How the Dam Breaks

Or Maybe It's More Like a Pie Crust

"For the crust presented by the life of lies is made of strange stuff. As long as it seals off hermetically the entire society, it appears to be made of stone. But the moment someone breaks through in one place, when one person cries out, 'The emperor is naked!' - when a single person breaks the rules of the game, thus exposing it as a game - everything suddenly appears in another light and the whole crust seems then to be made of a tissue on the point of tearing and disintegrating uncontrollably."

- Vaclav Havel, The Power of the Powerless (1979, 2018), p. 44. (If you decide to read this book, I strongly suggest you read Timothy Snyder's introduction first. Havel originally wrote for a Czech audience; Snyder explains things.) 

In my opinion, our problem in the United States is not simply Trump, or a fascist party called the Republicans. It is the half-hidden oligarchy that has ruled us in the past (see Mark Hanna), and has reasserted itself with increasing success since the days of Barry Goldwater, who came from a family of dry-goods merchants and was partial to cowboy hats. 

Havel describes a world where the ruling class has obtained complete control. That is not currently the situation in the United States, but people are very definitely busy erecting the crust. I think the Epstein scandal is a particularly useful weapon against them, because I think it will wind up implicating not only Trump but also many members of the oligarchy. Both Republicans and Democrats. And I will be utterly amazed if there is no film.

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From page 62: "... the question of whether one or several political parties are in power, and how these parties define and label themselves, is of far less importance than the question of whether or not it is possible to live like a human being." 

And from pages 60-61: "... those who are not politicians are also not so bound by traditional political thinking and political habits and therefore, paradoxically, they are more aware of genuine political reality and more sensitive to what can and should be done under the circumstances." 

And from page 140: "There can and must be structures that are open, dynamic and small; beyond a certain point, human ties like personal trust and personal responsibility cannot work." 

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As regular readers may recall, I have been struggling recently to maintain my commitment to non-violence, which has its roots in the 1960s. Havel writes favorably of an approach that "can only accept violence as a necessary evil in extreme situations, when direct violence can only be met by violence and where remaining passive would in effect mean supporting violence." (P. 99.) 

Perhaps we could call this engaging with the enemy in a language he understands.

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On pages 112-117 of The Power of the Powerless, Havel discusses how a resistance movement starts to develop parallel structures that allow people to perform their chosen activities when they have been excluded from official structures. His example is the famous samizdat literature of the Soviet Union and the eastern Europe of the Cold War. Another example would be the underground literature of France during World War II, including the newspaper Combat (with editor Albert Camus) and the famous 1942 novella Le silence de la mer, from the underground publisher Les editions de minuit. 

Instead of retyping manuscripts and perhaps making carbon copies at the same time, or quietly using commercial printing presses at night, we have today the internet, which allows Jen Rubin to leave the Washington Post and take her column to Substack, where she can write whatever she wants, whenever she wants, and reach a large audience. 

Stephen Miller could try to crush Substack, but then Peter Thiel would have to admit that he is a totalitarian and not a libertarian. (Miller and Russell Vought, by the way, are already there. As president, JD Vance will do whatever Peter tells him to do.)

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Here's the last paragraph of Havel's little book:

"For the real question is whether the 'brighter future' is really always so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us, and kept us from developing it?" (P. 146.) 

See also Wounded Souls, A Teacher's Dilemma, A Report on Travel Restrictions, Deja Vu All Over Again, A World in Ruins, Is Stephen Miller the Next Reinhard Heydrich?