Was Hayek a One-Worlder?
Friedrich Hayek in Gothenburg, Sweden 1981 (Roger Tillberg / Alamy Stock Photo).China, Model of the Modern Digital Dictatorship
(image: shutterstock.com)Thinking About the Holodomor: Part I
Monument to the Victims of the Holodomor, with the statue "Bitter Memory of Childhood" in foreground, Kiev, Ukraine (DmyTo/Shutterstock.com).China’s Cultural Revolution and the Social Justice Left
Poster of Chairman Mao, China's Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976 (contributed to alamy.com by Shawshots)An Unsung Opponent of Totalitarian Power
A Grimly Effective Death of Stalin
Steve Buscemi, Sylvestra Le Touzel, and Gerald Lepkowski in The Death of StalinChurchill, Orwell, and Why We Admire Them
George Orwell and Winston Churchill (Images: J. Russell and Sons/BBC via Wikimedia Commons).Building the “Parallel Polis”
Vaclav Havel, a dissident playwright and leading member of the Czechoslovak opposition Civic Forum, who drafted large parts of Charter 77, the declaration which helped attract international attention to the civil rights abuses in Czechoslovakia, waves 10 December 1989 to the crowd of thousands of demonstrators gathered on Prague's Wenceslas Square, celebrating the communist capitulation and nomination of the new government formed by Marian Calfa from Slovak dissident movement the Public Against Violence. At the end of 1989, Havel was elected first president of the then Czechoslovakia when the state-communist system crumbled in the Velvet Revolution. AFP PHOTO LUBOMIR KOTEK (Photo credit should read LUBOMIR KOTEK/AFP/Getty Images)Charter 77, the human rights group in the former Czechoslovakia dedicated to recognizing and protesting the lawlessness and abuses of the communist regime, turned 40 last month, and the milestone was marked by a panel discussion in Washington sponsored by the Czech Embassy and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
“The Enduring Significance of Charter 77” featured leading scholars and also Martin Palouš, one of the original 241 signatories of the Charter, who became his country’s ambassador to the United States a decade after the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Palouš called the Charter movement “a candle in the middle of the night”—the night having fallen over Czechoslovakia with the thunderous Soviet invasion of 1968. The movement emerged quietly during the dark days of what the communists called “normalization”—the restoration of “really existing socialism” after the 1968 invasion quashed the experiment in liberalization known as the Prague Spring.
Beer Street, Gin Lane, and Blurred (Moral) Vision
We like to consider totalitarianism a thing of the past, at least in Western countries, but its temptations are permanent and its justifications never very far away. Since no man is an island, no human action concerns only the actor himself. John Stuart Mill’s famous principle in On Liberty (1859) that the only good reason to interfere with someone’s freedom is to prevent him from doing harm to others is therefore as effective a barrier against totalitarianism as tissue paper against a tsunami. Potential harm to others can be alleged in practically any human action.
