The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central Eastern Europe

a big humble man, a man of intellect courage and principle whose word deserve to be read, Havel is the triumph of the individual who preserves its integrity under communism. Havel is also the living symbol of modern Czechoslovakia, that what makes this nation special and different. .

Living within the truth is the ultimate act of citizenship, and such living, even in the face of totalitarian repression (as in Czechoslovakia) or consumerist subversion and corporate corruption of the political and financial systems (as in the USA) can ultimately empower the powerless.This is an *extraordinary* book that is directly relevant to the circumstances that we now find ourselves in--what Ralph Nader calls "corporate socialism," where the nominal owners of both the federal government (the voters) and the corporations (the stockholders) find themselves disenfranchised, abused, shut out, and their life savings looted by the most senior chief executive officers and politicians.The book is slightly mis-represented, with "et al" in small print after Havel's name as the author. I was even tempted to skip the additional small essays (his leading essay constitutes 44% of the total book, with ten other essays each being roughly 6% of the book) but that would have been unwise. There is real value in the other essays.Both Eastern Europe prior to the revolution, and the USA in particular but Western democracies in general, share a common overwhelming problem, that of the silenced majority. As both Havel here and Nader elsewhere observe, the word "progressive" is contaminated and diluted, while democracy and capitalism (or socialism) in the ideal are completely compromised by a combination of asymmetric information (keeping the people uninformed) and corporate or bureaucratic or political corruption.Havel opens by noting that "the system has become so ossified politically that there is practically no way for ...nonconformity to be implemented within its official structures." This forces the vast majority of the public to "live within a lie," and accept, either consciously or unwittingly, the huge chasm between political freedom and economic fairness in the ideal, and what the totalitarian or hijacked capitalism models offer in reality.Brutally stated, from the point of view of the normal wage earner, there is no difference between totalitarianism and corrupt capitalism. In page after page, Havel, poet and president, documents this truth.Speaking specifically of the West, Havel notes that Western leaders, "despite the immense power they possess through the centralized structure of power, are often no more than blind executors of the system's own internal laws--laws they themselves never can, and never do, reflect upon." Who does that remind us of? Clue: it makes no difference which party is in power. Havel specifically relates the Czech and Eastern European experience to the West, "as a kind of warning to the West, revealing its own latent tendencies..."Havel places most of his emphasis on reform at the individual and community level, outside of politics and economics. He is especially encouraging in speaking of how unlikely it is to predict the moment when widely differing groups can come together in truth and freedom to overcome an oppress