Living History by Unknown (best non fiction books of all time .txt) 📕

could exchange messages undetected by the authorities. Music, particularly American rock music, was instrumental in keeping hope alive after the 1968 Soviet crackdown. In 1977, Havel led protests following the arrest and trial of a Czechoslovakian rock band called the Plastic People of the Universe, named for Frank Zappa lyrics. Having signed a human rights manifesto known as Charter 77, and been sentenced to hard labor for being a “subversive,”

he drew on his literary and intellectual ideas to sustain him. A collection of letters he wrote from prison to his late wife, Olga, is now a classic of dissident literature.

Havel, a political philosopher as much as a playwright, believed that globalization often exacerbated nationalistic and ethnic rivalries. Rather than uniting people in a common global culture, a mass culture in which everyone wears the same jeans, eats the same fastfood and listens to the same music doesn’t inevitably bring people closer. Rather, he argued, it can make them less secure about who they are, and, as a result, lead to extreme efforts-including religious fundamentalism, violence, terrorism, ethnic cleansing and even genocide-to validate and retain distinct identities. Havel’s theory had particular relevance to the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe, where intolerance and nationalistic tensions had begun to flare up, particularly in places like the former Yugoslavia and Soviet Union.

Havel successfully lobbied Bill and other American leaders to move the headquarters of Radio Free Europe from Berlin to Prague. During the Cold War, the U.S. government had sponsored Radio Free Europe to challenge Communist propaganda throughout the Soviet empire. In a post-Cold War Europe no longer divided by an Iron Curtain, Havel reasoned that Radio Free Europe should take on a new role―promoting democracy. Both Bill and the U.S. Congress agreed with Havel’s logic, and in 1994 approved the move of the RFE headquarters to Prague, where it was housed in the old Soviet-style Parliament at one corner of historic Wenceslas Square. This is where Soviet tanks had parked after rolling into the city to squelch a budding democracy movement in the summer of 1968.

Havel understood political symbolism.

I spoke at Radio Free Europe headquarters on July 4―an Independence Day message broadcast to twentyfive million listeners in Central and Eastern Europe and the New Independent States. I applauded the role Radio Free Europe had played before the revolution, when many Czechs held their radios toward the window so they could pick up the RFE signal and tune in to Western broadcasts. Inspired by Havel’s warnings about the downsides of globalization and cultural homogenization, I called for “an alliance of democratic values” that would help people confront “the unavoidable questions of the twentyfirst century,” like balancing individual and community rights, raising families amidst the pressures of the mass media and consumer culture, and retaining our ethnic pride and national identity while cooperating regionally and globally.

I said that democracy is a work-in-progress, one that our own nation, after more than two centuries, was still trying to perfect. Building and sustaining a free society is like a three-legged stool: one leg is a democratic government, the second is a free market economy and the third is a civil society―the civic associations, religious institutions, voluntary efforts, NGOs and individual acts of citizenship that together weave the fabric of democratic life. In the newly free countries, civil society is as important as free elections and free markets to internalize democratic values in citizens’ hearts, minds and everyday lives.

I closed with a story Madeleine had told me about a tour she had made through western Czech Republic in 1995 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. In every town she visited, the Czech people waved American flags with forty-eight stars. American troops had passed out the flags a half century earlier, and the Czechs had preserved them through years of Soviet domination, just as they had kept faith that freedom would eventually come.

I was delighted to spend time with Madeleine after our trip in 1995 to the U.N.

women’s conference in China. She and I were determined to build on Beijing and continue to advocate for the importance of women’s issues and social development in U.S.

foreign policy. After she became Secretary of State, we had regular lunches in her private dining room on the seventh floor of the State Department, joined by her Chief of Staff, Elaine Shocas, and Melanne. Over time, we changed some minds and helped shift the foreign policy agenda so that it more aptly reflected our nation’s democratic values of equality and inclusion.

Madeleine and I became allies because of our shared vision and experience, which included Wellesley College. We also became friends, and in the three days we spent in Prague, we talked nonstop during a splendid boat trip on the Vltava River past Prague Castle while July Fourth fireworks were set off in our honor. We walked around Prague, and she pointed out local sights and greeted well-wishers in her native Czech.

One moment from the trip epitomized Madeleine’s resourcefulness and pragmatism.

Before a meeting with Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus, she and I had to review some confidential diplomatic information, but there was no private place to meet. Suddenly Madeleine grabbed my arm and tugged me toward a door.

“Follow me,” she said. The next thing I knew, we were huddled in the ladies’ rest room―the perfect, and only, spot available for two women to have a private conversation.

Madeleine and I left Prague for Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia and the seat of a government then headed by Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar, a throwback to the era of authoritarian regimes. He wanted to outlaw nongovernmental organizations, seeing them as threats to his rule. Before our trip, NGO representatives asked if I would attend a gathering of NGOs scheduled during my visit to draw greater attention to Meciar’s repressive treatment of these organizations and to highlight his unwillingness to embrace democracy.

My presence at the meeting, held in the Concert Hall, home of the Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra, emboldened the participants to speak frankly