech literature and his own experience, with respect to the urgency of restoring the kinship and human connections that used to drive politics, economics, and other aspects of organized living. He is at one with Lionel Tiger among many others, with respect to the terribly consequences of the industrial era in terms of de-humanizing decision-making and allowing remote elites to treat individual workers as dispensable cogs in the machine, whose lives matter not a whit. 5) Neighborhoods, Politics "From Below". He joins the authors of the Cultural Creatives (Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson) and of IMAGINE: What America Could be in the 21st Century (Marianne Williamson) in emphasizing the vital role that neighborhoods must play in any democracy. From political self-governance to sustainable economics to low-cost healthy agriculture to cultural cohesion, neighborhoods are the sin qua non of d

This is a fine book about an amazing man. I was truly inspired by Vaclav Havel after reading this book. This book is an "easy read" even though it is largely about weighty matters. It is an interesting and enlightening book.

Whenever I need a moral boost I go back and reread Vaclav Havel's"Disturbing the Peace". This book is a series of essays by thedissident Vaclav Havel that were smuggled out of communistCzechoslovakia and translated by a Havel friend in the West. VaclavHavel was a playwright who became a Czech dissident who became leaderof the Velvet revolution (which ousted the communists) and who finallybecame president of the republic.Vaclav Havel was the foremostdissident under the communist regime. He openly challenged the rulinggovernment with such essays as "Power to the Powerless" and"The Soul of Main under Communism". (Actually I forgot the nameof the latter essay. I think "The Soul of Man under Communism"is an essay written by Oscar Wilde. But Havel did address this themein "Disturbing the Peace" and in essays he forwarded to thecommunist rulers.) One of the most exciting parts of the book iswhere Havel describes the dissident communitie's efforts to publish aHavel essay advocating that the Czech government adhere to the termsof the Charter 77 human rights accord to which they were a signatory.The story is spine tingling thriller complete with car chases andobscure drop points. It reads like a John le Carre novel except it isreal.After you read "Disturbing to Peace" I also recommend"The Magic Lanten" by Timothy Garton Ash. This is a first handaccount of the fall of the communism as the democratic revolutionrolled across Czechoslovakia, East German, Hungary, and Romania.Garton Ash was privy to the inner circle of people who plotted andexecuted these bloodless coups. (Bloodless everywhere except, ofcourse, in Romania.)

This is the most insightful book I've ever read on the spirit of political dissent. It was published as Havel's responses to a series of written interview questions smuggled to him while he was under watch in the 80s. From this vantage point, 1989 is nowhere on the horizon. Thus, there is no triumphalism in the way Havel understands his generation. He is deeply meditative, and even-handed, about the human condition. There are no tremendous feats of courage, just a bounteous sense of passion, reasonableness, and brotherhood. This private spirit of solidarity led a community of leaders to establish a civil society in the interstices of an oppressive system. I read this in China, a very different environment that does not share all same characteristics that made Havel's movement successful. To better understand the limits of contemporary dissent in China, I'd recommend Merle Goldman's (dense) "Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China" or Zhang Xianliang's "Grass Soup" -- his un-hyperbolic work-camp memoirs of the Anti-Rightist Campaign in the 1950s. Zhang is now a CCP member, but that doesn't diminish in the least the power of the message.