UNBROKEN GREY: How Václav Havel’s 1978 ‘Power of the Powerless’ Predicted America’s Downfall
Republishing this report from March 19, 2025, on how Havel’s book of dissident essays can put the power back in the hands of the people
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“‘The Power of the Powerless’ is one of the most important texts of the 20th century.”-Professor Marci Shore, author of ‘The Ukrainian Night’
“Havel was a Czech writing at a particular moment in his country’s history, the 1970s, when communism was unbroken grey.”—Timothy Snyder, from the introduction to the 2018 reissue of ‘Power of the Powerless’
“The post-totalitarian system is mounting a total assault on humans and humans stand against it alone.”—Václav Havel, ‘Power of the Powerless’
Ever since I made the conscious decision to throw myself onto the battlefield of the Great Information War in defense of truth and in defiance of unreality, the allies I made along the way are also living within the truth. Many of my allies were forged under Soviet rule. They know these liars well, and some have spent a lifetime in recovery from the sickness spread by those who ‘live within the lie’.
One of these allies is Alex Alvarova, who joined us at a recent Bette’s Happy Hour to teach us about the power of art and resistance. Alex grew up in Czechoslovakia — where my children’s grandfathers were born. She describes her dual life — who she was free to be within the walls of her home and who she was required to be outside of her home. She worked very hard in her writings to get people in the West to pay attention to threats headed our way, and as she wrote on these pages before the election:
People in the freest country in the world are afraid to talk about politics. I know that we all went through that angst during communism in Czechoslovakia, where I was born.
I didn't want to play Cassandra. I just wanted to warn.
As Randle McMurphy of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest said:
‘At least I tried’.—Alex Alvarova for Bette Dangerous, November 3, 2024
During our meeting with Alex, she educated us on the work of playwright and former president of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel, and the influence his words had on the people.
I was staying on the Rive Gauche at the time, and immediately went to Shakespeare & Co to buy the last copy of Havel’s book, ‘Power of the Powerless’ — a collection of his dissident essays.
It was poking out of my jacket pocket when I went to get another notebook at a shop around the corner. The manager saw the title and said, “That is a very important book.”
I told him how surprised I was that the introduction to this edition was written by my friend’s husband, Timothy Snyder, and he brightened and said: “You know Marci Shore?!”
I told him that her book, The Ukrainian Night, is easily one of the most important books I’ve read this decade. As it turns out, he attends every convention in Europe where Marci, an intellectual historian, is invited to speak. He is from Romania and studied the economics of Eastern Europe.
He then told me that if I haven’t yet read her book, ‘Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism’, I better return to Shakespeare & Co. I told him they were sold out.
And so it goes in a land where people still read books.
As I did with The Gravediggers, Blood & Banquets, and Under Cover — my book reports on the rise of the Nazis — I am bringing you my highlighted notes from Power of the Powerless. Please make this book your new bible. It holds the key on why America fell, how to survive living in a land of lies, and how to ultimately overthrow authoritarian regimes. It is nothing short of brilliant.
As with my previous book reports, I will offer direct passages from the book, interspersed with my observations on how his prescient words relate to our current troubles.
After the book was published in 1978 in Czechoslovakia illegally and smuggled out into Poland, Havel received a four and a half year prison sentence. He went from being a poet, a playwright, a ‘dissident’, to the first president of the Czech Republic after the Velvet Revolution and the fall of the Soviet Union.
It is always the writers with an unflinching commitment to truth who save us.—hsc
Unbroken Grey: How Václav Havel’s 1978 ‘Power of the Powerless’ Predicted America’s Downfall
And how his book can put the power back in the hands of the people
Let’s start with some passages from Professor Timothy Snyder’s introduction to the 2018 edition of the book:
The Power of the Powerless was a description of resistance to totalitarianism… Havel thought it was also a critique of Western democracies.
Havel was a Czech writing at a particular moment in his country’s history, the 1970s, when communism was unbroken grey. The colors had drained away in 1968.
Writing the Power of the Powerless a decade after the Prague Spring, Havel was less concerned by Soviet force than by the Czechs’ and Slovaks’ evident capacity for adaptation, in high politics, and in daily life… troubled by what the authorities called ‘normalization’… thinking was in any event discouraged.
The future disappeared… diverted by consumer goods, distracted by television serials, and demotivated from any sort of action in the public sphere… a modern unfreedom in which individuals enslave themselves because they do not ask themselves who they are and what they are doing.
Communism was a lie… the normalizers’ black hole… for Havel, the restoration of civic life began from truth.
Inhumane language can lull us to sleep, but humane language can awaken us…
Snyder then describes the period after the mass protests of the ‘Prague Spring’. During this period, Havels plays were no longer performed in Czechoslovakia, his apartment was bugged, and he moved out to the country, where the only job he could get was in a brewery. This led to one of his most famous plays, Audience, about an intellectual who takes a job in a brewery.
Now, more direct quotes from Snyder’s introduction:
Havel’s point is that normalization is unfreedom… suppressing your individuality… Havel thought that television was making a new animal species out of us, the ‘herded televisual human’…
In the West, Havel claimed in 1978, people ‘are manipulated in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used under communism’.
After Brexit and Trump, we know that surprising results in public life can be attained by psychologists and programmers normalizing unwitting voters… (social platforms) elicit our most banal selves.
Collectively, we could choose to change how the internet functions, with little or no cost. And most of us can appear as we like in real life, and for that matter, choose to spend more time in real life.
The continuity between communism and our world is normalization… it was the bottomless cynicism of the ‘really existing socialism’ that educated Vladimir Putin and the circle of Russian political technologists who have worked so hard to teach Russians, Europeans, and Americans that there are no alternatives to lawless, oligarch capitalism.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 was like the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968… an invasion to dominate a neighbor, combined with a stupefying television and internet campaign to normalize the destruction of a legal order the Europeans had taken for granted for decades.
Havel was correct: the experience of communism in the 1970s was decisive to the future of the West.
Russian propaganda in 2014 appealed to what people wanted to believe anyway… enabling them to do nothing at all. Everyone was told the conflict was about ancient hatreds. The internet, unlike television, allows a normalization tailored to prior beliefs…
Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in 2016 were among the aims of Russia’s targeted normalization… what threatens normalizers in power is the threat that people will speak to each other in real life. Back then, Brezhnev’s client, the Czech leader Gustáv Husák, claimed protestors were paid agents.
Putin’s client, the American president Donald Trump, says the same.
Facing a situation that seemed unalterable in the 1970s, Havel maintained that truthful words and actions of citizens matter, and that each of us has the responsibility to be a bit more courageous than we want to be.—Timothy Snyder, Vienna, 24 June 2018
I included vital portions of Snyder’s introduction in order to give you a sense of time and place, some context before we dive into Havel’s words, which will also appear throughout this report in block-quoted itals.
I will try to be as concise as possible, revealing the core themes of his work.
When I see important films, I often think of my life as divided into ‘before and after’ — my life before it was enriched by great art and my life after. As a writer, I am made up of millions of exquisite moments of art. As a writer, Havel is clearly a poet first, using words carefully and repeatedly to clearly cement his tenets in the minds of his readers. I only wish I could read it in the original language, how rich that would be.
Power of the Powerless — Highlights from the text of Václav Havel
He dedicates the book to the memory of Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, who was persecuted and died a dissident as a spokesman for Charter 77, a critique of the government for failing to support human rights. A 2017 film made about Patočka is titled The Socrates of Prague.
Havel begins the book with these words:
A spectre is haunting eastern Europe: the spectre of what in the West is called 'dissent'. This spectre has not appeared out of thin air. It is a natural and inevitable consequence of the present historical phase of the system it is haunting. It was born at a time when this system, for a thousand reasons, can no longer base itself on the unadulterated, brutal, and arbitrary application of power, eliminating all expressions of nonconformity…
Our system is most frequently characterized as a dictatorship or, more precisely, as the dictatorship of a political bureaucracy over a society which has undergone economic and social levelling.
He briskly describes ideology as the cover a government uses to ‘grant itself legitimacy’, noting that the ‘power is derived from the numbers of soldiers and police’. He describes ideology as having ‘a certain hypnotic charm’.
All one has to do is accept it… of course, one pays dearly for this low-rent home: the price is abdication of one’s own reason, conscience, and responsibility.
He writes that ideology no longer has much influence on people within his bloc, but with the possible exception of Russia…
Where the serf mentality, with its blind, fatalistic respect for rulers and its automatic acceptance of all their claims, is still dominant and combined with a superpower patriotism which traditionally places the interests of empire higher than the interests of humanity)…
Our system has been developing in the Soviet Union for over sixty years, and for approximately thirty years in eastern Europe; moreover, several of its long-established structural features are derived from Czarist absolutism… this has led to the creation of such intricate and well-developed mechanisms for the direct and indirect manipulation of the entire population that, as a physical power base, it represents something radically new.
At the same time, let us not forget that the system is made significantly more effective by state ownership and central direction of all the means of production. This gives the power structure an unprecedented and uncontrollable capacity to invest in itself (in the areas of the bureaucracy and the police, for example) and makes it easier for that structure, as the sole employer, to manipulate the day-to-day existence of all citizens.
He describes this post-totalitarian system of the Soviet bloc as no longer an enclave but an integral part of the larger world, sharing and shaping the world’s destiny… another form of the consumer and industrial society.
Among the characters in his book is a grocer who puts the slogan ‘Workers of the World Unite!’ in his window. Havel says it’s to show obedience to regime, therefore, an attempt to be left in peace. The sign also becomes a shield from potential informers.
Havel returns to the facade of ideology.
Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings an illusion of an identity, of dignity, and morality while making it easier for them to part with them… it enables people to deceive their conscience… a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence…
He writes beautifully of the yawning abyss that divides the system from the needs of the true self, and how a blind automatism drives the system.
It is a world of appearances trying to pass for reality.
This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views…
By now I’m sure you’re seeing how his words mirror the cruelty and rapid execution of abuses by the New Fascist Regime in America.
Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past, it falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics… individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did… they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie… individuals are the system.
Once the lie is accepted, by accepting appearances as reality, Havel writes that individuals then make it possible for the game to go on, reality is replaced with ‘pseudo-reality’.
He explains that lies create unstable foundations that can be knocked down by moral integrity.
He then foreshadowed the fall of the West, and particularly the US, when he wrote about the collision of dictatorship and consumerism, and how consumerism can lead to mass indifference, an unwillingness to sacrifice material comfort for spiritual and moral integrity.
In the end, is not the greyness and the emptiness of life in the post-totalitarian system only an inflated caricature of modern life in general? And do we not in fact stand… as a kind of warning to the West, revealing to it its own latent tendencies?
If only Americans still read history books.
Havel then writes a passage asking what if the greengrocer takes the slogan out of the window, begins speaking his political mind, and is willing to disrupt the game. He concurs there will be retaliation but by doing so, he also shows that it is possible to live within the truth. He exposed to everyone that the emperor had no clothes.
If the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living in truth.
For those of us dedicated to living within truth, we understand that the reason it is suppressed is because of the existential threat to the unstable foundations created by lies, which are brittle and breakable.
He writes pages and pages of the reasons why people collectively living within truth are so threatening, causing regime’s to desperately plug up the ‘dreaded wellspring of truth’, because truth can cause ‘incalculable transformations in social consciousness’.
Lies are made of strange stuff, he writes, but every free expression of life threatens regime’s politically.
Havel explains that a willingness to live within a lie creates a deep moral crisis in society and how system’s depend on demoralization.
As with so many movements, music played a huge role in the upheaval in Czechoslovakia, when a rock band was persecuted for just wanting to sing their songs. The Plastic People of the Universe, inspired by the Velvet Underground and Mothers of Invention, were the linchpin that brought people to the understanding that not standing up for the freedom of others, meant surrendering your own.
Truth had to be spoken loudly and collectively, he writes.
He spends time parsing what it means to be a member of the ‘opposition’ and how Soviets deemed them the blackest of enemies, but how it’s not enough to be against something. To truly have an impact on toppling a regime built on lies, the so-called ‘opposition’ has to be for something.
When he describes how people who are branded as dissidents are often simply people in their various fields dedicated to doing their work well, I can think of so many of my allies. Experts in various disciplines branded as the enemy simply because they felt a sense of duty, a dedication to living within truth.
“The post-totalitarian system is mounting a total assault on humans and humans stand against it alone… there are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth.
In democratic societies, where the violence done to human beings is not nearly so obvious and cruel, this fundamental revolution in politics has yet to happen, and some things will probably have to get worse there before the urgent need for that revolution is reflected in politics.
Well, it just got worse.
He reminds us that that threats to enslave humanity all over again exist, because the exploiters never surrender their power voluntarily.
As he looks toward the future, he sees two possibilities: an Orwellian vision of the world of absolute manipulation, or a dedication of people on a mass scale living within the truth growing into an important social phenomenon, putting an end to brittle regimes so people can live a life of ‘quiet dignity’.
He sounded a major alarm toward the end of his book about the ‘crisis of contemporary technological society’, and how it’s out of humanity’s control. In 1978, he predicted that technology would cease to serve us, would enslave us and compel us to ‘participate in the preparation of our own destruction’.
We look on helplessly as that coldly functioning machine we have created engulfs us, tearing us away from our natural affiliations… Only a God can save us now, Heidegger says.
He then argues for a radical renewal toward a moral reconstitution of society… of values like trust, openness, solidarity, and love… and tells us our brighter future may already be here.
Only humans living within the truth can stand against this total assault on all mankind.
Originally published March 19, 2025
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When I arrived there in 1993, you could still see “Havel na Hrad!” written on walls. That same year I was lucky enough to see him escorting the President of Finland to the Constitutional Court in Brno.