“… precisely these and similar questions reveal to me ever anew how deeply many Western intellectuals do not understand – and in some respects, cannot understand – just what is taking place here, what it is that we, the so-called ‘dissidents’, are striving for and, most of all, what is the overall meaning of it. Take, for instance, the question, ‘What can we do for you?’ A great deal, to be sure. The more support, interest, and solidarity of free-thinking people in the world we enjoy, the less the danger of being arrested, and the greater the hope that ours will not be a voice crying in the wilderness. And yet, somewhere deep within the question there is a built-in misunderstanding. After all, in the last instance the point is not to help us, a handful of ‘dissidents’, to keep out of jail a bit more of the time. It is not even a question of helping these nations, Czechs and Slovaks, to live a bit better, a bit more freely. They need first and foremost to help themselves. They have waited for the help of others far too often, depended on it far too much, and far too many times came to grief: either the promised help was withdrawn at the last moment or it turned into the very opposite of their expectations. In the deepest sense, something else is at stake – the salvation of us all, of myself and my interlocutor equally. Or is it not something that concerns us all equally? Are not my dim prospects or, conversely, my hopes his dim prospects and hopes as well? Was not my arrest an attack on him and the deceptions to which he is subjected an attack on me as well? Is not the destruction of humans in Prague a destruction of all humans? Is not indifference to what is happening here or even illusions about it a preparation for the kind of misery elsewhere? Is not their misery the presupposition of ours? The point is not that some Czech dissident, as a person in distress, needs help. I could best help myself out of distress simply by ceasing to be a ‘dissident’. The point is what that dissident’s flawed efforts and his fate tell us and mean, what they attest about the condition, the destiny, the opportunities and the problems of the world, the respects in which they are or could be food for thought for others as well, for the way they see their, and so our, shared destiny, in what ways they are a warning, a challenge, a danger or a lesson for those who visit us.”
– Václav Havel, “Politics and Conscience” (1984)
