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THE POWER OF THE POWERLESS
Mr. President, And to all those citizens of Cuba who are listening to us, I am
here in Florida for the first time in my life, and Florida is also
the last state in the United States -and the last place on the whole
American continent -that I will be visiting as President of my country.
It was my own choice to come to Florida, and I have chosen it, among
other things, because it is from here that I want to extend my greetings
to all Cubans - both to those who live here, and to those who live
at home, in Cuba.
Every modern, freedom-loving person feels -or at least ought to
feel-, a sense of solidarity both with those who are prevented from
living in their home country or from freely visiting it, and with
those who are forced to live in their country in a state of constant
fear, and who cannot leave it and return to it of their own free
will.
But there are people who should naturally feel this kind of solidarity
far more intensively than others. I am referring to those of us
who experienced first hand, on our own skins, as it were, the oppressive
weight of life under a totalitarian system of the communist type,
or who may even have tried to resist that system and, in doing so,
experienced just how important the solidarity and help offered by
people from freer countries was.
I think that one of the most diabolical instruments for subjugating
some people and fooling others is the special Communist language.
It is a language full of subterfuge, ideological jargon, meaningless
phrases and stereotypical figures of speech. To people who have
not seen through its mendacity or who have never had to live in
a world manipulated by it, this language can appear very attractive.
At the same time, in others, this very same language can evoke fear
and horror and force them into permanent state of simulation.
In my country, too, entire generations of people once let themselves
be led astray by this kind of language with its fine words about
justice, peace and the necessity of fighting against those who,
allegedly in the interests of evil foreign powers, resisted the
power that spoke this language. The great advantage of this language
lies in the fact that all its parts are firmly bound together in
a closed system of dogmas that excludes anything that does not fit.
Any idea with a hint of originality or independence -as well as
any word that is not of the official vocabulary- is labeled an ideological
diversion: almost, it would seem, before anyone can express it.
The web of dogmas deployed to justify any arbitrary action by the
ruling power, therefore, usually takes a utopian form - that is,
an artificial construct that contains a whole set of reasons why
everything that does not fit the structure -or that reaches beyond
it- must be suppressed, forbidden or destroyed for the sake of some
happy future.
The easy thing to do is to accept this language, to believe in
it or, at least, to adapt to it. It is very difficult to maintain
one's own point of view, though common sense may tell you a hundred
times over that you are right, as long as that means either revolting
against the language of the powers-that-be, or simply refusing to
use it. A system of persecutions, of bans, of informers, of compulsory
elections, of spying on neighbors, of censorship and, ultimately,
of concentration camps is hidden behind a veil of beautiful words
that have utterly no shame in calling enslavement a "higher form
of freedom", of calling independent thinking a way of “supporting
imperialism", or labeling the entrepreneurial spirit a way of "impoverishing
one's fellow humans" and calling human rights a "bourgeois fiction".
My country's experience was simple: when the internal crisis of
the totalitarian system grows so deep that it becomes a everyone,
and when more and more people learn to speak their own language
and reject the hollow, mendacious language of the powers-that-be,
it means that freedom is remarkably close, if not directly within
reach. All of a sudden, it necomes visible that the king is naked
and the mysterious radiant energy that comes from free speech and
free actions turns out to be more powerful than the strongest army,
police force, or party organization, stronger than the greatest
power of a centrally directed and centrally devastated economy,
or of the centrally controlled and centrally enslaved media, those
chief propagators of the mendacious language of the official utopia.
Our world, as a whole, is not in the best of shape and the direction
it is headed in may well be quite ambivalent. But this does not
mean that we are permitted to give up on free and cultivated thinking
and to replace it with a set of utopian cliches. That would not
make the world a better place, it would only make it worse. On the
contrary, it means that we must do more for our own freedom, and
that of others.
May all Cubans live in freedom and enjoy independence and prosperity!
To all those who have not lost the will to resist arbitrary force
and lies, may your dreams be fulfilled!
And may Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, the great champion of human rights
in Cuba, be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and may this award strengthen
the courage of all the Cuban people to take up non-violent resistance
against an oppressive regime!
Thank you for being here and for listening to me.
President Václav Havel
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