Vaclav Havel's prophetic address to the U.S. Congress in 1990

A Joint Session of the U.S. Congress

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Washington, D.C., February 21, 1990

Full address available online here. Below is an excerpt:

Ladies and gentlemen,

I've only been president for two months, and I haven't attended any schools for presidents. My only school was life itself. Therefore, I don't want to burden you any longer with my political thoughts, but instead I will move on to an area that is more familiar to me, to what I would call the philosophical aspect of those changes that still concern everyone, although they are taking place in our corner of the world.

As long as people are people, democracy in the full sense of the word will always be no more than an ideal; one may approach it as one would a horizon, in ways that may be better or worse, but it can never be fully attained. In this sense you are also merely approaching democracy. You have thousands of problems of all kinds, as other countries do. But you have one great advantage: You have been approaching democracy uninterruptedly for more than 200 years, and your journey toward that horizon has never been disrupted by a totalitarian system. Czechs and Slovaks, despite their humanistic traditions that go back to the first millennium, have approached democracy for a mere twenty years, between the two world wars, and now for three and a half months since the 17th of November of last year.

The advantage that you have over us is obvious at once.

The Communist type of totalitarian system has left both our nations, Czechs and Slovaks as it has all the nations of the Soviet Union, and the other countries the Soviet Union subjugated in its time a legacy of countless dead, an infinite spectrum of human suffering, profound economic decline, and above all enormous human humiliation. It has brought us horrors that fortunately you have not known.

At the same time, however unintentionally, of course it has given us something positive: a special capacity to look, from time to time, somewhat further than someone who has not undergone this bitter experience. A person who cannot move and live a normal life because he is pinned under a boulder has more time to think about his hopes than someone who is not trapped in this way.

What I am trying to say is this: We must all learn many things from you, from how to educate our offspring, how to elect our representatives, all the way to how to organize our economic life so that it will lead to prosperity and not poverty. But it doesn't have to be merely assistance from the well-educated, the powerful and the wealthy to someone who has nothing to offer in return.

We too can offer something to you: our experience and the knowledge that has come from it.
This is a subject for books, many of which have already been written and many of which have yet to be written. I shall therefore limit myself to a single idea.

The specific experience I'm talking about has given me one great certainty: Consciousness precedes Being, and not the other way around, as Marxists claim.

For this reason, the salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human humbleness and in human responsibility.

Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our Being as humans, and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed, whether it be ecological, social, demographic or a general breakdown of civilization, will be unavoidable. If we are no longer threatened by world war or by the danger that the absurd mountains of accumulated nuclear weapons might blow up the world, this does not mean that we have definitively won. We are in fact far from definite victory.

We are still a long way from that "family of man;" in fact, we seem to be receding from the ideal rather than drawing closer to it. Interests of all kinds: personal, selfish, state, national, group and, if you like, company interests still considerably outweigh genuinely common and global interests. We are still under the sway of the destructive and thoroughly vain belief that man is the pinnacle of creation, and not just a part of it, and that therefore everything is permitted. There are still many who say they are concerned not for themselves but for the cause, while they are demonstrably out for themselves and not for the cause at all. We are still destroying the planet that was entrusted to us, and its environment. We still close our eyes to the growing social, ethnic and cultural conflicts in the world. From time to time we say that the anonymous megamachinery we have created for ourselves no longer serves us but rather has enslaved us, yet we still fail to do anything about it.

In other words, we still don't know how to put morality ahead of politics, science and economics. We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of all our actions if they are to be moral is responsibility. Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my firm, my success. Responsibility to the order of Being, where all our actions are indelibly recorded and where, and only where, they will be properly judged.

The interpreter or mediator between us and this higher authority is what is traditionally referred to as human conscience.

If I subordinate my political behavior to this imperative, I can't go far wrong. If on the contrary I were not guided by this voice, not even ten presidential schools with 2,000 of the best political scientists in the world could help me.

This is why I ultimately decided after resisting for a long time to accept the burden of political responsibility.

I'm not the first nor will I be the last intellectual to do this. On the contrary, my feeling is that there will be more and more of them all the time. If the hope of the world lies in human consciousness, then it is obvious that intellectuals cannot go on forever avoiding their share of responsibility for the world and hiding their distastes for politics under an alleged need to be independent.

It is easy to have independence in your programme and then leave others to carry out that programme. If everyone thought that way, soon no one would be independent.

I think that Americans should understand this way of thinking. Wasn't it the best minds of your country, people you could call intellectuals, who wrote your famous Declaration of Independence, your Bill of Rights and your Constitution and who above all took upon themselves the practical responsibility for putting them into practice? The worker from Branik in Prague, whom your president referred to in his State of the Union message this year, is far from being the only person in Czechoslovakia, let alone in the world, to be inspired by those great documents. They inspire us all.

They inspire us despite the fact that they are over 200 years old. They inspire us to be citizens.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote that "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the Consent of the Governed," it was a simple and important act of the human spirit.
What gave meaning to that act, however, was the fact that the author backed it up with his life. It was not just his words, it was his deeds as well.

I will end where I began. History has accelerated. I believe that once again, it will be the human spirit that will notice this acceleration, give it a name, and transform those words into deeds.

HIRH Otto von Habsburg: Freedom's Holy Roman Emperor 20 November 1912 – 4 July 2011 Requiescat in pace

"When the Goddess of Reason was placed on the altar two hundred years ago during the French Revolution and when it was announced that God was dead or had never lived, there began the greatest crisis humanity had suffered up to then. This led in the twentieth century to the erection of the concentration camps of National Socialism and the Communist gulags. - HIRH Otto von Habsburg, Return to the Center pg. 217


Archduke Otto von Habsburg passed away on July 4, 2011 at the age of 98. The Archduke was a Christian statesman who fought the worse revolutionaries of the 20th century in defense of Christendom. He helped thousands of Austrians, among them many Jews escape from the Nazis. He fought against Nazism and Soviet Communism and for an integrated multinational Europe.



His Imperial and Royal Highness Otto von Habsburg played a prominent role in unifying a divided continent. He organized a picnic on August 19, 1989 that led to one of the first openings in the Berlin Wall where 700 East Germans managed to pass through to freedom. This was accomplished through the Pan-Europa movement along with much more following the fall of the Berlin Wall which included the reunification of Europe.



Walburga von Habsburg describes the August 1989 picnic in the video above that generated one of the first openings in the Iron Curtain. In the video below at 1 minute and 40 seconds there is actual footage of the Pan Europa picnic and scenes of people crossing the Iron Curtain.



When a great and good man such as Archduke Otto von Habsburg passes on, the world left behind seems diminished. Praying for him and his family I also find myself praying that he will be praying for those of us left behind in this gloomier place now that he has departed. Sincerest condolences to his family and friends.

You can offer your condolences here.

Young Americans for Freedom: The Struggle Continues

In this time of moral and political crises, it is the responsibility of the youth of America to affirm certain eternal truths. - The Sharon Statement, September 11, 1960


"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." - Edmund Burke

We grew up in the midst of the aftermath of turmoil and revolution of the 1960s and 1970s only to find that the radicals were now high school teachers and at university faculty members and Administrators. Using their positions to indoctrinate and continue to advance a radical agenda that had been rejected at the ballot box through the institutions. In the case of Florida International University years later in 2007 a couple were arrested by the FBI and revealed to be agents of Fidel Castro's communist dictatorship. Apparently, this was not an isolated incident.

It was our natural reaction against this that led a group of college students of different backgrounds to seek out and form a chapter of Young Americans for Freedom at Florida International University back in 1992. The first president of YAF-FIU was Craig Herrero, followed by myself, and Cesar Vasquez.



Throughout our years of existence, YAF-FIU attended Florida conventions hosted by the Young America's Foundation, attended Leadership Institute trainings as well as Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum Collegiate's first annual leadership seminar. YAF-FIU also lobbied to bring conservative speakers starting with Phyllis Schlafly, with the help of Young Americas Foundation, Jack Kemp, and later Pat Buchanan.



Aside from our own newsletter, VOX LIBERTAS, which was regularly distributed, YAF-FIU also distributed CAMPUS: AMERICA'S STUDENT NEWSPAPER, Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) publications and Campus Report, produced by Accuracy in Academia.


FIU-YAF fought battles on the cultural and political front for more than a decade before the increasingly restrictive university policies nibbling away at student freedoms finally took their toll. FIU-YAF fought the battles greatly outnumbered at times by faculty and administration with an apathetic student body untroubled by the loss of their freedoms on campus, and a student newspaper with a left-wing tilt.



"The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts." -Edmund Burke



In many ways what took place at Florida International University mirrors what has happened both in Miami-Dade County and in the country at large. The question that gnaws is what can be done about this?

"We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature, and the means perhaps of its conservation." -Edmund Burke

There are a number of texts and thinkers out there that provide a diagnosis of the crisis and the onslaught against American freedoms and the West in general. Identifying the problem and recognizing that the America we group up in is disappearing replaced with new generations that are much more passive and obedient to bureaucratic controls. Continued mass immigration combined with multiculturalism is fracturing the American identity and whatever homogeneity existed before which is perfect for the managerial elite because it gives them excuses for more bureaucracy and more controls.

"If you set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing." - Margaret Thatcher

Much of these revolutions undermining the United States have taken place under Republican presidents and were not reversed even when both the executive and the legislative were controlled by the Republican party.

"Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe." -Edmund Burke

Add to that conservatives going along with the party line defending George W. Bush as he trashed America's reputation abroad and demonstrated incompetence (one hopes) domestically ending with massive federal bail outs of companies "too big to fail" and as Herbert Hoover prepared the ground for Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s so Bush did for Obama today.

"People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors." - Edmund Burke

These failures on the political front pale in comparison to the failure to transmit American traditions and concepts of liberty to the new generations in the public schools. Conservatives have retreated into home schooling that is doing the job with a select few children, but the vast majority have been lobotomized by the education establishment and an increasingly toxic popular culture. This is what Gramsci described as the long march through the institutions by cultural Marxism.



Sadly these trends are not new William F. Buckley Jr. identified it in 1955 stating "The largest cultural menace in America is the conformity of the intellectual cliques which, in education as well as the arts, are out to impose upon the nation their modish fads and fallacies, and have nearly succeeded in doing so. In this cultural issue, we are, without reservations, on the side of excellence (rather than "newness") and of honest intellectual combat (rather than conformity)."*



The buzz word of today's Utopian is globalization but what is being globalized? Vaclav Havel offered the following observation last week: "We are living in the first truly global civilization. That means that whatever comes into existence on its soil can very quickly and easily span the whole world. But we are also living in the first atheistic civilization, in other words, a civilization that has lost its connection with the infinite and eternity. For that reason it prefers short-term profit to long-term profit. What is important is whether an investment will provide a return in ten or fifteen years; how it will affect the lives of our descendants in a hundred years is less important. However, the most dangerous aspect of this global atheistic civilization is its pride. The pride of someone who is driven by the very logic of his wealth to stop respecting the contribution of nature and our forebears, to stop respecting it on principle and respect it only as a further potential source of profit." What Havel is describing is the triumph of cultural Marxism.

Finally, the Sharon Statement is as relevant today as it was in 1960 including its plank on international communism. A large part of humanity continues to live under Marxist-Leninist despots in China, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam and are threatened by executives that would like to impose it in Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Ecuador undermining basic political freedoms. Jesse Helms in his memoirs written long after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disappearance of the Soviet Union in 2005 said it best: "It was never a mistake to give our support to the person or group who did not embrace Communism rather than a person or faction who did. Communism has been tried and found wanting in countries around the world. In every case, the rule of Communism brought the death of dissidents, the banning of religion, the destruction of revered cultures and the devaluation of human life. … Communism is not truly dead.”


Dear friends you are in my thoughts as you observe the half century mark of Young Americans for Freedom at the national convention but frankly there is much left to do if the United States is to be saved and if Western Civilization is to survive. A suggestion: pick up copies of Richard Viguerie's Conservatives Betrayed and M. Stanton Evan's Blacklisted by History and read both carefully. Young Americans for Freedom can still save the day.


*William F. Buckley Jr. "Our Mission Statement" in National Review (19 November 1955)

Václav Havel warns of civilizational catastrophe and issues a call to humility

"Humility is nothing else but a right judgment of ourselves." -William Law

These remarks by Václav Havel at the opening ceremony of Forum 2000 in the Czech Republic in Prague should be listened to and read by defenders of civilization. The video of the presentation is available online here. However the opening ceremony in addition to Havel's keynote address also offered additional reflections from Štefan Füle, European Commissioner for Enlargement, Yohei Sasakawa, Chairman, The Nippon Foundation all moderated by Oldrich Cerný, Executive Director of the Forum 2000 Foundation.

Remarks by Václav Havel at the Opening Ceremony

October 10, 2010

(oral presentation could slightly differ from this written text)

Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear Friends,

I cordially welcome you all to this year’s Forum 2000 Conference. I am firmly convinced that you will not consider the time you spend here wasted.

While I am aware of the countless more serious problems with human settlements on this planet – from the slums on the fringes of Asian or Latin American megalopolises to cities devastated by earthquakes or floods – with your permission I will start in a somewhat personal vein.

Years ago when I used to drive by car from Prague to our country cottage in Eastern Bohemia, the journey from the city centre to the signboard that marked the city limits took about fifteen minutes. Then came meadows, forests, fields and villages. These days the selfsame journey takes a good forty minutes or more, and it is impossible to know whether I have left the city or not.

What was until recently clearly recognisable as the city is now losing its boundaries and with them its identity. It has become a huge overgrown ring of something I can’t find a word for. It is not a city as I understand the term, nor suburbs, let alone a village. Apart from anything else it lacks streets or squares. There is just a random scattering of enormous single-storey warehouses, supermarkets, hypermarkets, car and furniture marts, petrol stations, eateries, gigantic car parks, isolated high-rise blocks to be let as offices, depots of every kind, and collections of family homes that are admittedly close together but are otherwise desperately remote. And in between all that – and this is something that bothers me most of all – are large tracts of land that aren’t anything, by which I mean that they’re not meadows, fields, woods, jungle or meaningful human settlement. Here and there, in a space that is so hard to define, one can find an architecturally beautiful or original building, but it is as solitary as the proverbial tomb – it is unconnected with anything else; it is not adjacent to anything or even remote from anything; it simply stands there.

In other words all the time our cities are being permitted without control to destroy the surrounding landscape with its nature, traditional pathways, avenues of trees, villages, mills and meandering streams, and build in their place some sort of gigantic agglomeration that renders life nondescript, disrupts the network of natural human communities, and under the banner of international uniformity it attacks all individuality, identity or heterogeneity. And on the occasions it tries to imitate something local or original, it looks altogether suspect, because it is obviously a purpose-built fake. There is emerging a new type of a previously described existential phenomenon: unbounded consumer collectivity engenders a new type of solitude.

Where has all this woeful development come from and why does it go on getting worse? How is at all possible that humans can treat in such a senseless fashion not only the landscape that surrounds them but the very planet which they have been given to inhabit? We know that we are behaving in a suicidal manner and yet we go on doing it. How is it possible?

We are living in the first truly global civilisation. That means that whatever comes into existence on its soil can very quickly and easily span the whole world.

But we are also living in the first atheistic civilisation, in other words, a civilisation that has lost its connection with the infinite and eternity. For that reason it prefers short-term profit to long-term profit. What is important is whether an investment will provide a return in ten or fifteen years; how it will affect the lives of our descendants in a hundred years is less important.

However, the most dangerous aspect of this global atheistic civilisation is its pride. The pride of someone who is driven by the very logic of his wealth to stop respecting the contribution of nature and our forebears, to stop respecting it on principle and respect it only as a further potential source of profit.

And indeed, why should a developer go to the trouble of building a warehouse with several storeys when he can have as much land as he wants and can therefore build as many single-storey warehouses as he likes? Why should he worry about whether his building suits the locality in which it is built, so long as it be reached by the shortest route and it is possible to build a gigantic car park alongside it? What is to him that between his site and his neighbour’s there is a wasteland? And what is to him, after all, that from an aeroplane the city more and more resembles a tumour metastasizing in all directions and that he is contributing to it? Why should he get worked up over a few dozen hectares that he carves out of the soil that many still regard as the natural framework of their homeland?

I sense behind all of this not only a globally spreading short-sightedness, but also the swollen self-consciousness of this civilisation, whose basic attributes include the supercilious idea that we know everything and what we don’t yet know we’ll soon find out, because we know how to go about it. We are convinced that this supposed omniscience of ours which proclaims the staggering progress of science and technology and rational knowledge in general, permits us to serve anything that is demonstrably useful, or that is simply a source of measurable profit, anything that induces growth and more growth and still more growth, including the growth of agglomerations.

But with the cult of measurable profit, proven progress and visible usefulness there disappears respect for mystery and along with it humble reverence for everything we shall never measure and know, not to mention the vexed question of the infinite and eternal, which were until recently the most important horizons of our actions.

We have totally forgotten what all previous civilisations knew: that nothing is self-evident.

I believe that the recent financial and economic crisis was of great importance and in its ultimate essence it was actually a very edifying signal to the contemporary world.

Most economists relied directly or indirectly on the idea that the world, including human conduct, is more or less understandable, scientifically describable and hence predictable. Market economics and its entire legal framework counted on our knowing who man is and what aims he pursues, what was the logic behind the actions of banks or firms, what the shareholding public does and what one may expect from some particular individual or community.

And all of a sudden none of that applied. Irrationality leered at us from all the stock-exchange screens. And even the most fundamentalist economists, who – having intimate access to the truth - were convinced with unshakeable assurance that the invisible hand of the market knew what it was doing, had suddenly to admit that they had been taken by surprise.

I hope and trust that the elites of today’s world will realise what this signal is telling us.

In fact it is nothing extraordinary, nothing that a perceptive person did not know long ago. It is a warning against the disproportionate self-assurance and pride of modern civilisation. Human behaviour is not totally explicable as many inventors of economic theories and concepts believe; and the behaviour of firms or institutions or entire communities is even less so.

Naturally after this crisis a thousand and one theorists will emerge to describe precisely how and why it happened and how to prevent it happening in future. But this will not be a sign that they have understood the message that the crisis sent us. The opposite, more likely: it will simply be a further emanation of that disproportionate self-assurance that I have been speaking of.

I regard the recent crisis as a very small and very inconspicuous call to humility. A small and inconspicuous challenge for us not to take everything automatically for granted. Strange things are happening and will happen. Not to bring oneself to admit it is the path to hell. Strangeness, unnaturalness, mystery, inconceivability have been shifted out the world of serious thought into the dubious closets of suspicious people. Until they are released and allowed to return to our minds things will not go well.

The modern pride that I refer to did not manifest itself in architecture only recently. In the inter-war period many otherwise brilliant avant-garde architects already shared the opinion that confident and rational reflection was the key to a new approach to human settlement. And so they started planning various happy cities with separate zones for housing, sport, entertainment, commerce or hospitality, all linked by a logical infrastructure. Those architects had succumbed to the aberrant notion that an enlightened brain is capable of devising the ideal city. Nothing of the sort was created, however. Bold urbanist projects proved to be one thing, while life turned out to be something else.

Life often demands something quite different from what the architects offer, such as an urban district consisting of the strangest hotchpotch of different functions, where the children’s playground is next to the government building, the government building next to a pub, and the pub next to an apartment house, which in turn is next to a small park. For centuries humankind lived in culture-forming civilisations, in other words, settlements had a natural order determined by a universally-shared sensibility, thanks to which every illiterate mediaeval blacksmith, when asked to forge a bracket, infallibly forged a Gothic bracket, without needing a teacher of Gothic or a Gothic designer. The designers’ civilisation in which we live is one of the many secondary consequences of that modern-era pride, whereby people believe they have understood everything and than they can therefore completely plan the world.

Wonder and an awareness that things are not self-evident are, I believe, the only way out of the dangerous world of a civilisation of pride.

Can anything be absolutely self-evident?

Wonder at the non-self-evidence of everything that creates our world is, after all, the first impulse to the question: what purpose does it all have? Why does it all exist? Why does anything exist at all? We don’t know and we will never find it out. It is quite possible that everything is here in order for us to have something to wonder at. And that we are here simply so that there is someone to wonder. But what is the point of having someone wonder at something? And what alternative is there to being? After all if there were nothing, there would also be no one to observe it. And if there were no one to observe it, then the big question is whether non-being would be at all possible.

Perhaps someone, just a few hundred light years away from our planet, is looking at us through a perfect telescope. What do they see? They see the Thirty Years War. For that reason alone it holds true that everything is here all the time, that nothing that has happened can unhappen, and that with our every word or movement we are making the cosmos different – forever - from what it was before.

In all events, I am certain that our civilisation is heading for catastrophe unless present-day humankind comes to its senses. And it can only come to its senses if it grapples with its short-sightedness, its stupid conviction of its omniscience and its swollen pride, which have been so deeply anchored in its thinking and actions.

It is necessary to wonder. And it is necessary to worry about the non-self-evidence of things.

I hope and trust that this year’s Forum 2000 will not only deal with architecture and urbanism, which it has taken as its main topic, but also with their wider implications. For what else should be the major challenge for reflection on today’s world than the manner in which humankind settles one of the many billions of cosmic bodies.?

Thank you for your attention. I don’t take it for granted.