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- Permanent Link:
- http://dpanther.fiu.edu/dpService/dpPurlService/purl/FI17062601/00001
Notes
- Scope and Content:
- Breakup of Czechoslovakia, Dienstbier (Jiří), Dissent, Friendship, Gorbachev, History, Human Rights, Iraq, Klaus (Václav), Legacy (Havel), Mečiar (Vladimír), Michnik (Adam), Nationalism, Obama, On Tyranny, Philosophy, Power of the Powerless, Prague, Russia, Solidarity, Šimečka (Martin), Trump, Vakarchuk (Slava).
- Biographical:
- Timothy Snyder is an American historian of Eastern Europe who teaches at Yale University. He was born in 1969 and describes himself as belonging to “the very last Cold War generation.” Snyder’s first contact with Václav Havel was “in translation, on the printed page, in the early 1980s.” He met Havel for the first time in person in Bratislava in 2009 at the Central European Forum, at which both men spoke.
Snyder refers to Havel’s texts – in particular The Power of the Powerless – as continually stimulating for both his own writing and teaching. Reflecting upon his most recent publication, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, Snyder says he “literally could not have done it without Havel.” The historian believes that students, and American young people more generally, can learn from Havel’s philosophy that “resistance is thoughtful… and that thoughtfulness is a kind of resistance.”
In this Havel Conversations interview, Snyder reflects upon some of the contradictions and near “impossible” tasks that faced Havel upon becoming president in 1989. He comments on the centrality of human rights to Havel’s foreign policy, as well as the ways in which the late Czech president was “abused” by members of the US political establishment. Snyder characterizes Havel as an inspiration and point of reference for champions of civil society today, discussing in particular the case of Slava Vakarchuk, a massively popular Ukrainian musician and activist.
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