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Totalitarianisms and authoritarianisms in Václav Havel Library

December 1, 2011

IllustrationThe association of CUFA history students in cooperation with Václav Havel Library invite you to the lecture of the director of CUFA Department of Political Science, PhDr. Radek Buben, on the theme of Totalitarianisms and Authoritarianisms (or "an intelligent non-politologist's companion into the world of strange concepts").

The lecture will cover less-known concepts of non-democratic regimes, putting them into context of Czech academic as well as nonspecialist (e.g. journalistic) debates. Attention will be given especially to less accentuated approaches to the study of problems of non-democracies and their understanding. The objective is to offer not only different interpretative framework of Czech Communism than those offered by the classical theory of totalitarianism, but also to show its unambiguously political and conservative drive.

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Speech to Joint Session of the United States Congress, Washington

„We are still a long way from that „family of man;“ in fact, we seem to be receding from the ideal rather than drawing closer to it. Interests of all kinds: personal, selfish, state, national, group and, if you like, company interests still considerably outweigh genuinely common and global interests. We are still under the sway of the destructive and thoroughly vain belief that man is the pinnacle of creation, and not just a part of it, and that therefore everything is permitted. There are still many who say they are concerdend not for themselves but for the cause, while they are demonstrably out for themselves and not for the cause at all. We are still destroying the planet that was entrusted to us, and its environment. We still close our eyes to the growing social, ethnic and cultural conflicts in the world. From time to time we say that the anonymous megamachinery we have created for ourselves no longer serves us but rather has enslaved us, yet we still fail to do anything about it.“

Václav Havel:
Speech to Joint Session of the United States Congress, Washington, February 21, 1990

Čechoslováci v gulaguCuba´s Black Spring