World: Czech Republic peace icon Vaclav Havel, on becoming a dissident
- You do not become a ‘dissident’ just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.
- Former Czech Republic leader Vaclav Havel • Writing in his 1978 essay, “Power of the Powerless,” about his dissident status in the former Czechoslovakia, a status he eventually broke free from after he rose to become the country’s leader. Not that he took a particularly normal path to the top — before he became a noted peace activist and political leader, he was a playwright whose works were banned in his own country following the 1968 Soviet invasion of the then-Czechoslovakia. Havel died Sunday at 75. He’s a figure that should’ve had a bigger international profile. Perhaps he’ll gain one now that his life has hit the history books. source