COLUMNISTS Vaclav Havel, dissident, poet and playwright, was the first post-communist president of the Czech Republic. In a famous essay, The Power of the Powerless, written under Soviet occupation of his country, he described a greengrocer who displayed in his window a sign saying “Workers of the World Unite!”
No one took the content of the declaration seriously – least of all the authorities who provided the sign, who would have been appalled at the prospect that the workers of the world might indeed unite. Czechoslovakia was not an especially brutal tyranny and the greengrocer would probably not have suffered sanctions for failing to give the placard a position of prominence. So what was the purpose of the display? Mr Havel argued that it represented a declaration of conformity. By placing the sign, the greengrocer said: “I do not want trouble.” He was responding to the human desire to avoid confrontation. That signal of compliance was what his rulers sought.
