From: [k--z] at [skat.usc.edu] (Dennis Kriz)
Newsgroups: soc.rights.human,alt.activism
Subject: CZECHOSLOVAKIA: transcript of HAVEL's New Years address
Date: 18 Feb 90 01:58:27 GMT
Followup-To: soc.rights.human

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                  'The Great Moral Stake of the Moment'
                   -----------------------------------
                    New Year's address by Vaclav Havel
                     to Czechoslovakia, Jan. 1, 1990
For the past 40 years on this day you have heard my predecessors utter
variations on the same theme, about how our country is prospering, how
many more billion tons of steel we have produced, how happy we all
are, how much we trust our government and wat beautiful prospects lie
ahead.  I do not think you put me into this office so that I, too,
should lie to you.
Our country is not prospering.  The great creative and spiritual
potential of our nation is not being used to its fullest.  Whole
sectors of industry are producing things in which no one is
interested, while things we need are in short supply.
The state, which calls itself a state of the working people, is
humiliating and exploiting the workers.  Our outdated economy is
squandering energy ... A country which could once be proud of the
standard of education of its people spends so little on education that
today it ranks 72nd in the world.  We have laid waste to our soil and
the rivers and forests our forefathers bequeathed us, and we have the
worst environment in all of Europe today ....
The worst thing is that we are living in a decayed moral environment.
We have beome morally ill, because we have become accustomed to saying
one thing and thinking another.  We have learned not to believe in
anything, not to care about one another and only to look after
ourselves.  Notions such as love, friendship, compassion, humility and
forgiveness have lost their depth and dimension, and for many of us
they represent merely some kind of psychological idiosyncrasy, or
appear as some kind of stray relic from times past, something rather
comical in the era of computers and space rockets ...
The previous regime, armed with its arrogant and intolerant ideology,
denigrated man into a production force and nature into a production
tool.  In this way it attacked their very essence and the relation
between them.  It made talented people who were capable of managing
their own affairs ... into cogs in some king of monstrous, ramshackle,
smelly machine whose purpose no one can understand.  It can do nothing
more that slowly but surely wear itself down, along with all the cogs
in it.
When I talk about a decayed moral environment ... I mean all of us,
because all of us have become accustomed to the totalitarian system,
accepted it as an inalterable fact and thereby kept it running.  In
other words, all of us are responsible, each to a different degree,
for keeping the totalitarian machine running.  None of us is merely a
victim of it, because all of us helped create it together.
Why do I mention this?  It would be unwise to see the sad legacy of
the past 40 years as something alien, handed down to us by some
distant relatives.  On the contrary, we must accept this legacy as
something which we have brought upon ourselves.  If we can accept
this, then we will understand that it is up to all of us to do
something about it.  We cannot lay all the blame on those who ruled us
before, not only because this would not be true but also because it
could detract from the responsibility each of us now faces -- the
responsibility to act on our own initiative, freely, sensibly and
quickly ....
Throughout the world, people are surprised that the acquiescent,
humiliated, skeptical Czechoslovak people who apparently no longer
believed in anything suddenly managed to find the enormous strength in
the space of a few weeks to shake off the totalitarian system in a
completely decent and peaceful way.  We ourselves are also surprised
at this, and we ask where the young people, in particular, who have
never known any other system, find the source of their aspirations for
truth, freedom of thought, political imagination, civic courage and
civic forsight.  How is it that their parents, the generation which
was considered lost, also joined in with them?  How is it possible
that so many immediately grasped what had to be done? ...
Of course, for our freedom today we also had to pay a price.  Many of
our people died in prison in the '50s, many were executed, thousands
of human lives were destroyed, hundreds of thousands of people were
driven abroad ... Those who resisted totalitarian government were
persecuted, [as were] those who simply managed to remain true to their
own prinicples and think freely.  None of those who paid the price in
one way or another for our freedom today should be forgotten ...
Neither should we forget that other nations paid an even higher price
for their freedom today, and thus also paid indirectly for us too.
The rivers of blood which flowed in Hungary, Poland, Germany and
recently in such a horrific way in Romania, as well as the sea of bloc
shed by the nations fo the Soviet Union, should not be forgotten ...
it was these great sacrifices which wove the tragic backdrop for
today's freedom or gradual liberation of the Soviet-bloc nations, and
the backdrop of our newly charged freedom, too...
This, it seems to me, is the great moral stake of the present moment.
It contains the hope that in the future we will no longer have to
suffer the complex of those who are permanently indebted to someone
else.  Now it is up to us alone whether this hope comes to friution,
and whether our civic, national and political self-confidence
reawakens in a historically new way.
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