‘We live in a contaminated moral environment’ VÁCLAV HAVEL Broadcast reviewing the Czech communist past, 1 January 1990

VÁCLAV HAVEL Born 5 October 1936 in Prague, Czechoslovakia In the 1950s he worked as a lab technician, was conscripted into the army, and attended technical college (1955–7) before working as a stagehand at the ABC Theatre, Prague. He began writing plays and magazine articles, becoming particularly associated with Prague’s Theatre on the Balustrade. After the liberalizing ‘Prague Spring’ (1968) was crushed, his writings were banned, and he was sent to do manual labour in a brewery in 1974. He co-founded the Charter’77 human rights group (1977) and the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted (1978). He was imprisoned in 1979 for subversion, until released because of illness in 1983. Through the 1980s he continued to publish abroad and in samizdat (underground) media at home. In 1989 he co-founded the Civic Forum opposition movement and, after that year’s Velvet Revolution overturned the regime, he was chosen as the Czechoslovak president. He was re-elected in 1990, but stood down in 1992. When the country split into sovereign Czech and Slovak states, he became President of the Czech Republic (1993–2003), retiring at the end of his second elected term. His accolades have been many.




WE LIVE IN A CONTAMINATED MORAL ENVIRONMENT. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimensions, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships. Only a few of us were able to cry out loud that the powers that be should not be all-powerful, and that special farms, which produce ecologically pure and top-quality food just for them, should send their produce to schools, children’s homes and hospitals if our agriculture was unable to offer them to all.

The previous regime – armed with its arrogant and intolerant ideology – reduced man to a force of production and nature to a tool of production. In this it attacked both their very substance and their mutual relationship. It reduced gifted and autonomous people, skilfully working in their own country, to nuts and bolts of some monstrously huge, noisy and stinking machine, whose real meaning is not clear to anyone. It cannot do more than slowly but inexorably wear down itself and all its nuts and bolts. ‘We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact’ When I talk about contaminated moral atmosphere, I am not talking just about the gentlemen who eat organic vegetables and do not look out of the plane windows.

 I am talking about all of us. We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all – though naturally to differing extents – responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery; none of us is just its victim: we are all also its co-creators. Why do I say this? It would be very unreasonable to understand the sad legacy of the last forty years as something alien, which some distant relative bequeathed us. On the contrary, we have to accept this legacy as a sin we committed against ourselves. If we accept it as such, we will understand that it is up to us all, and up to us only, to do something about it. We cannot blame the previous rulers for everything, not only because it would be untrue but also because it could blunt the duty that each of us faces today, namely, the obligation to act independently, freely, reasonably and quickly. Let us not be mistaken: the best government in the world, the best parliament and the best president, cannot achieve much on their own. And it would also be wrong to expect a general remedy from them only.

Freedom and democracy include participation and therefore responsibility from us all. ‘People, your government has returned to you!’ If we realize this, then all the horrors that the new Czechoslovak democracy inherited will cease to appear so terrible. If we realize this, hope will return to our hearts. … In conclusion, I would like to say that I want to be a president who will speak less and work more. To be a president who will not only look out of the windows of his aeroplane but who, first and foremost, will always be present among his fellow citizens and listen to them well. You may ask what kind of republic I dream of. Let me reply: I dream of a republic independent, free and democratic, of a republic economically prosperous and yet socially just, in short, of a humane republic which serves the individual and which therefore holds the hope that the individual will serve it in turn.


 Of a republic of well-rounded people, because without such it is impossible to solve any of our problems, human, economic, ecological, social or political. The most distinguished of my predecessors opened his first speech with a quotation from the great Czech educator Comenius. Allow me to round off my first speech with my own paraphrase of the same statement: People, your government has returned to you!

‘The special responsibility of the women of India’ INDIRA GANDHI Speech on the value of women’s education, 23 November 1974

AN ANCIENT SANSKRIT saying says, woman is the home and the home is the basis of society. It is as we build our homes that we can build our country. If the home is inadequate – either inadequate in material goods and necessities or inadequate in the sort of friendly, loving atmosphere that every child needs to grow and develop – then that country cannot have harmony and no country which does not have harmony can grow in any direction at all. That is why women’s education is almost more important than the education of boys and men. We – and by ‘we’ I do not mean only we in India but all the world – have neglected women’s education. It is fairly recent. Of course, not to you but when I was a child, the story of early days of women’s education in England, for instance, was very current. Everybody remembered what had happened in the early days. … Now, we have got education and there is a debate all over the country whether this education is adequate to the needs of society or the needs of our young people.

I am one of those who always believe that education needs a thorough overhauling. But at the same time, I think that everything in our education is not bad, that even the present education has produced very fine men and women, specially scientists and experts in different fields, who are in great demand all over the world and even in the most affluent countries.

Many of our young people leave us and go abroad because they get higher salaries, they get better conditions of work. … One of the biggest responsibilities of the educated women today is how to synthesize what has been valuable and timeless in our ancient traditions with what is good and valuable in modern thought. All that is modern is not good just as all that is old is neither all good nor all bad. We have to decide, not once and for all but almost every week, every month what is coming out that is good and useful to our country and what of the old we can keep and enshrine in our society.

 To be modern, most people think that it is something of a manner of dress or a manner of speaking or certain habits and customs, but that is not really being modern. It is a very superficial part of modernity. … Now, for India to become what we want it to become with a modern, rational society and firmly based on what is good in our ancient tradition and in our soil, for this we have to have a thinking public, thinking young women who are not content to accept what comes from any part of the world but are willing to listen to it, to analyze it and to decide whether it is to be accepted or whether it is to be thrown out and this is the sort of education which we want, which enables our young people to adjust to this changing world and to be able to contribute to it.

Some people think that only by taking up very high jobs, you are doing something important or you are doing national service. But we all know that the most complex machinery will be ineffective if one small screw is not working as it should and that screw is just as important as any big part. It is the same in national life. There is no job that is too small; there is no person who is too small. Everybody has something to do. And if he or she does it well, then the country will run well. ‘Everything, whether dirty or small, had a purpose’


In our superstition, we have thought that some work is dirty work. For instance, sweeping has been regarded as dirty. Only some people can do it; others should not do it. Now we find that manure is the most valuable thing that the world has today and many of the world’s economies are shaking because there is not enough fertilizer – and not just the chemical fertilizer but the ordinary manure, night-soil and all that sort of thing, things which were considered dirty. Now it shows how beautifully balanced the world was with everything fitted in with something else. Everything, whether dirty or small, had a purpose. …

So, I hope that all of you who have this great advantage of education will not only do whatever work you are doing keeping the national interests in view, but you will make your own contribution to creating peace and harmony, to bringing beauty in the lives of our people and our country. I think this is the special responsibility of the women of India. We want to do a great deal for our country, but we have never regarded India as isolated from the rest of the world. What we want to do is to make a better world. So, we have to see India’s problems in the perspective of the larger world problems.