Tag Archives: havel

Of Politics & Morality

In the midst of an ongoing collapse of ethical, moral and legal constraints on dangerously unhinged totalitarian power, we are indebted to a longtime DP correspondent for reminding us of Vaclav Havel’s Summer Meditations, dating from 1992.

Two excerpts below:

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Amidst the riptides of the present moment, a sentence worth repeating:

Only one battle can surely be lost: the one we give up.

 

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A Fundamental Negation

A faithful DP reader in Prague has guided us towards the 1984 essay by Vaclav Havel, Politics and Conscience. Worth a careful read in its entirety, the heart of the essay — its “values and imperatives” — is excerpted below with italics added by DP for emphasis, and with images borrowed from Sanja Ivekovic’s 1982 video, Practice Makes A Master.

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