Scholar Interviews
Questions
- Vladimir Tismaneanu: What source do you use in your classroom to help students understand the events of 1989?
- Vladimir Tismaneanu: How do you teach the letters found in Adam Michnik's book?
- Vladimir Tismaneanu: How do you teach Adam Michnik's book in the classroom?
- Vladimir Tismaneanu: How do you help your students interpret the passage you read about an independent, self-governing union?
- Bradley Abrams: How do you help students make sense of 1989?
- Bradley Abrams: What sources do you use to teach 1989?
- Bradley Abrams: What else is significant about the Declaration of the Creation of Charter 77?
- Bradley Abrams: How did the regime respond to Charter 77?
- Bradley Abrams: Why is the 28th of January remarkable?
- Bradley Abrams: How do you put the anti-Charter into context for students?
- Padraic Kenney: What is remarkable about the poem and the leaflet together?
- Padraic Kenney: How should students interpret the poem?
- Padraic Kenney: What is significant about the poem?
- Padraic Kenney: Does this poem help explain the strike?
- Padraic Kenney: How do you analyze the leaflet?
- Padraic Kenney: What is significant about the leaflet?
- Padraic Kenney: What sources help us understand the strikes?
- Maria Bucur: Is there a particular source that is important to study?
- Maria Bucur: How do students study 1989 in your classroom?
- Maria Bucur: What is difficult to understand about the "Common European Home" speech?
- Maria Bucur: What is important about Ceausescu's last speech?
- Maria Bucur: How do you help students understand Ceausescu's last speech?
- Maria Bucur: What is unique about viewing Ceausescu's last speech?
- Bradley Abrams: How do you use the Charter Declaration and the anti-Charter together with students?
Bradley Abrams: What else is significant about the Declaration of the Creation of Charter 77?
Transcription
A few important things come out here at the end. One is the statement that "responsibility for the maintenance of civic rights in our country naturally devolves in the first place on the political and state authorities. Yet not only on them, everyone bears his share of responsibility," and it’s this notion that everyone is responsible for the state of affairs. It’s not just the regime that’s oppressing us. We somehow share in this. Havel points out in his famous essay “The Power of the Powerless” that the system actually lives inside each individual and each individual makes up the system and that we are co-responsible for our fate and that I think is a very important sentiment. And there were some people in the nascent dissident movement who didn’t like this language.
The second part is the actual statement of Charter 77 starts off much more prosaically and it doesn’t get to the point until near the end where it says “Charter 77 is a free, informal open community of people of different convictions, different faiths and different professions united by the will to strive individually and collectively for the respect of civic and human rights in our own country and throughout the world. Rights accorded to all men by the two mentioned international covenants, by the final act of the Helsinki Conference, and by numerous other international documents.”
And it’s the first part of this that I think is the most interesting and telling. “A free informal open community of people,” the notion that it’s open, it’s public, is one thing. And it’s a community. It’s not an organization. It’s a community of people who share this one interest. It has no rules, permanent bodies, or formal membership. It embraces everyone who agrees with its ideas, participates in its work, and supports it. It does not form the basis for any oppositional political activity. They are expressly stating that this is going to be a fluid organization. By saying “we believe that Charter 77 will help to enable all the citizens of Czechoslovakia to work and live as free human beings,” which is a nice way I think to wrap up what they were trying to say.
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