Literary Hub – How a 1977 Czech Writers’ Manifesto Applies to the Stark Realities of America in 2025
Illustration from article, no credit.How a 1977 Czech Writers’ Manifesto Applies to the Stark Realities of America in 2025
What We Can All Learn From the Courage of Charter 77
By Jonny Diamond, October 10, 2025
The wonderful Czech writer Ivan Klima died this past weekend at the age of 94. Klima lived a remarkable, principled life, having survived both the Nazi occupation of Prague (he spent three years in the concentration camp at Terezin as a boy), and the post-1968 repression of the Soviet regime.
Unlike his more famous literary compatriots, Milan Kundera and Josef Skvorecky, Klima stuck around in Czechoslovakia, despite being forbidden from publishing for 20 years. For two decades Klima was consigned primarily to menial work, as a street sweeper, bricklayer, orderly… But he kept writing. And he kept resisting, through the publication of literary samizdat (his own and others), organizing clandestine salons, and helping to disseminate Charter 77, an artists’ manifesto named for the year it was written.
Editor’s Note: Charter 77 appended below.
Charter-77DownloadThe main authors behind Charter 77—Václav Havel, Jan Patočka, and Pavel Kohout, who were responding to the Communist government’s crackdown on free expression—generated its moral (and to some extent legal) authority by citing two UN human rights covenants signed by the Czechoslovak government in 1968, in the lead up to the so-called Prague Spring. [Spoiler: the Russians didn’t approve, sent tanks into Prague, and crushed any hope of a freer society].
The Communist regime quickly made it a crime to distribute copies of Charter 77, calling it “an anti-state, anti-socialist, and demagogic, abusive piece of writing,” and deeming its signatories to be “traitors and renegades” and “agents of imperialism.” As for how they saw themselves, the organizers behind Charter 77 were very clear about being nothing more than an ad hoc confederation of likeminded people, and certainly not an opposition party. In their own words, they were a “loose, informal, and open association of people . . . united by the will to strive individually and collectively for respect for human and civil rights in our country and throughout the world.” (So, more of a shared set of beliefs than a formal organization, like, you know, antifa.)
Why is a 50-year-old writers’ manifesto worth thinking about now? First of all, the aforementioned human rights covenants, cited at length in the charter, map neatly over what we still like to think of as western democratic ideals of free expression and individual liberty. And just as Charter 77 decries the state crack-down on those ideals in 1970s Czechoslovakia, we too can cite many and obvious authoritarian crimes from the Trump administration circa 2025.
From government officials menacing late-night comedians to masked thugs landing helicopters on apartment buildings, from Democratic officials threatened with jail time by the president to the brazen flouting of the rule of law, America’s decades-long drift into authoritarianism has sped up dramatically in the last nine months. We are in the middle of an anti-democratic sea-change, and as each week passes the likes of Stephen Miller grow bolder in flouting their fascist inclinations.
But it’s never too late to fight for basic human freedoms, for the right to be who you are and to say what you want, the right to not go hungry or get shot at school or lose everything because you get sick. Luckily, Charter 77—which is but one of countless historical examples of courage in the face of tyranny—offers a clear blueprint for how we might respond to the Trump administration’s attacks on free expression and the rule of law:
With regard to the targeting of pro-Palestinian ideas on college campuses:
The right to freedom of expression, for example, guaranteed by Article 19 of the first-mentioned covenant, is in our case purely illusory. Tens of thousands of our citizens are prevented from working in their own fields for the sole reason that they hold views differing from official ones, and are discriminated against and harassed in all kinds of ways by the authorities and public organizations.
Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.
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