Parallel politics

pp. 123-154

in: Harald G. Skilling, Samizdat and an independent society in Central and Eastern Europe, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1989

Abstract

In a "post-totalitarian" society, as Václav Havel has called Czechoslovakia, "all politics in the traditional sense has been eliminated. People have no opportunity to express themselves politically in public, let alone to organise politically. The gap that results is filled by ideological ritual." In this situation, he wrote, "people's interest in political matters naturally dwindles and independent political thought and work, in so far as it exists at all, is seen by the majority as unrealistic, abstract, a kind of self-indulgent game, hopelessly distant from their everyday concerns; something admirable, but quite pointless, because on the one hand it is entirely utopian and on the other extraordinarily dangerous".¹