Quote of the Day (Vaclav Havel, on the ‘Contaminated Moral Environment’ of Communism)

“We live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships. Only a few of us were able to cry out loudly that the powers that be should not be all-powerful and that the special farms, which produced ecologically pure and top-quality food just for them, should send their produce to schools, children's homes and hospitals if our agriculture was unable to offer them to all.”— Vaclav Havel, “New Year’s Address to the Nation” after his election as President of Czechoslavakia, January 1, 1990

The life and career of playwright-dissident-statesman Vaclav Havel (1936-2011), who died over the weekend, was a standing rebuke not just to totalitarianism but also to the habits of mind to which even politicians in a democracy can slip when spin becomes, by ever-so-artful degrees, lying. He showed that, while words alone might not be sufficient in political discourse, they are an indispensable starting point in framing arguments and, as he put it, "living within the truth."

We are about to find out not only if that example will not only prove an enduring object lesson to the countries involved in the "Arab Spring," but whether the parties that followed his path toward freedom behind the Iron Curtain will have the backbone to tell their constituents the hard choices that await them in the worst economic crisis since the end of the Cold  War.

Vaclav's crucial recognition--that in politics (especially in politics) moral considerations still need to be brought to bear--is analyzed in a fine post by the blogger “Archbishop Cranmer.” (No, not the archbishop executed in the 16^th century, but the contemporary British blogger using the name as a pseudonym.)

Quote of the Day (Ambrose Bierce, on War)

“War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.”—Attributed to American journalist, poet, short-story writer, satirist, and Civil War veteran Ambrose Bierce (1842-ca. 1914) 

(Not only our wars, Bierce might have added, but so do other people’s conflicts, from which we turn in bafflement, anger and shame. Consider this: On this date in 1968, the good citizens of Czechoslovakia awoke to find tanks manned by their fraternal brothers in Communism, the Soviets, as well as those of four other Warsaw Pact countries, invading their country. The move—taking advantage of an America mired in Vietnam, beset by takeovers of college campuses, and disorder in city streets—brought a premature end to the “Prague Spring” of careful experimentation with market and political reforms, one that would not be repeated until Communism fell in the Eastern bloc countries in 1989.

Fast forward 40 years. The media this week are filled with the reports of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Georgia. Just like his Soviet predecessors, he cannot abide dissent in his “sphere of influence.” Well, what else do you expect from a former KGB goon? And isn’t “KGB goon” a redundancy?)