Chris Hedges: No Act of Rebellion Is Wasted

[marmar]

from truthdig:



No Act of Rebellion Is Wasted

Posted on Dec 13, 2010
By Chris Hedges


I stood with hundreds of thousands of rebellious Czechoslovakians in 1989 on a cold winter night in Prague’s Wenceslas Square as the singer Marta Kubišová approached the balcony of the Melantrich building. Kubišová had been banished from the airwaves in 1968 after the Soviet invasion for her anthem of defiance, “Prayer for Marta.” Her entire catalog, including more than 200 singles, had been confiscated and destroyed by the state. She had disappeared from public view. Her voice that night suddenly flooded the square. Pressing around me were throngs of students, most of whom had not been born when she vanished. They began to sing the words of the anthem. There were tears running down their faces. It was then that I understood the power of rebellion. It was then that I knew that no act of rebellion, however futile it appears in the moment, is wasted. It was then that I knew that the Communist regime was finished.

“The people will once again decide their own fate,” the crowd sang in unison with Kubišová.

I had reported on the fall of East Germany before I arrived in Prague. I would leave Czechoslovakia to cover the bloody overthrow of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. The collapse of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe was a lesson about the long, hard road of peaceful defiance that makes profound social change possible. The rebellion in Prague, as in East Germany, was not led by the mandarins in the political class but by marginalized artists, writers, clerics, activists and intellectuals such as Vaclav Havel, whom we met with most nights during the upheavals in Prague in the Magic Lantern Theater. These activists, no matter how bleak things appeared, had kept alive the possibility of justice and freedom. Their stances and protests, which took place over 40 years of Communist rule, turned them into figures of ridicule, or saw the state seek to erase them from national consciousness. They were dismissed by the pundits who controlled the airwaves as cranks, agents of foreign powers, fascists or misguided and irrelevant dreamers.

I spent a day during the Velvet Revolution with several elderly professors who had been expelled from the Romance language department at Charles University for denouncing the Soviet invasion. Their careers, like the careers of thousands of professors, teachers, artists, social workers, government employees and journalists in our own universities during the Communist witch hunts, were destroyed. After the Soviet invasion, the professors had been shipped to a remote part of Bohemia where they were forced to work on a road construction crew. They shoveled tar and graded roadbeds. And as they worked they dedicated each day to one of the languages in which they all were fluent—Latin, Greek, Italian, French, Spanish or German. They argued and fought over their interpretations of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Goethe, Proust and Cervantes. They remained intellectually and morally alive. Kubišova, who had been the most popular recording star in the country, was by then reduced to working for a factory that assembled toys. The playwright Havel was in and out of jail. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/no_act_of_rebellion_is_wasted_20101213/

[struggle4progress]

1. One should perhaps add that decades of careful work may be required to create conditions

where massive political change can occur and produces stable results. The almost-bloodless German revolution of 1918 toppled the kaiser but produced only a weak state that lasted barely fifteen years. Stories like Tiananmen Square, where many people seemed to believe a spontaneous revolt could occur and discovered instead that the status quo has an enormous organizational advantage, are common. Forty or more years separates the Tupamaro era in Uruguay from the election of former Tupamaro José Alberto Mujica Cordano as President there. The ANC, largely responsible for the 1994 South African transition, had been founded eighty some years earlier, had been illegal, and had been violently suppressed by the government, for decades before its organizing strategy finally produced a movement with sufficient power to force the apartheid government to negotiate

Hedges wants to tell us about Prague in 1989, but it seems possible that years of careful work, following the Prague spring of 1968, played an important role: that is, people in 1989 may not simply have remembered but more importantly may have learned lessons from and after that brief defiance of power

[snot]

2. +1

Hedges essay is wonderful. I also agree with your reply.