Latest news with #Havel
The Age
26-04-2025
- Politics
- The Age
When brilliance is not enough: What it takes for an outsider to become one of the political greats
Vaclav Havel, the poet and political prisoner who became the first democratically elected president of Czechoslovakia, in 1989, went on to steer his country – and later, the Czech Republic, after Czechoslovakia separated from Slovakia – through the painful transition from communism to capitalism. Over 13 years as president, he drove the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact – the defence treaty that tied it to the former Soviet Union – and his country's entrance into NATO and the European Union. 'With the collapse of communism was a real sense of moral uncertainty about, right, all the old values are gone, what are we being offered?' says University of Sydney emeritus professor Graeme Gill, an expert on Russian and Soviet politics, of the period when Havel was voted in, mere weeks after having been jailed for championing human rights. '[So] there's something in [his] past that gave him increased capacity, when he was a leader, and it was the sort of moral authority he had, both as a former dissident because he'd been locked up by the communists at some stage, certainly been suppressed; his plays weren't allowed to be shown.' This enabled him to operate on the moral high ground, and accomplish great things. And be repeatedly re-elected by his people. Then there's Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, whose only preparation before being elected in 2019 was starring in Servant of the People, a satirical television show about a history teacher who unexpectedly is elected as the president of Ukraine. He has shocked many by his transition into a courageous statesman who has rallied his people to hold off the Russian army, against all odds, for three years. '[But] I mean, he's in a crisis, which gives him a lot more power, and there's a lot less scrutiny that he would otherwise have had,' says Professor Rodney Smith, an expert in parliamentary democracies at the University of Sydney. 'And crises allow you to mobilise people around you who otherwise wouldn't be co-operative with you. It's more difficult to criticise the leader, if the crisis isn't of your making, and you seem to be doing the right things.' Loading But experts point out that Havel and Zelensky are the rare exceptions. American President Donald Trump, is, for many, an illustration of what is more likely – the failures that can result, when a person comes to the job equipped only with renown in an entirely different arena. 'When we see someone who is clearly a good leader in some other field, you know, there's an assumption, 'Wow, if only we could get that person into politics, wouldn't it be great?' And that's not the case,' says Smith. 'Because they're a great thinker, or a great orator, or a great businessperson, or a great whatever. But, you know, even a great head of a public sector agency, if they don't have the full skill set [they will not be an effective political leader].' Smith says there are five key skills in that set: being able to manage a party and rival factions, understand how the public service works, manoeuvre through the partyroom and parliament to get legislation passed, navigate the demands of lobbying and advocacy groups, and being able to bring the public along with you. Think of Michael Ignatieff, the Booker Prize-shortlisted author and Harvard professor of human rights, who became leader of the Canadian opposition in 2008. He was 'a complete disaster', says University of Sydney Emeritus Professor Rodney Tiffen, author of Disposable Leaders. Media and Leadership Coups from Menzies to Abbott. 'He was a very, very bright guy, but didn't really know how to operate in Ottawa.' Ignatieff, who wrote an 8000-word policy manifesto before entering politics, in which he advocated for ways to improve the lives of Indigenous Canadians, and improve productivity through investments in higher education, didn't disagree. 'If a politician cannot succeed in convincing voters he is in it for them, he cannot win standing … without it, no message can get a hearing,' Ignatieff wrote in his memoir, Fire And Ashes: Success and Failure In Politics, after he'd resigned as leader of the Liberal Party, following the loss of his seat in the 2011 federal election, the Liberal Party's worst showing in its history. (The Liberals won only 34 seats in parliament, marking the first time since Confederation that the party failed to finish first or second.) His rivals, building on the fact that Ignatieff spent 30 years in the United States before returning to Canada to run for office, attacked him in ads that read: 'He didn't come back for you.' Even leaders who come to the top job with considerable political experience end up failing to become effective when they lack 'the full skill set', says Smith. Think of former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, says Smith. He was an incredibly astute lawyer, merchant banker and venture capitalist who was turfed by his own party. 'You might be brilliant, but if the party doesn't like you, you're in trouble,' he says. Think of Malcolm Turnbull, says Smith. He was an incredibly astute lawyer, merchant banker and venture capitalist who was turfed by his own party. 'You might be brilliant, but if the party doesn't like you, you're in trouble,' he says. The same can be said of former prime minister Kevin Rudd, an accomplished diplomat, ex-political staffer and one-time head of Queensland's cabinet office; he lost the support of his party in his first term after being unable to manage relationships within it. 'And you've got to convince the public [of your vision], so, you know, that's [former Liberal Party leader] John Hewson's story,' says Smith. 'He put up a complete tax package. It made perfect sense to him as an economist with a PhD in economics. But it didn't make sense to a majority of voters.' It's no wonder that the late Queen Elizabeth II once quipped about prime ministers: 'I don't know why anyone would want the job.' So, does Mark Carney, if he wins on Monday – and the latest polls from The Economist give his Liberal Party an 86 per cent chance of winning the most seats in parliament – have a decent shot at becoming a Zelensky or a Havel? Loading 'I think this is one of those situations where it depends a lot on the team he has,' says Smith. 'I think he's got some of these skills already, but he's never had to keep a party together before, a political party, at parliamentary level. Never had to really deal directly with MPs who are worried about their constituents in their ridings, or their provinces. He seems a very smart guy, very personable, very confident. But, you know, it's unlikely to get easier for Canada, I would've thought, in the next little while, given the situation with the southern neighbour. I think there is a certain level of risk there.' Perhaps he'll personify the theory of renowned German sociologist Max Weber – himself a failed politician – who believed that the only outsiders well suited to becoming politicians were lawyers or journalists, as both had been taught the ruthlessness and adaptability necessary to lead. Or maybe not. Because Carney's first action as prime minister was to repeal the consumer carbon levy. This was the Liberal Party's signature climate policy, which Carney had fiercely defended, so much so, that Carney's rival Poilievre previously dubbed him 'Carbon Tax Carney'. 'This demonstrates a willingness to slaughter a sacred cow of the pro-climate progressive movement which the Liberal Party had been the proud leader of, until the moment he took it out the back and cut its head off; a determination to win power, regardless of any policy sacrifice,' says Herald and Age columnist Peter Hartcher. Maybe the banker with a heart of gold has a ruthless side after all.
Sydney Morning Herald
26-04-2025
- Politics
- Sydney Morning Herald
When brilliance is not enough: What it takes for an outsider to become one of the political greats
Vaclav Havel, the poet and political prisoner who became the first democratically elected president of Czechoslovakia, in 1989, went on to steer his country – and later, the Czech Republic, after Czechoslovakia separated from Slovakia – through the painful transition from communism to capitalism. Over 13 years as president, he drove the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact – the defence treaty that tied it to the former Soviet Union – and his country's entrance into NATO and the European Union. 'With the collapse of communism was a real sense of moral uncertainty about, right, all the old values are gone, what are we being offered?' says University of Sydney emeritus professor Graeme Gill, an expert on Russian and Soviet politics, of the period when Havel was voted in, mere weeks after having been jailed for championing human rights. '[So] there's something in [his] past that gave him increased capacity, when he was a leader, and it was the sort of moral authority he had, both as a former dissident because he'd been locked up by the communists at some stage, certainly been suppressed; his plays weren't allowed to be shown.' This enabled him to operate on the moral high ground, and accomplish great things. And be repeatedly re-elected by his people. Then there's Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, whose only preparation before being elected in 2019 was starring in Servant of the People, a satirical television show about a history teacher who unexpectedly is elected as the president of Ukraine. He has shocked many by his transition into a courageous statesman who has rallied his people to hold off the Russian army, against all odds, for three years. '[But] I mean, he's in a crisis, which gives him a lot more power, and there's a lot less scrutiny that he would otherwise have had,' says Professor Rodney Smith, an expert in parliamentary democracies at the University of Sydney. 'And crises allow you to mobilise people around you who otherwise wouldn't be co-operative with you. It's more difficult to criticise the leader, if the crisis isn't of your making, and you seem to be doing the right things.' Loading But experts point out that Havel and Zelensky are the rare exceptions. American President Donald Trump, is, for many, an illustration of what is more likely – the failures that can result, when a person comes to the job equipped only with renown in an entirely different arena. 'When we see someone who is clearly a good leader in some other field, you know, there's an assumption, 'Wow, if only we could get that person into politics, wouldn't it be great?' And that's not the case,' says Smith. 'Because they're a great thinker, or a great orator, or a great businessperson, or a great whatever. But, you know, even a great head of a public sector agency, if they don't have the full skill set [they will not be an effective political leader].' Smith says there are five key skills in that set: being able to manage a party and rival factions, understand how the public service works, manoeuvre through the partyroom and parliament to get legislation passed, navigate the demands of lobbying and advocacy groups, and being able to bring the public along with you. Think of Michael Ignatieff, the Booker Prize-shortlisted author and Harvard professor of human rights, who became leader of the Canadian opposition in 2008. He was 'a complete disaster', says University of Sydney Emeritus Professor Rodney Tiffen, author of Disposable Leaders. Media and Leadership Coups from Menzies to Abbott. 'He was a very, very bright guy, but didn't really know how to operate in Ottawa.' Ignatieff, who wrote an 8000-word policy manifesto before entering politics, in which he advocated for ways to improve the lives of Indigenous Canadians, and improve productivity through investments in higher education, didn't disagree. 'If a politician cannot succeed in convincing voters he is in it for them, he cannot win standing … without it, no message can get a hearing,' Ignatieff wrote in his memoir, Fire And Ashes: Success and Failure In Politics, after he'd resigned as leader of the Liberal Party, following the loss of his seat in the 2011 federal election, the Liberal Party's worst showing in its history. (The Liberals won only 34 seats in parliament, marking the first time since Confederation that the party failed to finish first or second.) His rivals, building on the fact that Ignatieff spent 30 years in the United States before returning to Canada to run for office, attacked him in ads that read: 'He didn't come back for you.' Even leaders who come to the top job with considerable political experience end up failing to become effective when they lack 'the full skill set', says Smith. Think of former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, says Smith. He was an incredibly astute lawyer, merchant banker and venture capitalist who was turfed by his own party. 'You might be brilliant, but if the party doesn't like you, you're in trouble,' he says. Think of Malcolm Turnbull, says Smith. He was an incredibly astute lawyer, merchant banker and venture capitalist who was turfed by his own party. 'You might be brilliant, but if the party doesn't like you, you're in trouble,' he says. The same can be said of former prime minister Kevin Rudd, an accomplished diplomat, ex-political staffer and one-time head of Queensland's cabinet office; he lost the support of his party in his first term after being unable to manage relationships within it. 'And you've got to convince the public [of your vision], so, you know, that's [former Liberal Party leader] John Hewson's story,' says Smith. 'He put up a complete tax package. It made perfect sense to him as an economist with a PhD in economics. But it didn't make sense to a majority of voters.' It's no wonder that the late Queen Elizabeth II once quipped about prime ministers: 'I don't know why anyone would want the job.' So, does Mark Carney, if he wins on Monday – and the latest polls from The Economist give his Liberal Party an 86 per cent chance of winning the most seats in parliament – have a decent shot at becoming a Zelensky or a Havel? Loading 'I think this is one of those situations where it depends a lot on the team he has,' says Smith. 'I think he's got some of these skills already, but he's never had to keep a party together before, a political party, at parliamentary level. Never had to really deal directly with MPs who are worried about their constituents in their ridings, or their provinces. He seems a very smart guy, very personable, very confident. But, you know, it's unlikely to get easier for Canada, I would've thought, in the next little while, given the situation with the southern neighbour. I think there is a certain level of risk there.' Perhaps he'll personify the theory of renowned German sociologist Max Weber – himself a failed politician – who believed that the only outsiders well suited to becoming politicians were lawyers or journalists, as both had been taught the ruthlessness and adaptability necessary to lead. Or maybe not. Because Carney's first action as prime minister was to repeal the consumer carbon levy. This was the Liberal Party's signature climate policy, which Carney had fiercely defended, so much so, that Carney's rival Poilievre previously dubbed him 'Carbon Tax Carney'. 'This demonstrates a willingness to slaughter a sacred cow of the pro-climate progressive movement which the Liberal Party had been the proud leader of, until the moment he took it out the back and cut its head off; a determination to win power, regardless of any policy sacrifice,' says Herald and Age columnist Peter Hartcher. Maybe the banker with a heart of gold has a ruthless side after all.
Boston Globe
12-03-2025
- Science
- Boston Globe
In Pennsylvania, a meteorite landed in a carton of ice cream. Brown University helped ID the out-of-this-world topping.
Once authorities released the rock, the vehicle's owner believed it could be a Get Rhode Map A weekday briefing from veteran Rhode Island reporters, focused on the things that matter most in the Ocean State. Enter Email Sign Up Before long, a team of geologists and meteorite experts formed to take a look and verify what exactly they were looking at – including professor Dan Ibarra and graduate student Riley Havel, from Brown University. Advertisement 'At Brown University's Ibarra Lab, Ibarra, Havel, and visiting student Jiquan Chen prepared the sample for advanced isotopic analysis,' university officials said in a statement. 'Their primary focus was measuring the rock's triple oxygen isotope composition— an essential method for distinguishing meteorites from terrestrial rocks.' Meteorites are distinct from Earth rocks as they contain 'oxygen isotope ratios that reflect their formation in space, often dating back to the early solar system,' according to the university. The measurements allowed the team to confirm the rock was a meteorite, informally referred to as the 'Ice Cream Drop,' school officials said. 'This work paves the way for official classification in the Meteoritical Bulletin, ensuring that the sample becomes part of the global scientific record,' the university said. Havel said there is a particular importance in identifying meteorites from 'meteor-wrongs.' 'Meteorites have unique scientific value and can be used to answer questions about our solar system in ways that many terrestrial rocks cannot,' Havel said in a statement. The research was recently detailed in Pennsylvania Geology Magazine, which is published by the state's Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. Advertisement 'We tried to maintain an open mind when the owner of the main mass brought it to us for examination after being rebuffed by others,' Robert C. Smith II and John H. Barnes, retired from the Pennsylvania Geological Survey, and James T. Herbstritt, of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, wrote in the magazine. 'We do not control custody of the main mass of this specimen, but we hope that our efforts on the material that was made available to us will lead to additional research of this worthy specimen by others. 'To be sure, observed meteorite falls are rare, but meteorites can and do land in Pennsylvania!,' they added. Christopher Gavin can be reached at
The Guardian
09-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Athol Fugard, South African political dissident playwright, dies aged 92
The South African playwright and director Athol Fugard, whose works included the plays Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and The Island and the novel Tsotsi, has died at the age of 92. A major political dissident playwright of the 20th century, Fugard wrote more than 30 dramas including Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act (in 1972) and 'Master Harold' … and the Boys (1982). Both of those drew upon the time in the 1950s when he could only find employment as a clerk in one of the courts where black South Africans were charged (and inevitably convicted) of breaches of the 'pass laws', designed to control the movements of a racially segregated population under the apartheid system. There, he witnessed hourly the dehumanisation of those who had chosen the 'wrong' streets or people. Fugard's cultural and political impact was rivalled elsewhere only by the dramas of Václav Havel in what was then Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia. Havel was jailed and, when released, abandoned theatre to become the first president of the Czech Republic. Fugard – despite setting up two theatre companies in the segregated black townships and courageously refusing to play to the state-mandated 'whites only' audiences – avoided prison, due to being white and therefore not a primary target of the racist government. The worst direct personal persecutions Fugard suffered were the removal of his passport and the occasional banning of plays and burning of books. He was always conscious, though, of benefiting from the immoral hierarchy his writing decried. The writer's race would also have made him an impossible political leader in the new Republic of South Africa: its dissident turned president in the Havel manner was Nelson Mandela, who had a strong background presence in Fugard's plays, especially The Island (1972), set on Robben Island, the penitentiary for political prisoners where Mandela had spent some of his 27 years of incarceration. Born in 1932, Fugard was the only child of Harold, from an immigrant family of Irish descent, and Elizabeth, whose Potgieter clan were among the early Afrikaans settlers of Dutch stock. A jazz pianist turned shopkeeper, Harold moved his family in 1935 to Port Elizabeth, an urban industrial town that remained Fugard's main home and most regular dramatic setting for the next nine decades. During his childhood, the family ran a hotel and cafe in Port Elizabeth where 'Hally' (as the young Athol was known) grew up. There, as a teenager in the late 1940s, an incident occurred that would lie at the heart of his psychology and creativity. In published extracts from his notebooks, Fugard explained how Sam Semela, a black employee in the family businesses, became 'the most significant – the only – friend of my boyhood years'. But, after a 'rare quarrel', Hally pulled racial rank and spat in Semela's face. While confiding to his journal that he would never be able to 'deal with the shame that overwhelmed me the second after', Fugard made literary recompense with 'Master Harold' … and the Boys, its title acknowledging a racist hierarchy between white people and their servants that is overturned by a devastatingly apologetic depiction of how the demon of superiority can rise even in the mind of someone who defines as a liberal: the spitting scene is its climax. One of the dedicatees of the published play is 'Sam', with whom Fugard had been reconciled. Public admission of this shaming story was typical of Fugard's personal honesty, but can also be seen as an attempt to forestall any 'saint' or 'saviour' interpretation of his work. The contemporary pejorative term 'white saviour', with its implication of credit stolen and virtue claimed, was not yet widely used, but, once it was, Fugard faced retrospective accusation. A complication arose with the working methods of the African Theatre Workshop and Serpent Players, two multi-racial companies Fugard and his wife, Shiela (also a writer) formed either side of 1960, first in Johannesburg and then Port Elizabeth. Early Fugard plays such as No-Good Friday (1958), Nongogo (1959) and The Coat (1966) improvised scenes with actors based on their own experiences and then created a fixed text for performance. As a major Fugard scholar, Professor Dennis Walder, has pointed out, it was yet another horror of the system that the writer could only work with colleagues of colour at his home by registering them, for bureaucratic purposes, as his domestic staff. Fugard's desire to collaborate with the wronged community, rather than writing anti-apartheid stories from an isolated study in a white area (a criticism of some contemporaries), can reasonably be seen as another compensating response to the Sam shame. But a majority black co-operative run by a white man subsequently raised issues of 'appropriation' to which Fugard was alert: editions of The Island and its companion play, Sizwe Banzi Is Dead (1972), in which someone takes on the identity of a dead man in order to use his 'pass book' (ID papers), have the credit 'devised by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona', with royalties split three ways. The circumstances in which Fugard's early plays were made now sound like something from dystopian fiction. The South African police would raid rehearsals, check scripts and take the names of actors; it became standard for performers to be listed in programmes and on posters under the identities of fictional characters they had previously played. The end of apartheid and Mandela's presidency removed, from 1994, what the novelist Nadine Gordimer had called 'the only subject' for white liberal writers in South Africa. Fugard, though, wrote plays that effectively reflected the country's 'truth and reconciliation' phase of attempted restorative justice. In The Train Driver (2010), his strongest late work, the white title character seeks out the family of a black mother and child who died when they stepped in front of his train; in Sorrows And Rejoicing (2001), the family of a dead, white anti-apartheid writer reflect on the evasions of his life. That Fugard continued as a dramatist even when the driving cause of his first plays was achieved was due to the incompleteness of the victory. Whereas anti-Soviet dramas now have only historical interest – as relative democracy has continued in Russia's former bloc – the 2021 revival of Fugard's Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act, at the Orange Tree theatre in Richmond, remained disconcertingly relevant. While the specific evil it dramatised – the ban on interracial sex in South Africa from 1927 to 1985 – was gone, the play now served a new purpose: a metaphor for the continuing inequalities of opportunity and security suffered by people of colour around the world. The unexpected longevity of Statements continued a paradox that ran through Fugard's career: situations that he detested as a citizen were his dramatic fuel. Parents leaving the London production of Statements could be heard explaining to appalled children that the immorality laws had existed in a Commonwealth country during the lifetime of anyone older than 36. That duty of education will keep Fugard's plays in the theatrical canon, as will the broader lessons of Statements, 'Master Harold' … and the Boys and The Island in how racism roots and grows. His 1980 novel Tsotsi, about crime in Johannesburg, was adapted as an Oscar-winning 2005 film, directed by Gavin Hood. Fugard would have been the first to acknowledge that others, such as Kani and Ntshona, were the theatrical Mandelas of free South Africa, but the man who called himself 'a classic example of the impotent, white liberal' was an epitome of the good people who, in Hannah Arendt's formulation, must act if evil is not to prevail.
New York Times
25-02-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
America's Most Shameful Vote Ever at the U.N.
In the spring of 2007, I interviewed Václav Havel on a bench in the garden of Prague's Czernin Palace. The playwright and former Czech president discussed his shifting views on the war in Iraq, the role of art in unfree states, the dangers of political obsession and indifference — and his yearning, 11 years after he had quit smoking, for a cigarette. We also spoke about the importance of truth, particularly in matters of international diplomacy. 'I think we can talk to every ruler but first of all it is necessary to tell the truth,' Havel said. Turning to Vladimir Putin — or 'Ras-Putin,' as he called him — he added: 'With me, he gets more and more suspicious. We have to tell him plainly what we think of his behavior.' Havel's comment — which followed the murders of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the prominent critic Alexander Litvinenko but preceded Russia's invasion of Georgia, its seizure of Crimea, the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, the poisoning, imprisoning and death of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the massacre at Bucha and the obliteration of Mariupol — comes to mind after the single most shameful vote ever cast by the United States at the United Nations. On Monday, for the third anniversary of Russia's brutal lunge toward Kyiv, the Ukrainian government put forward a resolution in the General Assembly demanding Russia's withdrawal of its forces and accountability for its war crimes as the basis of a 'comprehensive, lasting and just peace.' Ninety-three countries supported the resolution; 65 abstained, including China. Among the 18 who opposed it were Russia, North Korea, Nicaragua, Belarus, Equatorial Guinea and, vomitously, Israel and the United States. Later, the United States won a wan 10-0 approval for a Security Council resolution (with five abstentions, including from Britain and France) that called for an end to the war without mentioning who started it. This is supposed to be a mark of realism, on the view that scolding Moscow for its sins will do nothing to advance a diplomatic end to the war. On a broader level, it's also meant as one in a series of moves to woo Putin back toward the West and away from his partnership (as the junior member) with China's Xi Jinping — what foreign-policy pundits are calling a 'Reverse Nixon,' in contrast to the 37th president's efforts to detach China from the Soviet orbit. But the effort is bound to fail, and not just because Moscow, with its no-limits friendship with China and a pliant administration in the United States, finds itself today in a very different strategic position than the one Beijing was in the early 1970s, when it had blown up its society in the Cultural Revolution while coming close to full-scale war with Russia. Havel would have understood the deeper reasons. In his 1978 essay 'The Power of the Powerless,' Havel explained the ways in which communist regimes like the one in Czechoslovakia maintained control. It wasn't simply, or even primarily, through the threat of force. Rather, it happened through the construction of a 'panorama' of mutually reinforcing slogans that most people found relatively easy to go along with, even if, at some level, they knew they were based on outrageous distortions and obvious lies. Putin spent the first part of his career as a low-level enforcer of that system. He's spent 25 years in power perfecting it from the top, creating a world in which his dictatorship is 'sovereign democracy,' political opposition is 'terrorism,' the Jewish president of Ukraine is 'a neo-Nazi' and the biggest war in Europe in 80 years is just a 'special military operation,' undertaken as a defensive measure against an aggressive NATO. At nearly every turn, he's been able to get away with it, often with the reluctant acquiescence of Western leaders, from George W. Bush to Angela Merkel, who looked away from his misdeeds for the sake of diplomatic comity. But he's never had a bigger accomplice in deceit than Donald Trump. By participating in the moral and factual inversions that Putin has deployed for his invasion of Ukraine, the Trump administration isn't setting itself up as some sort of evenhanded broker to end the war. It is turning the United States into an accessory to Russia's crimes — or at least to the lies on which the crimes are predicated. Unlike Nixon, who moved China toward our corner, at least for 30 years, Trump is moving America toward Russia's corner, while betraying an ally and breaking the Atlantic alliance. At this point, Tucker Carlson, Putin's preferred poodle, may as well be secretary of state. In his essay, Havel movingly described the ways in which tyrannies are brought down: when a handful of brave souls decide to 'live within the truth,' which gives their 'freedom a concrete significance.' Their early acts of truth-telling — like refusing to participate in sham elections or other regime fictions — will exact an initial price as the government amps up its means of repression. But over time the regime's panorama of lies will gradually, then suddenly, fall apart. It's exactly what happened just 11 years after Havel foresaw it, with the fall of communism and the Berlin Wall. This administration, like its predecessor, had the opportunity, through an easy U.N. vote, to live within the truth when it came to Russia and its malevolence. Instead of working to deconstruct Putin's panorama of lies, it opted to keep it in place, to reinforce it, to build on it. It's a choice that will haunt, and shame, America for years.
