Why We Need More Leaders Like Vaclav Havel
The courageous playwright who destroyed Communism in Czechoslovakia could teach us much about the need to defend Western freedoms against totalitarian Islam.
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In these decadent times when powerful people in the West cannot conceive of any response to totalitarian jihad other than rank appeasement, and when the name of Che Guevara, a bloodthirsty Stalinist and enemy of freedom, is synonymous with heroism, it is vital that free people be familiar with — and honor — the examples of those valiant few who, living under totalitarianism, have stood up to it with a courage that today’s appeasers of Islam could hardly imagine.
Among the greatest of these heroes is Vaclav Havel.
Born in 1936, Havel spent his early years under the two major twentieth-century varieties of totalitarianism — first Nazism, then Communism. When the Communists took over Czechoslovakia after World War II, instituting a system under which, as Havel biographer Edá Kriseová writes, “[e]veryone was afraid of his neighbor” and “[p]eople disappeared without a trace,” they confiscated the Havel family’s money and the theater they owned. In 1949, Havel’s father was imprisoned and interrogated for several weeks; three years later, the Havels’ home and possessions were taken from them as part of a new policy under which class enemies were to be removed from Prague. News of the latter development gave Havel’s maternal grandfather a stroke from which he died; meanwhile Havel’s uncle Miloš, after spending two years in prison and labor camp as punishment for having run a movie studio, escaped to West Germany with the help of American troops — whereupon his name, according to Kriseová, was “erased from the history of Czech film.”
Prohibited from being a full-time university student because he was the son of bourgeois parents, Havel cobbled together an education by working as a chem lab apprentice, attending night classes, and studying economics and, later, drama. In 1952, when Havel was sixteen, the Czechoslovak government tried thirteen people on trumped-up charges of conspiracy to overthrow the Communist regime. The questions and answers were scripted, the defendants found guilty (the verdict, of course, having been preordained), and all but two of the convicts executed, their ashes, as Kriseová writes, “shoveled into sacks and scattered on an icy side road in the outskirts of Prague.” This was only one of many “crazed experiment[s] in the arts of legalized terror” that took place in Czechoslovakia at the time, the purpose of which was not to punish real criminals or dissidents but to maintain an atmosphere of terror and reaffirm the state’s power to do what it pleased. Such “experiments” had the desired effect: most people in Czechoslovakia kept a low profile. But not Havel: determined to work in the theater, he continued to write plays — mostly critiques of Communist utopianism and dogmatism — even though their production and publication were banned.
Then, in 1968, something remarkable happened: the “Prague Spring,” during which Alexander Dubček’s government lifted censorship and travel restrictions and granted freedom of speech, religion, and assembly. But not for long: Russian tanks moved in, and Dubček was handcuffed and shipped to Moscow, where he was interrogated, isolated, threatened, bullied, and humiliated. After he finally agreed to sign a document capitulating entirely to the Kremlin, he was allowed to fly back to Prague, where he sobbed his way through a radio speech announcing his capitulation. The Communists then proceeded to whip Czechoslovakia back into line by (among other things) purging most government ministers, top diplomats, and company officials; firing thousands of teachers, school principals, and professors; persecuting actors and artists; forcing almost half of the country’s journalists to resign and replacing everybody at the management level of news organizations; dismissing the great majority of writers from the Writers’ Union, imprisoning or exiling many of them, and removing books by scores of them (including Havel) from libraries. The lesson was clear: in the words of Havel biographer John Keane, the people of Czechoslovakia
were expected to join what Havel’s friend Ivan Klíma called the “community of the defeated,” and to abide by its basic rules: that there would only ever be one governing party, to which everything, including truth itself, belonged; that the world was divided into enemies and friends of the Party and, accordingly, that compliance with Party policies was rewarded, dissent penalized; and, finally, that the Party no longer required the complete devotion of its subjects, only the quiet acceptance of its dictates.
It is a mark of Havel’s character that when Czechoslovak officials, eager to be rid of him (one of the country’s leading troublemakers), actually offered to let him move to the West and take a dream job he had been offered with the New York Shakespeare Festival, Havel, who at the time was working in a brewery, refused. “The solution to this human situation,” he wrote, “does not lie in leaving it.”
Years passed. Organized dissent in Czechoslovakia disappeared. Then, in 1976, a rock group called the Plastic People of the Universe was arrested. The musicians were not dissidents, or even politically inclined; but in the eyes of the Communist leaders, their music was, in and of itself, subordinate. The group’s arrest underlined the fact that what was at issue in Communist Eastern Europe was not simply the right to political dissent — it was the right simply to be oneself, to spread one’s wings, to do one’s thing. The trial led Havel and others to found Charter 77, a group that called on the government to live up to its obligations under international human rights agreements. It was a new tactic: Czechoslovakia’s leaders, like the heads of other Communist countries, had entered into a number of such agreements, of which their very system of government was, of course, a violation; signing them was an act of pure cynicism on which no one had ever challenged them. At first the Plastics didn’t even know whether to align themselves with Charter 77; but they eventually decided to stand up for themselves — and with Havel. “In this trial,” Kriseová would later write, “the human desire to lead one’s life freely was in the dock. It was a trial in the name of sameness, indifference, bureaucratization, total obedience, and conformity. Anything that deviated from the norm in any way had to be liquidated.” Or, in Havel’s words: the trial was “an impassioned debate about the meaning of human existence, an urgent questioning of what one should expect from life, whether one should silently accept the world as it is presented to one and slip obediently into one’s pre-arranged place in it, or whether one has the strength to exercise free choice in the matter.”
Eventually over a thousand people signed Charter 77’s manifesto, and many were punished severely for it. Havel — already under the watchful eye of the Czechoslovak government — became a constant target of its attentions. The secret police interrogated him regularly. “He received threatening letters and anonymous telephone calls,” writes Keane.
His life began to feel as if it was one continuous round of threats, bright lights, padded doors, wooden desks, sliding chairs, handcuffs, truncheons. … When it became clear to the authorities that the man was not for giving up … Havel was arrested, charged … with committing “serious crimes against the basic principles of the Republic.” He was confined without trial “in total isolation” for four and a half months in Ruzyně prison. After his release, he and other Chartists were beaten brutally by police at a ball for railway workers.
In all, Havel was imprisoned four times. “Prison hammered into Havel’s hide the painful realization that responsibility is the key to human identity,” Keane writes.
Courage did not come easily to Havel. It was a matter of will, of resolve. In prison, swarming with worries about what prison would do to his soul, his sense of humor, he struggled to keep up his spirits. … He was riddled with guilt over having dragged other people into Charter 77. He was deeply suspicious of utopians with their “radiant tomorrows”: “What is a concentration camp but an attempt by Utopians to dispose of those elements which don’t fit into their Utopia?”
After the Charter’s appeal was made public, the Czechoslovak government put together a group of artists, musicians, journalists, and performers who publicly declared their enthusiasm for the Communist system and who condemned Havel and others as imperialist agents. To read their testimonies now is to be reminded of today’s Western apologists for jihadism. (The difference, of course, is that the latter, who are not yet living under the totalitarianism they so reprehensibly defend, have less excuse for their cowardice.)
In 1978 Havel wrote a long essay that would have an extraordinary impact and that should be required reading in Western schools. “The Power of the Powerless” explained on a profound human level why Communist tyranny should be resisted with all one’s heart and mind and soul. It wasn’t a dry political treatise — it was a work of deep thought and feeling that accomplished the apparently impossible: it enabled many Eastern Europeans to look with fresh eyes at the oppression that they had long taken for granted as the way of the world. And in doing so, it persuaded them to abandon their meek passivity and stand up for their liberties. Only on a very few occasions in history has a writer attained a unique insight into his society and expressed it in words that moved mountains; Havel is one such writer. His essay took Eastern Europe by storm. Solidarity member Zbigniew Bujak later said that it came along at a time when he and many of his fellow Polish activists felt dispirited and had decided that it was pointless to challenge their Communist masters. “The Power of the Powerless” changed that. It articulated, in words that touched them to the core, the spiritual need to resist oppression. “Reading it,” explained Bujak, “gave us the theoretical underpinnings for our activity. It maintained our spirits; we did not give up, and a year later — in August 1980 — it became clear that the party apparatus and the factory management were afraid of us.” Of the spectacular successes of Solidarity in Poland and of Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, Bujak said, “I see in them an astonishing fulfillment of the prophecies and knowledge contained in Havel’s essay.”
In the essay, Havel imagined a man who runs a fruit and vegetable stand in Communist Czechoslovakia (runs, not owns: in Communist Europe, of course, all businesses were owned by the state). The man puts in his store window a sign bearing a Communist slogan: “Workers of the world, unite!” Why, Havel asked, does he do this? The answer: he’s afraid. He wants to live “in harmony with society,” and must prove he’s obedient. Havel noted that such a man might hesitate, out of shame, to post a sign explicitly admitting his fear; but the sign bearing the Communist slogan helps him conceal his cowardice from himself by hiding it behind the façade of ideology — an ideology that offers people “the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them.” Communist ideology, Havel pointed out, obliges people to “live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.” Moreover, while life in free societies “moves toward plurality, diversity, independent self-constitution, and self-organization,” life under Communism “demands conformity, uniformity, and discipline.” People like Havel’s greengrocer, by going along with all this, become not only victims of the system’s oppression but also collaborators in it — for the sign in the window, in addition to testifying to the shopkeeper’s meek compliance, increases pressure on other merchants to put signs in their windows lest the authorities start asking why they haven’t. So it is that ordinary people, by kowtowing to the system, become its enforcers. (Thus are the subjects of Communism the equivalent of dhimmis under Islam.)
Havel went on to ask: what if the greengrocer takes down his sign? In doing so, he will have “shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system,” and “shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth” — and thereby illuminated the lying around him. The Plastic People trial, Havel noted, had helped Czechoslovaks to understand that their government wasn’t just attacking a rock group — it was attacking “the very notion of living within the truth.” People saw “that not standing up for the freedom of others … meant surrendering one’s own freedom.” To be sure, Havel thought that “[p]rospects for a significant change for the better” were “very long range indeed.” Yet he wondered if he might be mistaken: what, he asked in closing, if “the brighter future … has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it round us and within us, and kept us from developing it?” This intuition would prove correct. Communism in Czechoslovakia had little time left — and Havel’s essay, which of course had to be distributed in secrecy, had much to do with that. Only eleven years later, the system collapsed — and Czech leaders, weakened beyond redemption, were forced to accept what would have been unthinkable a few years earlier: the establishment of a coalition government with Havel’s newly formed group, Civic Forum. This miracle — the overthrow of Czech Communism without a shot being fired — came to be known as the “Velvet Revolution.” On December 29, 1989, Havel was elected interim president of Czechoslovakia; the following June he was returned to office in an election that also gave Civic Forum, a Czech group, and its Slovak counterpart, Public Against Violence, overwhelming control of Parliament.
Bruce Bawer’s book While Europe Slept is now in paperback. His website is at www.brucebawer.com.
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32 Comments
vb:Thank you for honoring an honorable man. Thank you for helping keep us aware of what words like honor and freedom really mean and what they are worth. Thank you also for your excellent book.
Jun 6, 2008 - 4:36 am SwingShiftCEO:Thanks for this amazing lesson in recent history. I had no idea who Havel was, but now I will never forget him.
Jun 6, 2008 - 6:30 am Bill in New York:Thank you for the history lesson, I loved reading it. To Vaclav Havel, and all those who sacrificed (including those who sacrificed their lives and who’s stories will never be told in this lifetime), may we all give thanks by remembering and honoring their sacrifices lest we fail to learn from and repeat history (which of course we are living now). I can’t help but notice while reading this, that the absence of a belief system in a life after death with a moral code that supercedes the values of a people who only see life as “cradle to grave” and nothing more, makes those people as vulnerable to evil (in whatever form it takes, be it Islamist terrorism, Nazism, Communism, or whatever) as sheep being led to slaughter… which explains their constant efforts to purge Christ and Christianity from our lives… they know the power of good is stronger than evil, that’s their greatest fear… evil is a weak, but incessant enemy that thrives through never-ending insidious small victories in each individual’s life… and thus personal responsibility is the cure… without God, without faith, without liberation as defined in our Declaration of Independence that only comes from God and can never be taken from us… then of course fear of loss must fill the void, and evil rules… Victor Frankl, “Man’s Search for Meaning”, another must read along the same heroic line as this story of Vaclav Havel. Thank you again for sharing this article, it is a tremendous read.
Jun 6, 2008 - 8:03 am Concerned Citizen:Vaclav Havel is one of my heros. He found the truth and accepted nothing short of the truth. Socialism, communism, environmentalism and other ideologies that cannot accept the truth ultimately end in the ruin of humanity.
Jun 6, 2008 - 8:39 am Sandra M:Many heartfelt thanks for teaching me more about this great hero.
I woul be grateful to anyone who translated The Power of the Powerless into Farsi and Arabic and posted it on the web.
Jun 6, 2008 - 10:56 am Fellow Czech:As an American of Czech decent I couldn’t be more proud of the country where my family originated. The Velvet Revolution and their peaceful split into two countries are remarkable. Havel is truly a hero whose story should be taught in our schools. We also need to listen to the current Czech president’s warning about the global warming hoax. I grew up among the Czechs and know their wisdom and goodness. Thanks for a great article.
Jun 6, 2008 - 11:17 am Sandra M:The Power of the Powerless should be translated not only into Farsi and Arabic but into SPANISH.
Decades ago, the Reader’s Digest published an abridged version of THE ROAD TO SERFDOM by Frierich Hayek in North America and in a Spanish version in South America. Very influential.
Want to defeat Chavez, Islamofascism and Adminjihad et al? Translate into Spanish, Farsi, and Arabic, Hindi and Mandarin Ayn Rand’s WE THE LIVING (life in Soviet Russia) THE FOUNTAINHEAD (man’s right to live for himself not the state (Russia) or the race (Nazism), ATLAS SHRUGGED (”evil” industrialists and entrepreneurs et al go on strike and society collapses).
The West’s lamestream media should be totally despised for their failure to investigate our Arab-American candidate (Dad was 87% Arab) half-brother and cousin (google Odinga Obama) to Kenyan terrorists, and more (PJ Media/Jun 4 , 5:25 am comment by Dean in column by Rick Moran on Mc-Cain Obama). Once again, they don’t vet a candidate until it’s too late: Clinton, Kerry, et al.
Worse yet, a timid academia and government bureaucracy abjectly kowtowto Islamofascistm especially in Minnesota and in British Columbia against Mark Steyn (read his most recent column).
It’s time for all of us to push back against the Islamofascists while rigorously defending lapsed Muslims and Lebanese Christians, even Sikhs (first to die after 9/11, killed by a knownothing moron) from the lethal fury of their Islamofascist tormenters, here and abroad.
Jun 6, 2008 - 11:35 am subrot0:Once in a while there emerges a person who exemplifies the true nature of Western civil society. Not a whole lot of them exist currently but Havel is one of them.
A man who has seen the face of evil, resisted it and created two new countries is a rare man indeed. It is refereshing to read this instead of the tripe we are forced to swallow in the name of political correctness and ideology.
Jun 6, 2008 - 12:50 pm karl:Sorry to spoil the love fest party here, but folks should remember that while he was President, the greatest criminal looting of the Czech Republic occured, with countless investment funds being “tunneled” out by their fund managers and the savings of thousands of Czechs being lost. He sat around doing nothing and saying practically nothing while all this occured.
Jun 6, 2008 - 1:37 pm Valle:Dyanmite piece. Thank you.
Jun 6, 2008 - 4:59 pm vb:karl: Even if Havel was not a fantastic administrator, he fought for a government that is capable of self correction. How many millions have lived with corruption, poverty, and unbelievable environmental degradation because they could not raise their voices or cast a vote? And should we not remember that he oonfronted lung cancer during his term of office?
Jun 6, 2008 - 5:11 pm Rubicon:The “corruption probes” that followed, organized by him, uncovered many of the culprits & continues to this day to uncover & return funds to those who lost them.
Jun 6, 2008 - 6:14 pm abu al-fin:The man is among those who freed his nation. Those who were part of the government who decided to steal, were typical bureaucrats. A system with way too many regulatory types & regulations, all designed to allow manipulation. Sounds like what many want for America.
Keep it simple. Keep it small. And allow the people to be free. Havel is a champion of humanity and freedom.
Havel is fantastic. A brilliant and eloquent man with courage and wisdom. Very rare indeed. Havel was re-elected for an excellent reason–the people liked what they saw and wanted to see more.
We live in a decadent age of Peter Pans and Cinderellas–psychological neotenates who will never grow up or take responsibility for preserving the freedoms they were given for nothing. These twits love Che, Fidel, Mahmoud, Hugo, and Karl.
Jun 6, 2008 - 6:34 pm Tom Boutell:Havel is magnificent.
But I have read this piece carefully, and I still have absolutely no idea what the connection with western attitudes toward “jihadists” is supposed to be. It feels completely tacked-on.
Comparing a totalitarian regime which focuses all power in a single state to a world-spanning religion of billions with many distinct sects and attitudes just doesn’t make any sense.
Who are these people “in the western world” who are getting bullied to give up their rights by Muslims and happily acquiescing to it?
Hey, that’s what you wrote:
“Today, in the Western world, if a group of Muslims starts bullying non-Muslims and seeking to limit their freedoms, most of the latter will not raise a peep in protest— instead, they’ll criticize those who resist.”
Yeah, those straw men are awful and they should step off and leave us brave defenders of freedom alone.
You also took a moment to point out that if we criticize our own country for moving in a more totalitarian direction, we’re trivializing what the victims of real totalitarianism go through. But apparently it’s fine for you to compare an entire religion— sunni and shiite, hundreds of millions of moderate Indonesians and, yes, conservative powderkegs like Iran— to a single monolithic totalitarian state. That comparison is A-OK and doesn’t stretch credibility at all because the point you’re making is too important to worry about things like that.
Jun 6, 2008 - 7:07 pm Tom Boutell:P.S. It looks like Havel himself sponsored an interfaith conference in 2004 where criticism of the “clash of civilizations” theory was put forward by moderate muslims. Doesn’t sound like he’d be in any rush to embrace your tortured analogy.
Jun 6, 2008 - 7:12 pm David B.:Some of the acquiesence Mr Bawer is talking about could be interpreted to refer to the mass of “moderate” Muslims whose almost complete silence in the face of murderous fanaticism carried out in the name of their religion could be seen as de facto approval. Or, as he points out, that silence could be the result of fear. To paraphrase a famous quote, “All that it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing.”
Terrific piece of history. This was a pleasure to read and will be long remembered by me.
Jun 6, 2008 - 7:32 pm Benson:I’ll be scolded for adding this to the comments, but the truth is, if Havel attained high office, he would be bad for the world. While he’s been a leader in the transition from the fake communism of Eastern Europe, he’s not a thoroughgoing friend of Liberty. Like most Europeans, he believes in a politically controlled world economy. He said this in 2004 (in, AFAIK, CMIIAW, an article in the journal The New Presence):
“The end of the bipolar world represented a great opportunity to make the international order more humane. Instead, we witness a process of economic globalization that has escaped political control and, as such, is causing economic havoc, as well as ecological devastation, in many parts of the world.”
This mindless babble sounds like something Naomi Klein would say — it’s sloganeering laced with willful ignorance. In fact, the world was never “bipolar,” there is no “international order” (nor should there be), and the more globalization comes under political control, the more likely it will be a disaster for the poor, who could be its biggest beneficiaries. Ecological devastation predates and is not caused by globalization, but by the corruption that is the ineradicable norm in the “developing” nations.
We don’t want people like Havel running governments. There are too many Utopian control freaks already. Give the man credit for the great good he has done; he played his role, and admirably. Now he should retire. It would be a blunder to give him the power to mess up free trade and economic development.
Jun 7, 2008 - 1:14 am vb:Tom B: “Who are those in the West being bullied” I suggest you read Bawer’s book. For one thing, Muslims themselves who live in the West are being bullied. Girls in the bannlieu walking home from school were being threatened and even raped for not wearing a headscarf. They were not protected by the police and the bullies won the neighborhoods. The French have woken up to the problem. How far they have gotten in addressing it is something I can’t judge. And before you object, my information about the bannlieu was not from Bawer’s book. It was from German MSM. The whole point that Bawer is making is that we are too complacent about the values that give us the rights we enjoy.
Benson: In case you haven’t noticed, Havel has been replaced by Vaclav Klaus, who is one of the stronger voices warning against eco-totalitarianism. That both Vaclavs can put their ideas in the marketplace is due in part to Havel’s efforts. We are still debating the Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian views of the world, but we recognize their roles in giving us the right to debate.
Jun 7, 2008 - 5:09 am Steven Brockerman:Stunning anecdotes of personal courage; astonishing conclusions that undermine that courage. And both from the same person! Havel’s notion of sacrifice is old school, to be sure: liberty-or-death as noble sacrifice. It is, nonetheless, genuine sacrifice when expanded and re-applied to other things. Of course, much is the result of this writer’s interpretation and unquestioning worship of sacrifice.
Jun 7, 2008 - 5:13 am Porkov:To fight Islam we must…sacrifice. To fight disease, then, we must become ill.
I wonder how he would have felt about the necessity of a flag pin. Would he have bowed to Gessler’s hat?
Jun 7, 2008 - 6:01 am PJ:Excellent post.
The story of heroes like Dubcek and Havel would make a wonderful movie, but I guess Hollywood is too busy making movies about McCarthyism to care about real oppression.
Jun 7, 2008 - 8:02 am Barry Meislin:Thanks for this. Now I know why Noam Chomsky can’t stand this guy.
Jun 7, 2008 - 11:59 am QwkDrw:While visiting for a short time in Prague, I had an impression of some current generation citizens living in the Czech Republic. Many appeared to be living among the fabulous treasures of a preserved architectural cityscape, without the means to afford admission to a museum. Evident behavior of some showed apathy, if not obvious disrespect, for the ancient buildings created by the work of many, less free, before them. Jumping to mind is the non-caring to destructive behavioral range of some teenagers when left home alone by otherwise repressive parents. A few Czech citizens seem to be visibly struggling while growing into the responsibility of governing themselves in an environment that was inherited.
Jun 7, 2008 - 10:35 pm Robert:Havel is indeed an extraordinary person, and this article presents him admirably, but view its ending arguments skeptically. I was a student at Columbia Univesity during Havels stay, and the author distorts the Columbia studentry perception of Havel to illicit a false argument. A great number of students knew of Vaclav Havels accomplishments, and we were all clamouring to hear his lectures, speeches, and panel discussions. Getting tickets to hear his lectures and discussions were nearly impossible, too many students signed up for every one of his events, making it necessary for the school to allocate tickets on a lottery selection scheme. Despite popular opinion, not all college students are stereotypical stalinists planning a communist takeover of the government while we sit in our dorms underneath our Che Guevara posters listening to the Dixie Chicks croon over our itunes.
Jun 8, 2008 - 9:12 am Jeremy:I second what Robert said above. Though I wasn’t at Columbia in 2006, I did see Havel speak at the Library of Congress around the same time, and there were dozens of young people in attendance–and dozens more who couldn’t get in. Though I do think Noam Chomsky makes a fair point from time, I also consider Vaclav Havel to be one of the singular people of the last 50 years.
Jun 10, 2008 - 6:23 am Jaroslav:I am Czech and I must react ,because all of this is totall lie ,havel was and he still is kryptocomunist euronazi colaborant who stealed property ( about 1 billion Czech Crowns) after socalled velvet revolution(which was only tool to save commies from justice) by socalled restitution of property which was confiscated after WWII because his family was band of nazi colaborants ,he served a and still serve as puppet of eurobolschevik neofeudal Bruxel,neocons promoting multicultralism,PC,criminophilia(”criminals are victims of society” ) puppet of zionists and islamofascist sheiks at the same time,promoting fascist concept of “hate crime”,enviromentalism and all that globalist fascist agenda he love. havel hates people as nobody else and he promoted teror and injustice as nobody else and he served nearly everybody who pays.You are right in one thing - there is no other person like him.
Jun 10, 2008 - 11:55 am Vespasiano:Thank-you, Mr. Bawer, for that inspiring profile of Vaclav Havel. He is, indeed, both a true hero of our time and an inspiration.
I do have one serious concern, however, with respect to what I view as your (if not, Mr. Havel’s) misuse of the word “sacrifice”. To sacrifice is to give up a higher value for a lesser one or a non-value. Because it is an essential requirement of a human life, individual liberty is neither a non-value or a lesser one. Therefore, to defend it, to struggle for it and, indeed, to fight for it even to death cannot be a sacrifice properly understood.
Jun 10, 2008 - 3:14 pm