#havel

Recently, Adam Gopnik travelled to Kraków, the home of one of his favorite poets, the late Wisława Szymborska. Having seen all manner of extreme suffering from the Holocaust to Soviet rule, Szymborska turned to the heroism of daily life for succor and meaning. “And she succeeded in building, in words, another place to live: one of ambiguity and reflection, of teasing satire and mordant wit,” Gopnik writes.

Poles are “eerily conscious of not only the general shape but the specific details of the dark cloud that is falling on American life,” Gopnik continues. They are more acutely aware than Americans of the inevitable steps in the establishment of an authoritarian state. They have seen tyranny rise from both sides, from the right and the left—from the incalculably evil Nazi occupation to the long and stupidly brutal Soviet one—and so have become experts in authoritarian takeovers, and authoritarians, of all kinds. Whether imposed by a military or not, they point out, the subsequent steps of tyrannical takeover are predictable: demonize the helpless, criminalize all criticism, idolize the leader, then paralyze individual action through corruption.

Read Adam Gopnik on what Americans can learn from Eastern European dissidents: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/lRKpPL

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"This is not to suggest for a moment that our struggle is even remotely comparable in scale to theirs. But the essential insight of the dissidents, in Poland particularly but not in Poland alone, was that resistance against authoritarianism begins as much in the pre-political or nonpolitical arenas as it does in politics. That was Václav Havel’s constant point in the former Czechoslovakia, about the necessity of building “parallel structures” to the centralized authoritarian one, writing that all attempts by society to resist the pressure of the system have their beginnings in the pre-political arena. As he wrote in his essay “The Power of the Powerless,” from 1978, “For what else are parallel structures than an area where a different life can be lived, a life that is in harmony with its own aims and which in turn structures itself in harmony with those aims? What else are those initial attempts at social self-organization than the efforts of a certain part of society to live—as a society—within the truth?”

By living “within the truth,” Havel meant simply refusing to participate in what are known to be lies or to be easily intimidated by the intensity of the liars. And one can speak the truth to just a few listeners at a time and still make it matter. When people are told that they are merely “preaching to the choir,” they are, in fact, teaching the choir to sing in tune: to know which melodies rise and which fall, what’s wise and what’s foolish. Small sounds have loud echoes."