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xChaos 19. prosince 2011 ← komentářů 5501 ☯ 0 [3016x]
★★ [ + ] 2 [2x] [ - ] [informativní[x] pravdivé[x]]
[Zemřel filosof na trůně #vaclavhavel] → [/-/17052]
Keep on Rockin' in the Free World #rock #music #freedom #vaclavhavel

Zajímavé postřehy týkající se vztahu svobody a cenzury západní popkultury...

http://reason.com/archives/2011/12/18/keep-on-rockin-in-the-free-world
How the Velvet Underground and Václav Havel built a blueprint for toppling totalitarians and other censors

The remarkable two weeks of #Egyptian street protests that led to the resignation of longtime dictator Hosni #Mubarak were populated mostly by leaderless young people who could no longer tolerate being #censored ... For more than a decade, the Egyptian regime had waged a brutal and eventually losing battle against a burgeoning homegrown heavy #metal movement in a crackdown known as the "#Satanic Panic."
...
What I had seen that night was on some small level a revolution - or at least a concentrated act of defiance - played out to the fuzz and wail of heavy metal music. I had seen kids assert their right to rock. There is this expectation, a shared if unarticulated belief that these bands - like the legendary [Czech band] Plastic People of the Universe, who carried the ethos of revolution inside the psych-swirl of their avant-rock - herald some hope for future freedoms. Regardless of lyrical content, simply by existing, merely by banging head, [the Egyptian bands] Wyvern, Deathless Anguish and company are harbingers of change.
...
Charter 77, just like the #Plastic People of the Universe, is a relatively obscure reference in twenty-first-century #America. Yet, its 1970s-era call for freedom of expression in #communist #Europe is at the very center of the single-most foundational story of how supposed Western cultural decadence combined with #dissident aspirations in the unfree world to produce not just unprecedented #liberation but a useable blueprint for oppressed people everywhere to cast off the shackles of their masters.
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A hippie-hating countercultural figure, the teenaged Reed had been given electroshock treatments to "cure" his homosexual tendencies.
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No one is exactly sure how a copy of The Velvet Underground & Nico found its way to #Czechoslovakia before #Soviet tanks crushed the cultural opening of the #Prague #Spring in August 1968. After all, the March 1967 debut album by Andy Warhol's nihilistic house band barely sold in America, peaking at just 171. on the Billboard charts before quickly disappearing. Rock critics would not come around to declaring it one of the best albums ever made until decades later. There is that famous line, variously attributed to superproducer Brian #Eno or R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck, that "only a thousand people bought the record, but every one of them started a band."
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One month after the 1968 Soviet invasion, Hlavsa and some buddies started a band called the Plastic People of the Universe.
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"The most important lesson [about] the Velvet Underground", he concluded, was "the power of the human soul to transcend its darker levels."
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Now, imagine how it might have gone over in a totalitarian country where longhairs like #Hlavsa were arrested, literally, for having long hair, as well as for the crime of possessing unapproved music. Rock bands in Czechoslovakia required a license from the government, and in those days of communist "normalization," the Plastic People's was soon revoked.
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The actual Velvet Underground back in the United States was being used as a cautionary tale for parents about their drug-addicted teens.
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At the same time, the band's Czech apprentices were being portrayed on propagandistic communist television shows as dangerously nihilistic longhairs who might just convince wayward teens to #hijack an airplane.
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As an enthusiastic participant of the 1960 - "That was an extraordinarily interesting, fertile, and inspiring period, not only here, but in the culture of the entire world," he told an interviewer in 1997 - #Havel was a rock guy. He preferred the Stones to the Beatles and took from amplified music "a temperament, a nonconformist state of the spirit, an anti-establishment orientation, an aversion to philistines, and an interest in the wretched and humiliated," he would later write. This may help explain why, the year before, after more than a half decade of depressed indolence brought on by normalization and the experience of being banned in his own country, Havel had uncorked a piece of literary and political punk rock whose ramifications are still being felt.
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In April 1975, Havel sat down and, knowing that he'd likely be imprisoned for his efforts, wrote an open letter to his dictator, Gustáv Husák, explaining in fearless and painstaking detail just why and how #totalitarianism was ruining Czechoslovakia. "So far," Havel scolded Husák, "you and your government have chosen the easy way out for yourselves, and the most dangerous road for society: the path of inner decay for the sake of outward appearances; of deadening life for the sake of increasing uniformity; of deepening the spiritual and moral crisis of our society, and ceaselessly degrading human dignity, for the puny sake of protecting your own power."
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"Now the state could put you into jail simply for being the wrong sort of bloke." ("nepřizpůsobivý")
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"Somewhere, something slips out of joint and suddenly a particular event, because of an unforeseen interplay between its inner premises and more or less fortuitous external circumstances, crosses the threshold of its usual place in the everyday world, breaks through the shell of what it is supposed to be and what it seems, and reveals its innermost symbolic significance. And something originally quite ordinary suddenly casts a surprising light on the time and the world we live in, and dramatically highlights its fundamental questions"
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The essay ends with a classic description of Havel bumping into a film director who doesn't understand his sudden enthusiasm for defending a bunch of derelict, possibly drug-addled rock musicians.
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With this middle finger pointed at commie censors and other cunning shits, Václav Havel and his friends then launched Charter 77, arguably the most influential human rights organization in modern history.
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The Final Act, signed by President Gerald Ford, was roundly criticized at the time by American conservatives - and especially #neoconservatives - as a "betrayal" since, among other things, it codified the existing postwar borders of Europe, which meant accepting in treaty form the imperial Soviet subjugation of the Baltic countries of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. But the act also included important covenants on civil, political, and economic rights.
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It was the big bang that set off the dissident movement in Central Europe
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Havel spent most of the next five years in jail. But such arrests only served to make the plight of the dissidents more internationally famous and to drain what remaining sympathy there might have been among# Western #intellectuals for the projects of communism and #Marxism
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By the time communism imploded in 1989, Havel and his comrades had been preparing for the moment for over a decade, through exhaustive debate, peer review, coalition building, and acts of enormous personal courage. It was no accident that Czechoslovakia's liberation, as compared to the rest of the region, would be among the least violent and most poetic, that it would be called the "Velvet Revolution."
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Up until 1989, mainstream Western European political thought included a large and unhealthy appetite for government ownership of the means of production. The original Marshall Plan was an almost desperate attempt to prevent the kind of domestically popular (if externally manipulated) communist takeover that would submerge Czechoslovakia in 1948.
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Although media attention was rightly focused on the dramatic economic changes transforming Asia and the former Eastern Bloc, fully half of the world's #privatization in the first dozen years after the Cold War, as measured by revenue, took place in Western Europe. (tak tohle jsem fakt nevěděl)
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It was no accident that, in the midst of Washington's recent bailout of U.S. automakers, Swedish enterprise minister Maud Olofsson, when asked about the fate of struggling Saab, tersely announced, "The Swedish state is not prepared to own car factories."
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Liu Xiaobo of China's Charter 08 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 after heavy lobbying from Havel
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The Alexandria Declaration, like the original Charter 77, holds Arab-world governments accountable to international treaty obligations (the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and so on) and goes further in listing other treaties countries should join if they haven't already.
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It's far too soon, as of press time for this book, to declare 2011 the most consequential year for global freedom since 1989.
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agony over popular culture actually pays tribute to its potential liberatory effects, which range far beyond any particular form of entertainment
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If the critics of pop culture typically lack perspective, its practitioners often lack a sense of irony. In October 1989, a month before Germans pulled down the Berlin Wall and six weeks before the Velvet Revolution unfolded in Czechoslovakia, Neil Young released an album called Freedom, which featured the sardonic song Rockin' in the Free World, intended as a snarky attack on Ronald Reagan's legacy and George H. W. Bush's removal from brutal realities ranging from school violence to a thinning of the ozone layer. "We got a thousand points of light," snarls Young, "for the homeless man / We got a kinder, gentler / Machine gun hand." A minor hit in the United States, the song took on anthemic dimensions among the peaceful revolutionaries of Central Europe, who sang along with the chorus unironically while expressing themselves for the first time with something like unfettered abandon.

Tak, tady máte všechno, co nebylo zmíněné v mém původním článku. Vyplývá z toho, proč byla smrt Václava Havla v celosvětově revolučním roce 2011 tak symbolická. Končí tím jedno velké vyprávění o tom, jak totalitní systémy ve východní Evropě nesvrhl americký zbrojní průmysl - ale opovrhovaná, feťácko-levičácko-hipísácko-nehipisácko-dekadentní popkultura. Vypadá to skoro, jako bych to četl před tím, než jsem napsal tenhle článek - ale tak to není: já to prostě vím, vyrůstal jsem v tom. Dneska možná nebudeme Havlisti, možná budeme Žižekisti. Někde možná už vznikla nebo vznikne podobá nepředvídatelná koalice mezi někým z USA nebo Evropy - a někým z Egypta, Iránu, Indie nebo Číny. Mezinárodní dohody nebo technologie, kterými si mocní chtěli upevnit svoje postavení, se možná nečekaně obrátí proti nim. Změna nepřijde skrze nějakou kultivaci nenávisti a stupňování existujících trendů ad absurdum - ale přijde z nečekané strany, z nečekaného směru. Vytvoří se nečekaná spojenectví ... a hlavně doufejme, že to bude spíše komedie, než tragédie. Protože mezi žánry nejde přeskakovat neomezeně...

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