"But this is still not the main problem. The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we got used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only for ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility and forgiveness lost their
depth and dimension, and for many of us they came to represent only psychological pecularities, or to resemble long-lost greetings from the ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of commuters and spaceships. ...When I talk about contaminated moral atmosphere, I am not talking just about the gentlemen who eat organic vegetables and do not look out of the planes windows, I am talking about all of us. We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unalterable fact of life, and thus we helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all-though naturally to differing extents-responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery. None of us is just its victim: we are all also its cocreators. (New Year's Address to the Nation, Prague, January 1, 1990)

"...we must accept this legacy as a sin we committed against ourselves. If we accept it as such, we will understand that it is up to us all, and up to us alone, to do something about it. We must not blame the previous rulers for everything, not only because it would be untrue but also because it could blunt the duty each of us faces today, that is, the obligation to act independently, freely,reasonably, and quickly. ...Freedom and democracy require participation and therefore responsible action from us all. (New Year's Address to the Nation, Prague, January 1, 1990)

"We agree that the basic prerequisite for a genuine friendship between our nations is truth, a truth that is always expressed, no matter how hard." (The Visit of German President Richard von
Weizacker, Prague)

"Interests of all kinds-personal, selfish, state, national, group, and if you like, company interests-still considerably outweigh genuinely common and global interests. We are still under the sway of the destructive and thoroughly vain belief that man is the pinnacle of creation, and not just a part of it, and that therefore everything is permitted to him. There are still many who say they are concerned not for themselves but for the cause, while they act demonstrably in their own interests
and not for the cause at all. We are destroying the planet that was entrusted to us. We still close our eyes to the growing social, ethnic, and cultural conflicts in the world. From time to time we say that the anonymous megamachinery we have created for ourselves no longer serves us but,rather, has enslaved us, yet we fail to do anything about it. In other words, we still don't know how to put morality ahead of politics, science and economics. We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine core of all our actions-if they are to be moral-is responsibility. Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my firm, my success. Responsibility to the order of Being, where all our actions are indelibly recorded and where, and only where, they will be properly judged. The
interpreter or mediator between us and this higher authority is what is traditionally referred to as human conscience. If I subordinate my political behavior to this imperative, I can't go far wrong. If on the contrary, I am not guided by this voice, not even ten presidential schools with two thousand of the best political scientists in the world could help me. (A Joint Session of the U.S. Congress, Washington, D.C., February 21, 1990)

After reading "The Art of Impossible" I would also recommend the following writings:

Havel, Vaclav. Open Letters: Selected Writings 1965-1990. Translated by Paul Wilson. New York:Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.

Sire, James W. Václav Havel: the intellectual conscience of international politics: an introduction, appreciation, and critique. Downers Grove: IVP, 2001.

This is a rather optimistic book, and every person who aspires to making our world a better - and safer - place for everyone, should definitely read it. It does not, however, provide us with solutions, but this is not what this work was intended for in the first place. What it does is identify the areas of politics we ought to concentrate on. The passages in which he argues for an increased participation of "intellectuals" in politics is particularly enlightening.

A commendable collection of lectures and essays, beautifully translated, which offers us a glimpse of a truly admirable man.

For those not in the know, the author of this play spent much of his life as a political dissident and activist in Czechoslovakia, and was elected that country's president after the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. It is interesting to think about how Havel's thoughts on bureaucracy and memorandums inform his life as a political leader and statesman.

Vaclav Havel has been called "the greatest moral thinker of our time" and "a sort of EuroGhandi." While most noted as a playwright, Havel's most important works have been of prose; essays such as "Power of the Powerless" and his "Open Letter to Gustav Husak" allowed his nation to retain hope under brutal conditions. Now, Havel's greatest essays, from the early sixties to his "New Year's Address" after his 1989 election to the presidency, have been collected in a volume that will, unlike most political texts, make you think as well as feel.

The most impressive of Havel's essays would have to be "Power of the Powerless" which was written in only a few days during the mid-1970's at the urging of a Polish dissident. It stresses that, when a government holds its citizens actions, words and even minds at bay, that gives the citizens a power that the government can only dream of; the power of truth. This idea of truth, which is contained in one form or another in all of Havel's writings, serves as the very basis of his political thought, which outlines man's current journey towards moral politics. A thought-provoking and deeply illuminating book

Living within the truth is the ultimate act of citizenship, and such living, even in the face of totalitarian repression (as in Czechoslovakia) or consumerist subversion and corporate corruption of the political and financial systems (as in the USA) can ultimately empower the powerless.

This is an *extraordinary* book that is directly relevant to the circumstances that we now find ourselves in--what Ralph Nader calls "corporate socialism," where the nominal owners of both the federal government (the voters) and the corporations (the stockholders) find themselves disenfranchised, abused, shut out, and their life savings looted by the most senior chief executive officers and politicians.

The book is slightly mis-represented, with "et al" in small print after Havel's name as the author. I was even tempted to skip the additional small essays (his leading essay constitutes 44% of the total book, with ten other essays each being roughly 6% of the book) but that would have been unwise. There is real value in the other essays.

Both Eastern Europe prior to the revolution, and the USA in particular but Western democracies in general, share a common overwhelming problem, that of the silenced majority. As both Havel here and Nader elsewhere observe, the word "progressive" is contaminated and diluted, while democracy and capitalism (or socialism) in the ideal are completely compromised by a combination of asymmetric information (keeping the people uninformed) and corporate or bureaucratic or political corruption.

Havel opens by noting that "the system has become so ossified politically that there is practically no way for ...nonconformity to be implemented within its official structures." This forces the vast majority of the public to "live within a lie," and accept, either consciously or unwittingly, the huge chasm between political freedom and economic fairness in the ideal, and what the totalitarian or hijacked capitalism models offer in reality.

Brutally stated, from the point of view of the normal wage earner, there is no difference between totalitarianism and corrupt capitalism. In page after page, Havel, poet and president, documents this truth.

Speaking specifically of the West, Havel notes that Western leaders, "despite the immense power they possess through the centralized structure of power, are often no more than blind executors of the system's own internal laws--laws they themselves never can, and never do, reflect upon." Who does that remind us of? Clue: it makes no difference which party is in power. Havel specifically relates the Czech and Eastern European experience to the West, "as a kind of warning to the West, revealing its own latent tendencies..."

Havel places most of his emphasis on reform at the individual and community level, outside of politics and economics. He is especially encouraging in speaking of how unlikely it is to predict the moment when widely differing groups can come together in truth and freedom to overcome an oppressive regime, and yet how likely it is, in today's environment, that such a change might occur.

In many ways his long essay reminded me of George Will's collection of thoughts published as "Statecraft as Soulcraft," except that Havel has found the state (either communist or capitalist) to be a failure at its most important function--the people must instead constitute an alternative polis that is initially side-by-side with the state, and ultimately displaces the state with a fresh new start. Incumbents beware, Havel finds that more often than not a clean sheet fresh start is the way to go.

As the USA confronts terrorism and a right-of-center approach to law enforcement, Havel offers a clear warning to citizens at risk of being labeled as terrorists when in fact they are only dissidents and speakers of truth. He speaks of the communist regime "ascribing terrorist aims to the 'dissident movements' and accusing them of illegal and conspiratorial methods." Shades of the present in the West, where anti-globalization activists and legitimate Arab and Muslim personalities have been tarred with the terrorist brush, held without recourse to lawyers, and generally abused in the name of an ill-defined and badly-managed counter-terrorism program.

Among his deepest thoughts, and I will stop here for the essay needs to be read by the same thoughtful people that are reading "Cicero" and "What Kind of Nation" and "Crashing the Party" and "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy", is the following: "The 'dissident movements' do not shy away from the idea of violent political overthrow because the idea seems too radical, but on the contrary, because it does not seem radical enough. For them, the problem lies far too deep to be settled through mere systemic changes, either governmental or technological." Havel, perhaps in concurrence with Lawrence Lessig and his "Future of Ideas" finds both the law and the legal code to be oppressive and abusive of the people--the recent effort to modify bankruptcy laws to reduce the protections of the people from abusive credit card companies, are but one small example--the outrageous extension of copyright and patent laws to keep innovation from the marketplace are another.

Havel anticipates the "whithering away and dying off" of traditional political parties, "to be replaced by new structures that have evolved from 'below' and are put together in a fundamentally different way." He speaks briefly of technology being out of control, and of the ultimate war now taking place, between state control and social control. He concludes that parliamentary democracies are essentially institutionalized forms of collective *irresponsibility*, and that only a moral reconstitution of society, the resurrection of core "values like as trust, openness, responsibility, solidarity, love" will show the way out of the "classic impotence of traditional democratic organizations."

The other authors are not to be missed, and provide complementary but distinct views that are helpful to sparking debate and reflection. This volume will in my opinion stand as one of the great basic texts for political science and public administration, and it has great value for courses and reflections on ethics, citizenship, sociology, and economics.

This book should be read as an adjunct to the author's other major book along these lines on power to the powerless.

The most gripping and troubling conclusion that I drew from this book is that the United States of America is today much closer to where Czechoslovakia was in 1968 than anyone other than the Chomsky's and Vidal's might be willing to admit. We have both a federal government and a national corporate economy that thrives on elitist secrecy and blatant lies--even our non-profit sector is corrupt, from the Red Cross to United Way to many others. The people, the citizen-voters, truly have lost all power, as well as access to the information that might give them back the power, and this is indeed a black, absurdist-realist situation.

On a more positive note, the author offers up, in the course of a long series of interviews, a number of ideas that are relevant to America today, as well as to any other emerging or re-emergent democracies in the making.

1) Model of behavior. When arguing with the center of power, do not get side-tracked with ideological debates over right or wrong. Focus on very specific concrete things (e.g. term limits, campaign finance reform, neighborhood economics) and stick to your guns.

2) Popular coalitions. Non-violent non-partisan popular coalitions are the core means of taking back the power. They represent a means for bring together groups of people from widely divergent backgrounds, with genuine social tolerance.

3) Informal networks. Even under conditions of repression and censorship, informal networks of dissidents and quasi-dissidents can be effective in sharing information through samizdat publications. [With the Internet, these possibilities explode, although caution must be taken on the fringes since the Internet is easily monitored and the more radical leaders could be declared seditionist "combatants" ineligible for their rights as citizens...speaking of the Soviet Union, of course, not America.]

4) Man versus Machine. Havel reaches his own conclusions founded in Czech literature and his own experience, with respect to the urgency of restoring the kinship and human connections that used to drive politics, economics, and other aspects of organized living. He is at one with Lionel Tiger among many others, with respect to the terribly consequences of the industrial era in terms of de-humanizing decision-making and allowing remote elites to treat individual workers as dispensable cogs in the machine, whose lives matter not a whit.

5) Neighborhoods, Politics "From Below". He joins the authors of the Cultural Creatives (Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson) and of IMAGINE: What America Could be in the 21st Century (Marianne Williamson) in emphasizing the vital role that neighborhoods must play in any democracy. From political self-governance to sustainable economics to low-cost healthy agriculture to cultural cohesion, neighborhoods are the sin qua non of democracy--without active neighborhoods, one can go so far as to say, national democracy is a sham, a false theater, fully equivalent to the centralized, repressive, inefficient totalitarian control states of earlier eras.

6) Small Numbers Can Make a Difference. I was struck by how few were the original dissidents and organizers--in some cases, 20-30 in number, in others 70-80. Earlier studies have suggested that Hitler took power over millions with just 25,000 people. One can only hope that the anti-thesis is true, and that the 50 million cultural creatives can take back the power by getting serious about organizing across neighborhoods and into a national network.

7) Art and theater matter. Even under conditions of severe censorship and control, art and theater can be the manifestation of uncensored life, "life that spits on all ideology and all that lofty word of babble; a life that intrinsically resist(s) all forms of violence, all interpretations, all directives....here stood truth..."

8) Absurdity is a warning. Nihilistic and absurd theater or other works of art are a caution. They "do not offer us consolation or hope (but) merely remind( ) us of how we are living: without hope.

9) Truth can be misappropriated. The author experienced the misappropriation of his words and was both hurt and enlightened, ultimately creating a play about truth, the circumstances in which it is said, and the whom, why, and how of it.

10) Great men doubt themselves. Most touching are the author's many retrospective and current references to his insecurities, to his doubting himself even as he made history and became President of Czechoslovakia.

11) Writers live to tell the truth. This is certainly not true of most American writers who write for money, but it reflects the ideal and merits thought.

12) Change the atmosphere. If you can do nothing else, strive for a moral mobilization and a change in the atmosphere of governance, at any level. We cannot even begin to conceive the magnitude of the positive changes that can occur overnight if the people begin to speak truth among themselves. Work toward a process "in which people's civic backbones (begin) to straighten again."

13) Role of the intellectual. While I the reviewer would churlishly doubt that America has many intellectuals right now, the author's concluding words on the role of the intellectual strike me as very important: "...the intellectual should constantly disturb, should bear witness to the misery of the world, should be provocative by being independent, should rebel against all hidden and open pressure and manipulations, should be the chief doubter of systems, of power and its incantations, should be a witness to their mendacity."

Any person concerned about the corruption and misdirection of their government and their corporate as well as non-profit entities, will be provoked and inspired by this book. It speaks to the future of human life as it might be, were we willing to stand up straight and be counted at citizen-voters, active at every level beginning with our own neighborhoods.

All of these accounts are intertwined with stories about Laber's personal life. She talks about her abrupt divorce, attempting to keep a balance between work and home life, and her dedication to the dissidents who relied upon her to tell their stories and bring aid to their plights. A very relevant book to the world we live in today, and a wonderful book chronicling the beginnings of Human Rights Watch.