The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central Eastern Europe

Haugen said she often thinks about Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright and dissident who helped lead the movement that brought down communist rule in Czechoslovakia.

Years before that happened, Havel wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless about what an individual can do inside a system that seems too big and powerful to change.

His answer wasn't that one person could bring down the system alone.

It was that you could refuse to participate in its lies.

Like we'll let you out when we're happy with you again.

So Václav Havel, who later became like the leader of the free Czech movement and was like a big force in toppling the Soviet Union.

He wrote this pamphlet called the power of the powerless.

And he talks about the idea of like when you are living in a system that, that truly dehumanizes you, that, that, The difference between, say, you know, Hitler's Germany and the Soviet Union was the Soviet Union was a system where if individuals tried to cross the party line, the party just healed around them.

Havel considered the 1993 split of Czechoslovakia his greatest political failure.

Young Czech and Slovak amateur actors are to perform Havel's famous essay, "The Power of the Powerless," in a co-production between the National Theatre in Prague and the Slovak National Theatre in Bratislava, where it will premiere on the 8th and the 9th of October.

The Košice International Peace Marathon has its first winner from South Africa.

Adam Lipschitz won the 103rd edition.

is take two.

I want to welcome everyone back to my reading of The Power of the Powerless by Vaclav Havel.

I'm going to jump right in where I left off in the first episode.

Glad to be back to this one.

want to welcome everyone back to The Pete Quinones

Show.

I am going to continue my reading of Vaclav Havel's The Power of the Powerless.

We are up to part nine, and I'm just going to pick right up from where I left off last time.