Will Braun always meandered towards the gentle. That, largely, is what I liked so much about the talks he facilitated with us at Canadian Mennonite University. He avoided the extremes. He was a gentle man. And he did it largely without preaching. He reminded me of what I knew about Vaclav Havel and his velvet revolution. I always admired Havel too.
Havel was part of the amazing revolution in Czechoslovakia that brought down the mighty Soviet Empire that seemed invincible and it seemed it would last forever. Then for 11 days from November17 to 28 1989 the people in Czechoslovakia resisted that immense one-party government. The one party was of course the Communist Party that was backed by the Communist party in Russia. In 11 days the 41-year single party government collapsed largely without bloodshed. How was that possible?
The 1989 event triggered a series of anti-Communist demonstrations. The people had basically never demonstrated against communist rule. The government was just too powerful. At least until it wasn’t. On November the group of protesters swelled from 200,000 the previous day to 500,000. People feared the worst, but did not relent. On November 24, 1989 the entire group of communist leadership resigned. On November 27, 1989 a two-hour general strike was held. It involved nearly all working people in Czechoslovakia.
It was a remarkable non-violent revolution. It came to be called the Velvet Revolution. In those 11 days The world saw (and soon forgot) how powerful a non-violent revolution could be. The communist party gave up its monopoly on power. The barbed wire fences at the borders with West Germany and Austria came down. An interim government was appointed and actually resigned after elections were held in 1990. Czechoslovakia peacefully split into 2 countries the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic when the 2 major ethnicities did not get along well. But they negotiated it. Warfare was not necessary. In part that was because they had strong leaders. Havel was a strong leader, not like so many of our current leaders who boast about being strong leaders but have no idea how to be one.
Václav Havel was a Czech statesman, author, poet, playwright, and dissident. Havel served as the last president of Czechoslovakia from 1989 until 1992. He really did not want to be a political leader. He wanted to be a writer more. He agreed to be a leader for only a few years. He was a true statesman.
On New Years Day, in 1991 he gave a wonderful short speech in which he expressed a few very interesting ideas. He said wanted a new type of politics—one based on morality. What a crazy idea? He said his country would have to learn that new type of politics. He said,
“politics does not have to be the art of the possible, especially if this means the art of speculating, calculating, intrigues, secret agreements, and pragmatic maneuvering, but that it also can be the art of the impossible, that is the art of making both ourselves and the world better.”
In that speech he also considered what his country had most to fear. He said, “Our worst enemy today is our own bad qualities—indifference to public affairs, conceit, ambition, selfishness, the pursuit of personal advancement, and rivalry—and that is the main struggle we are faced with.” He then concluded his remarks by telling his countrymen about the upcoming free election which he referred to as a battle, and urged his people like this: “Let us not allow that battle to sully the still clean face of our gentle revolution….”
He did not want a battle of the extremes. He wanted a gentle revolution. He was a man of humility. He knew how powerful the powerless could be a called it The Power of the Powerless.
We need more leaders like that. We don’t need those who are filled with bombast.