Fight! Fight!

This is a fascinating essay: Kundera vs. Havel, 1968, just after the tanks rolled in. Kundera comes down on the side of optimism, yet concerned about further rocking the boat because Czechoslovakia is a small nation; Havel, on the other hand, calls for a more active Czechoslovak society, pointing out that

Really: if we are going to persuade each other that a country that wanted to establish freedom of expression --something that is a commonplace in most of the civilized world --and that wanted to prevent the omnipotence of the secret police, stood as a result of this at the center of world history, then we will not seriously become anything but smug fakes, ridiculous in our provincial messianism! Freedom and the rule of law are the first preconditions of a normally and healthily functioning social organism, and if some state tries, after years of absence, to renew them, it is not doing anything historically immense, but simply trying to do away with its own abnormality, to normalize…

As they say, read the whole thing. The Havel quote is better, but Kundera's no fool either.