Since Vaclav Havel died the day Kim Jong Il’s death was announced, and that the two of them sat on different sides of totalitarian rule, many articles mention them together. Havel played a significant role in dismantling one regime. Kim maintained his.

My series on North Korean strategy concluded with limited methods to change North Korea. My limited number of ideas in North Korea makes me wonder if I might also not have found many ideas in Czechoslovakia too.

I haven’t studied Czechoslovakia or his activity so I can’t speak knowledgeably about them, but something worked if they brought about a bloodless revolution. If something worked there, it might work again in some form in North Korea. I would hope to be shown wrong or unimaginative in my understanding of North Korea.

I find applying things that worked before the best way to get things to work now. Studying successes helps you succeed. If you want to honor Vaclav Havel, I can’t think of a better way than to apply ideas and practices of him to achieve goals he did for other people.

With that, I link to his 1978 essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” to promote understanding living under totalitarian rule and a successful movement to bring about more freedom.

According to this site

Havel wrote his essay in 1978. He was arrested and jailed shortly after writing it. The essay had a profound impact on Polish activists. One Solidarity activist recalls: “This essay reached us in the Ursus factory in 1979, at a point when we felt we were at the end of the road … Reading [Havel’s essay] gave us the theoretical underpinnings for our activity.”

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