Regime Toppling
"What Have You Done Today To Help?"
March 30, 2025 (edited March 31, 2025)
I spent years translating some of the poetry of Václav Havel from Czech into English, during which time I read most all of what he’d written that had been translated into English. I came to know Havel’s translator, Paul Wilson, who was expelled from Czechoslovakia to live in his native Canada. Paul helped me translate a fascinating little parable of verse Havel wrote in 1977. A friend from Thetford, VT also helped me translate this poem. I then went on to translate more than a dozen of Havel’s poems into English. None have been published save the one poem Wilson and my Thetford friend collaborated on to translate with me.
I can assure you, one doesn’t translate the poetry of someone like Václav Havel without learning about the trying times in which he lived, about his life and his friendships, about his spirit and desires, about the time he spent imprisoned while writing letters to his wife, Olga, in slant verse and oblique sentences to avoid the government censors who monitored his every movement, about his very soul.
Havel was a giant who could move countries into and out of war or peace. Of course, he chose peace through non-violent means, thankfully. He was a man of extreme intellect, a wonderful sense of humor, a love for American rock music as an expressive art form that he believed mattered deeply to a well-functioning society, and a human being of high ethical and moral character. These are the reasons why he was chosen as a leader and revered by his fellow citizens of Czechoslovakia and the Czceh Republic. It takes courage, honesty, and the passion and compassion to serve others selflessly that propelled Havel to the presidency. He was a dissident in the face of some of the worst atrocities ever seen by modern society under the Stalin regime that subjugated Havel, his people, and the very essence of the creative and free expression every society needs to thrive.
So, with that as a backdrop, I’ll tell you what I’ve done today to help others learn how to overthrow a regime. I’ve taken to the keyboard and this platform to write about some insights I’ve gleaned from Stalinism and convey the ideology of totalitarianism I’ve learned from spending much time with Havel’s poetry, plays, prose, the people of the Czech Republic, and their country’s history that speaks volumes about the perils of centralization—the concentration of power under a single authority.
How does a totalitarian, autocratic, or dictatorial regime develop?
First, identify a strong man or puppet of other strong men and catapult him into the political space. The operative words here seem to be “man” or “men.” Look up a list of totalitarian regimes online and you’ll realize they’ve all been led by men. Perhaps it’s a testosterone thing. Or maybe a failure of personality. Sociopaths and narcissists do tend to fit this bill. So do the greedy and deceitful. And those who lack compassion for others.
Next, take things away from people. Take away their money, their freedom, their belief in a system of government that they can trust. Take away institutions upon which they have relied for decades or centuries. Deconstruct trust. Deconstruct government. People will feel hobbled, confused, and not know where to turn for support.
Third, encourage and celebrate greed. People will begin to see money and power as their only hope. They will begin to respect and fear those who have wealth, power, and control over others.
Fourth, instill fear. Once people have lost their money, the next thing they must lose is their hope. This will effectively centralize power into the hands of the few. Fear is the precursor to: 1. more fear, and 2. a sense of hopelessness. Once hopelessness among a populace has been achieved, people will lose their way. They will move like lambs led to slaughter, bleating, powerless to do anything but follow the path of breadcrumbs the leader, ruler, monarch, dictator, autocrat, or oligarch lays down for them.
Fifth, undertake an economic, militaristic, artistic, educational, and social leveling of society broadly. This will force people to prefer death to life rather than be ruled by the regime. They will become exhausted and dehumanized. It’s the ultimate triumph of the oligarch or authoritarian ruler. Complete control over people and country ensures the ruler’s ability to garner as much wealth as possible for themself and their family and close-knit circle of political cronies. Money, not compassion, drives the political and social regime-machine forward. The idea is to first ruin the country, steamrolling it into submission, so that controlling it will be easy. Then, throw breadcrumbs for people to follow like animals on their way to slaughter.
Oh, and even those who retain some measure of wealth are doomed to live in fear as they question why society is so subdued, why the masses are morose, why there is no sparkle or fun, goodwill, or camaraderie throughout their country. They will also be bitten by the intense psychology of mistrust, fear, and a large-scale desire to flee to some other part of the world where life is better. No populace can withstand complete autocratic control. It will destroy minds and ruin a nation in time. Even the rich will be undone.
Finally, establish a firm grip on mind control. During the days of Stalin’s reign over Eastern Europe, propaganda was a powerful tool. In Havel’s essay, The Power of the Powerless, he explains how the government controlled its citizens by forcing grocery store owners to put signs in their store windows stating “Workers of the World Unite!” The grocer, a trusted member of each community, therefore appeared to be supporting the government’s mandate of worker solidarity and unification. The underlying code here is supplication or fealty to the ruling regime. As shoppers believed their grocer had complied, they, too, would feel compelled to accept the governments heavy hand and become supplicants to whatever it wanted them to do, act, or be. Their very essence was shorn from them.
In a further bit of research, I learned about another piece of propaganda I had to translate by working with two elderly Czech citizens who could remember being taught a Stalinist slogan when they were in grade school. It went, roughly translated, like this: “Grandma and grandpa nibble away at our sandwiches.” It’s a sentence that seems innocuous at first blush, but the weight of it consumed and subsumed generations of Czechs who were led to believe from as early as kindergarten that their grandparents were taking food way from them, harming them. Such were the insidious tactics of Stalin and his propagandists. They played the short game with the grocery store signage and the long game with teachers feeding their youngest of learners in government-controlled schools curricula and insidious messaging that stuck for the rest of their lives.
This simple slogan came at a time when the government saw the elderly as a financial drain on society. They wanted them moved from cities and suburbs to rural compounds where the government controlled what they did, what they owned, how they dressed, what they ate, and where they lived—or died. And, more often than not, they died. It was a massive money-saving scheme that was bred into the consciousness of the populace over years as the accepted way to treat family matriarchs and patriarchs. The government, the Stalinist regime, had won. People were so afraid of Stalin and his centralization of power and military control that they would turn in family members for not speaking positively about the government and its programs. At last, with a simple slogan taught to grade schoolers, they’d gotten to the point where family members would willingly send family members off to die in government camps in the country out of sight and out of mind.
Stalin was a master of mind control. So were Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Amin, Ghaddafi, Castro, Pol Pot, and other “strong man” dictators throughout history. But Stalin could be overcome, and he was.
It was Václav Havel’s essay mentioned above that instilled hope in the people of his country. He helped them understand that they had within their grasp the power to overturn the enemy that had taken control of them and their country. They had the power to move out of a position of powerlessness and into freedom. They had the one thing that all greed-focused rulers fear: the Truth. The ideology of speaking the truth to power is the most powerful of rulers, and the most effective of friends to a subdued nation’s people. The entire power structure developed by a greedy ruler will be unseated and reduced to nothing when the truth is exposed. This is why the founders of the United States were so keen to ensure the First Amendment to the Constitution was drafted, and that freedom of speech and expression, and a free press, were celebrated and cherished as good and right for society.
It was Havel who recognized the profound crisis of human identity when life is lived within a lie. He knew a nation could not survive a crisis of lies. Nor could the people who comprise the country. Their souls, their very selves, would be crushed. They would become automatons incapable of emotion because it is the truth that sets us all free as individuals and as expressive beings. We need the truth to survive. Without it, we wither and die.
Today, here in the United States, I understand from my research and writing about Havel and his country that some organized group has taken whole chapters from the Stalinist playbook and put them into motion. They’ve spent time sowing, first, the seeds of lies, to destabilize trust in the media. Then, they began delivering their own lies by creating a “fake news” campaign such that people began to believe that those calling out the “fake newscasters” had something truthful to say. In fact, they didn’t and they don’t. All they’ve done and continue to do is destabilize people’s trust in one of the most celebrated forms of free speech the world has ever known—the American media. And, now, they are trying to destabilize people’s beliefs in another most worthy and trustworthy institution—the American judiciary. Once our courts, judges, and laws fall to the lies of the regime, the country could fall into a deeper and darker hole than Eastern Europe experienced during the reign of Stalin. People will become fearful and willing to follow anyone who promises them a way forward. But it will be a false light at the end of a dark tunnel. It will be a manufactured light composed of lies that perpetuate more lies and fears to keep the rulers in power, garnering wealth and feeding upon a populace living in and fearing darkness.
Okay. You might think I’ve somehow fabricated the above. Or that history doesn’t really matter today. Well, in fact, I’m watching history repeat itself right now, today, in the United Sates of America. I hear plenty about Hitler and the Nazi regime, and I know something of that and its atrocities, but I can tell you that history is being made today from the playbook of Joseph Stalin, one of the most feared and cruel leaders the modern world has ever known. He stopped at nothing, not at killing millions to establish his supremacy over nations. Oh, and here’s a quote worth considering: “Between 1936 and 1938, Stalin eradicated his political opponents and those deemed "enemies of the working class" in the Great Purge, after which he had absolute control of the government.” Vesting control of government in one person is a bad, a very bad, idea. Our country is headed down that path as I write. And I hope people will begin to see that what I’ve written above about Eastern Europe is becoming reality right here at home.
Now under threat are Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. This smacks of how Stalin’s propaganda machine taught children that their grandparents were not worth feeding, or caring for or about. It’s frightening. So, too, are our financial markets, schools, food supply chains, art and history organizations, businesses, and court systems now under threat and becoming destabilized. Centralized power is a threat to democracy. Our legislators have not read, or choose to ignore, the history books. They are being forced out of their way of life and will soon feel the painful pinch of being on the outside looking in, wondering what happened as they kept silent. This will happen to Democrats and Republicans alike. Such is the desire and hunger for power by the few that will impact the many, even those who think they are close to the center of the power structure of the day. The playbook is clear—destabilize, instill fear, create confusion, sow lies, question the truth, assume control of the military and the judiciary, collapse the country’s art and history museums, libraries, educational institutions, and the country will be ripe to be led by a chosen few.
Late in his essay, Havel asked, “What is to be done?” He knew that expansionist powers were anathema to a freely operating and trusting society. He knew that lies and greed were evil. He knew that people need other people to thrive, and that community and goodwill are the keys to a thriving nation. Unwittingly, he may have been the first person to fully grasp the need for interconnected global forces that make for a civil society. He knew people must participate freely in economic decision-making in the most collaborative of ways. He knew truth needs to reign supreme, for only then could the post-democratic state that Czechoslovakia found itself in be turned into a free and open democracy where people could openly express themselves and appreciate the expressions and contributions of all others.
Today’s America smacks of a post-democracy, a failing democracy, a fragile nation that is failing its citizens by overwhelming them with chaos borne from fear mongering and hatred of “the other.” We are “the other” and must make the Truth known that this nation was built by great people to be great. It was given the freedom to speak freely so everyone could hear, learn, and grow. Its government and institutions, while bloated perhaps, can certainly be pared down and streamlined, money can be saved. But to wholesale gut, eviscerate, and throw out to die those institutions created to establish and protect democracy is the wrong way to create necessary change. It is our institutions that have made America great, coupled with our people, our families and friends, who have made those institutions work. We, “the other” in us all, must pull together and chart a course forward that recognizes the good in each of us. Truth must triumph lest we live out our lives within a lie to perish.
Let’s be clear. Science and technology will not create a better society for us. Only we can create a better society for ourselves and our nation. America now seems to be circling the drain of greed and its corollary, autocracy. It is hungry to greedily co-opt other nations and upset a world order that has been operating with relative stability for decades since World War II ended. We’re seeing greed play out on a global scale. A single man is taking control, and this is bad. Tariffs create trade wars. Trade wars are, by any other name, wars waged on nations and their people. History proves this to be true. We have not advanced to a new level of humanity that can do without one another engaging with and appreciating the diverse and expressive thoughts and creations of everyone around us. That includes letting businesses and people operate freely without excessive government restraints though tariffs and taxes. America was founded on that principle to free itself from a greedy monarchy. We are social beings who will be driven into debt and depression through greed and the fear mongering that is the order of the day today. We must, collectively, speak our minds as truthfully and honestly as we can.
And so, to close, Havel suggests we must live in truth. What does this mean? It means, as Havel so succinctly stated about living within the truth:
…I naturally do not have in mind only products of conceptual thought, such as a protest or a letter written by a group of intellectuals. It can be any means by which a person or a group revolts against manipulation: anything from a letter by intellectuals to a workers' strike, from a rock concert to a student demonstration, from refusing to vote in the farcical elections to making an open speech at some official congress, or even a hunger strike, for instance. If the suppression of the aims of life is a complex process, and if it is based on the multifaceted manipulation of all expressions of life, then, by the same token, every free expression of life indirectly threatens the post-totalitarian system politically, including forms of expression to which, in other social systems, no one would attribute any potential political significance, not to mention explosive power.
Oh, and that poem I translated that was written by Havel back in 1977? I don’t have the rights to publish it in full here, even in translated form, but I can tell you its title is, improbably, “The Little Owl Who Brayed.” We must bray, whinny, cackle, holler, sing, and shout more loudly now that ever before. And the final line of the poem? It reads as follows…
Dig in. Resist. Persist…
So, my dear Facebook friend, to answer your question of, “what have I done today to overthrow the regime?”; I’ve written this for you and everyone who care to live in truth with me.
Dave Celone writes from Sharon, Vermont on the day after an ice storm took out power to his house. Thankfully, he has plenty of wood for the wood stove. And plenty of rock-n-roll music to keep him happy.