No act of rebellion is wasted

Chris Hedges writes:

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.

The long, long road of sacrifice, tears and suffering that led to the collapse of these regimes stretched back decades. Those who made change possible were those who had discarded all notions of the practical. They did not try to reform the Communist Party. They did not attempt to work within the system. They did not even know what, if anything, their protests would accomplish. But through it all they held fast to moral imperatives. They did so because these values were right and just. They expected no reward for their virtue; indeed they got none. They were marginalized and persecuted. And yet these poets, playwrights, actors, singers and writers finally triumphed over state and military power. They drew the good to the good. They triumphed because, however cowed and broken the masses around them appeared, their message of defiance did not go unheard. It did not go unseen. The steady drumbeat of rebellion constantly exposed the dead hand of authority and the rot and corruption of the state.

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4 thoughts on “No act of rebellion is wasted

  1. Vince J.

    Go to Lafayette Park, in front of the White House, at 10 a.m. Dec. 16. Join dozens of military veterans, myself, Daniel Ellsberg, Medea Benjamin, Ray McGovern, Dr. Margaret Flowers and many others who will make visible a hope the corporate state does not want you to see, hear or participate in.

  2. Norman

    Yes, the same thing is taking place here in the U.S.A. The rot & corruption has grown to such a level, that it can no longer be ignored by the common man. As the Government takes our freedoms away, we are left bare to face the onslaught of home grown terrorists, who, like the terrorists that our Government says threaten the U.S., don’t give a damn about the people, just the addiction to power, greed, criminality. Take the blinders off America, the downfall is coming sooner than you or they think. The question that should be on your lips; “am I prepared for that time”?

  3. alaric

    I do understand that Chris Hedges needs to recall some inspiring images to instill much needed optimism into his cause. But as a person who stood on the very same Prague square on the same night he is talking about, I cannot describe his view of the events as something else than a tourist’s view.
    Tourists, journalists and diplomats have the same manner of collecting information. They lend their ear to people, who were recommended to them. Then they look for some significant pattern on the appearance of things and make a conclusion about the meaning of what they have seen and heard. Then they meet with other tourists, journalists or diplomats and compare their conclusions. According to their allegiances they then choose what is proper for them to say and pass it on as information.
    As the mechanism of recommending local sources tends to lead either to people upholding the official standpoint or to members of some grouping affiliated to those who recommend them, it seldom happens that journalists and the like come upon something else than stories made up for influencing foreigners, or PR stuff for consumption by the naive.
    Prague’s velvet revolution was not much different from all the color revolutions in the soviet bloc. The artificially put up icons of these revolutions didn’t last for long, as they had to serve to interests which brought them up, not to the interests of people, who thought that change can be made by gathering on a big frosty square and singing chants.
    If you’re in need of some optimism, don’t look for sentimental images, try to find people with a constructive and realistic vision of the future instead.

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