Note: This resource contains Václav Havel's essay “The Power of the Powerless.” The book of the same name, available for purchase, contains.
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The world turns daily, and quickly, in a direction we did not determine. It will not stop and start to accord with our wishes. When we do, see this, we realize our powerlessness.
That sphere of influence basically begins and ends with us. But it only extends that far if we exercise power over ourselves. It may sound selfish, but the most important and effective work you can do to be empowered is on yourself. When you have ultimate power over yourself, you have a power that very few others have. When they see that power in you, you gain respect and admiration.
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With that comes the power to affect real change. But it all begins with realizing how powerless we are. So when I saw the video of her first appearance before her followers, I expected to feel lofty and profound emotions. But all I found myself doing was worrying that she might injure herself, or at least cut her fingers on the wicked looking spikes on top of the closed gate of the compound where she had been confined. She was behind the gate but someone had put a table or something for her to stand on, so you could see her quite clearly.
She was smiling but those damned spikes were getting in her way. At one point she even rested her forearms on them. Then someone from the crowd handed up a bouquet of flowers. She tied a spray to her hair, it might have been her trademark jasmine. Whatever it was, it did the trick for me. All was right with the world. When the first signs appeared that Suu Kyi would be released, but before the experts could hold forth on the possible reasons behind the junta's motives for freeing her, quite a few reports The New York Times , the BBC , The Inquirer.
Ambiguous as the explanation was it was certainly not incorrect. It soon became one of those rare pieces of political reflection that outlive their time of birth and come to be regarded as a classic. The piece was written in a hurry, as Havel later mentioned, and was intended not as an academic or literary exercise, but as a call to action for all dissidents in Eastern Europe and the Soviet bloc.
In fact after its publication in a volume of essays on freedom and power, Havel and some of the other contributors to the volume were arrested.
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The essay's impact on the frail political opposition in Eastern Europe was profoundly transformational. A Solidarity activist, Zbygniew Bujak who had for years had been trying to rally and organize workers in Polish factories explains why: Why were we doing this?
Why were we taking such risks? Not seeing any immediate and tangible results we began to doubt the purpose of what we were doing Then came the essay by Havel. Reading it gave us the theoretical underpinnings for our activity. It maintained our spirits; we did not give up Havel's plays are marvelously accessible. It is the only thing on TV that's ever made me deeply depressed and weak with laughter at the same time. On the other hand I have always found the dense 76 odd pages of "Power of the Powerless" heavy going.
Moreover, and more crucially, the essay provides a genuinely doable, though painful and high-sacrifice way, for the oppressed to successfully challenge their oppressors. The first and crucial thing that Havel does in his essay is define the nature of the regime in the Eastern Europe. It was not a traditional dictatorship or a classic totalitarian regime like Stalin's or Mao's. Havel called this post-totalitarianism, but emphasizes that it was still totalitarian in spite of the prefix "post".
But Havel tells us that in spite of its ordinariness this system was in was in fact the "dictatorship of a bureaucracy. Havel then opens people's eyes as to the nature of the power that held them in subjugation. He maintained that this power should not be mistaken for the instruments of that power: Though the regime still had its torturers and labor camps and was still capable of tremendous and arbitrary cruelty, the true source of its power lay in its ability to coerce people in a variety of ways even with consumerism to "live within the lie"; i.
Because post-totalitarianism was so fundamentally based on lies, Havel maintained that truth "in the widest sense of the word" was the most dangerous enemy of the system. The primary breeding ground for what might be understood as an opposition in the post-totalitarian system was "living within the truth". This operated initially and primarily at the existential level, but it could manifest itself in publicly visible political actions as street demonstrations, citizens associations and so on. Havel mentions the creation of Charter 77 by Czech writers and intellectuals, who demanded that the government of Czechoslovakia recognize some basic human rights.
It was a far from radical document but the Communist government cracked down hard on the authors and signatories.
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But it inspired subsequent efforts. Whether Havel intended it or not his essay has a very Gandhian feel to it. Havel tells us that "living within the truth" which one might accept as a form of satyagraha " The risk may bring rewards in the form of a general amelioration in the situation, or it may not". Havel emphasized that by "living within the truth" he did not just mean "products of conceptual thought," or major political action, but that it could be " My last post but one, was about the student demonstrations in Tibet in October, which I think fits in nicely with Havel's "living with the truth" and as an expression of "the power of the powerless".
The Tibetan plateau hasn't had a major rock concert yet but a young singer from Amdo, Sherten, has released a Bollywood style music video extravaganza , "The Sound of Unity " calling on all Tibetans from the three provinces of the "Land of Snows" to unite against you know who.
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Even such counterrevolutionary characters from "the bad old days" as an aristocrat lord and lady from Lhasa in full regalia are conspicuously depicted in one segment to press home the message of Tibetan unity. Two other similar music videos " The Telephone Rang ", and " Mentally Return " have appeared, with similarly subversive messages calling on "ruddy face" Tibetans to unite and await the return of "The Snow Lion".
In spite of the effort by the lyricists to hide their political meaning behind euphemisms and double entendre, such compositions are not without risk. A year ago, the singer Tashi Dondrup, was arrested for his bestselling album, Torture Without Trace, and in the singer, Jamyang Kyi was incarcerated and tortured for "subversive activities". Havel saw the significance of such singers and musicians in social and political revolutions, and he supported the Czech rock group, The Plastic People of the Universe, which the Communist government had harassed and forced underground, and whose members were arrested and prosecuted in Havel once told Salman Rushdie that the final non-violent revolution of that overthrew the Communist government was called the "Velvet Revolution" after the American band.
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Rushdie thought that Havel was joking but later found out that Havel had said exactly that, and quite seriously, to Lou Reed, the principal songwriter for the Velvet Underground. Tibetan scholars, writers and students have, since the late nineties, effectively used the internet to communicate with each other and spread their writings around the world. They write near exclusively in Tibetan and Chinese, but the website High Peaks Pure Earth provides English translations of a representative sampling of their works.
One of the most well known and outspoken bloggers has been the poet, Woeser, who recently received the "Courage in Journalism" award, but whose computer was hacked last month by the ultra-nationalist China Honker Union, and all her writing deleted. She lives in Beijing, under near constant surveillance.
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Chinese censors have regularly shut down many Tibetan language blogs and blog hosting services, both in Tibet and China, but Tibetan bloggers have somehow managed to keep on writing, though with ever increasing difficulty. One way many Tibetans have managed to circumvent censorship and shutdowns has been by posting on Chinese social networking sites, such as the popular renren. All these activities reflect a broadening of the political and social opposition to Chinese rule in Tibet, and a growing sophistication in the way people have begun to exercise the "power of the powerless", without it become an absolutely perilous or terminal exercise, as it had been before.
Earlier, all public manifestations of opposition to Chinese rule was direct and confrontational. If we look at the Tibetan Uprising of , and also those from onwards, nearly all of them have been direct clashes with Chinese central authority, with demonstrators waving the forbidden national flag of Tibet and shouting slogans calling for Tibetan independence and the return of the Dalai Lama.
These demonstrations, or rather uprisings, have, on every occasion, been met with overwhelming force, shootings, beatings, imprisonment, labor camps, executions and disappearances. But this new phase of the struggle emerging in Tibet just might, because of its awkward for Beijing nuances, have a better chance of getting off the ground, before the authorities come up with a way to crush it.
For the first thirty years of exile the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan community practiced "living in the truth" with unwavering resolution, holding on to the goal of Rangzen or "independence", in spite of the disheartening turn of events from the mid-seventies when Communist China became an ally of the West against the Soviet Union, and when most intellectuals and celebrities in the free world even western visitors to Dharmshala then, appeared to be besotted with the thoughts of Chairman Mao.
The Dalai Lama was not welcome in the West as he is now. In fact he only managed to visit the USA in , although he had been in exile for twenty years before that.