In short, Kundera and the THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING are about destiny and the fact that each individual cannot really do much to change fate.
The system or linear path of history will take care of itself. The individual has much less to say.
Suddenly, my train took off and we began to travel into Czechoslovakia that April 1989 morning. I returned to my train cabin as did the soon-to-be-no-longer-exiled Czech national.
The train quickly stopped on the other side of this border--and eventually took off again.
Suddenly, I realized that I still had not had my passport returned to me.
So, I went back to the cabin where I had met the Czech-national just some minutes before.
He was gone.
Had he been taken to prison? Or was he just taken in for questioning and released? Or had he simply escaped into the trees? Click here.
BUDAPEST, 1987: PRE-REVOLUTION EVOLUTION?
Two years before heading to Prague, I had made a trip to Budapest.
Similar to Czechoslovakia, several decades earlier Hungarians had tried to put a more human face on communism.
That was in 1956, just as the world was settling down to watch Egypt take over the Sinai and Suez Canal, only to find Israel—backed by France and the UK—trying to take it back from Egypt. In the midst of this first post-colonial Middle East War, the USA and NATO were unable to offer any help to the Hungarians in need. They were slaughtered by Soviet forces. Click here.
NOTE: For some political reviewers, this would be similar to the passivity today, with which NATO stays on the sidelines in terms of telling Russia to back-off in Georgia, Ukrania, or elsewhere in the Caspian region, i.e. NATO is fairly fully preoccupied with wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
On the other hand, thirty years after 1956, one group of critical Marxists would describe the failed 1956 Hungarian revolution as follows:
“Even though its outcome was a tragic defeat, in which at least 20,000 Hungarian workers were killed and countless others injured, imprisoned and forced into hiding or exile, it nevertheless was undoubtedly the most significant pointer to future developments in the Stalinist states since the consolidation of the bureaucracy around Stalin in the 1920s. It was the most vivid confirmation of the perspectives of Trotsky, that the workers under Stalinist dictatorship, far from accepting their conditions or demanding a return to capitalism, would move in a political revolution to take power into their own hands. The tremendously inspiring events of the Hungarian October are full of lessons for the workers of Eastern Europe and the whole world.”
Looking back on the 1950s, i.e. a time when American’s most cynical anti-communists were painting the decade as the world’s final stand against an all-encompassing (but in many cases imaginary) monstrous-unitary communism, European communism was actually being challenged on numerous fronts.
Earlier in the decade, Tito had already taken Yugoslavia onto its on course. Under Tito, Yugoslavia would come to have a primary position in the non-aligned movement
