HAVEL SPEECH 2/22/90

It was in the early Thirties, when I was a boy and a member of a persecuted minority in a totalitarian state, that Czechoslovakia acquired certain mythic qualities for me. My parents and their friends often brought back tales from holidays in that near-by land where they could walk in the streets with their heads erect and express their views without fear of the secret police.

Only a few years later I was listening on the radio to Hitler's attacks on Benes. Though I was too young to fully understand the issues or know very much about the history of Czechoslovakia - which was not a required subject in German schools - Benes achieved heroic stature as a kindred victim of totalitarian wrath. My family emigrated to America in the

middle of that crisis so I was living in New York during the
Munich agreement. It was a shattering experience which
instilled in me the conviction that a free people relying on
democratic countries must never be abandoned again.

Thirty years later almost to the day I happened to be
in Czechoslovakia for a Pugwash conference on disarmament.
It was during the so-called Prague spring, and it was one of
the great experiences of my life. I shall never forget the
innocence and devotion of my Czech hosts as we sat at a
table in a Prague restaurant decorated with American and
Czech flags. I warned them to be careful, to consolidate
rather than give the Soviets an excuse to intervene. They
did not altogether reject my arguments, but they did not
quite understand them either: how could their desire to
humanize Communism lead to foreign intervention? How does
one pause on the road to freedom when there still remains so
much injustice to be removed?

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Czechoslovakia has now lived under totalitarian rule
for more than fifty years. Its people have experienced every
form of oppression perfected in this century. And so it is
particularly fitting that at the end of that process we
greet here as a hope for freedom for us all a leader who
until a few months ago was a prisoner of conscience.

Mr. President, you told Congress yesterday that politi-
cal stability in your country has traditionally been impor-
tant for all of Europe. Indeed, the hills and valleys of
Bohemia and Slovakia have been the barometers of European
history for centuries: armies have trampled across its
verdant fields; for centuries ideas were disputed in its
ancient universities; both Catholicism and the Reformation
struggled for the soul of this country. The Thirty Years War
started there. And yet through all the upheavals - perhaps
because of them - ideas of freedom and human dignity have

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continued to flourish. Representative government existed
there centuries before it did in neighboring countries.

Mr. President - your presence here is testament to the
power of the human spirit. You have overthrown an entrenched
oppressor by turning the legalistic phrases of the Helsinki
Accords into a revolutionary manifesto and by the purity of
your motives, the spirit of your suffering and the endurance
of your long struggle. You have transcended the historic
political conflict between prophets and statesmen - between
those who think they know the end without the means and
those who specialize in means without focusing on the ends -
by being yourself both prophet and statesman. It is appro-
priate that your small country should proclaim the unity of
all of Europe, and that as a former prisoner you should now
represent universal peace. We can have no more trusted guide
in answering the question of what Europe is to be, where its
frontiers lie and its relations to outside powers.

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Mr. President - you have managed to bring together here a spectrum of Americans who have not in recent decades practiced much at celebrating together. Tonight we have been united here to honor your fight for a world in which the just can be free, and the weak secure.