Velvet Valentine

A Václav Love Triangle for Truth

Statue of Václav the Good - Prague, Czechoslovakia during the 1989 “Velvet Revolution” [Suspendable Edit]

Václav the Good, or as we’re more likely to know him in the West, Wenceslas I, is the patron saint of Bohemia; the modern day Czech Republic. As the lore goes, this Václav was Prince of Bohemia from 921 until his death which was likely in 935, but may also have been in 929; or perhaps another year in that timeframe. I call it lore because even the best historical accounts seem fanciful at best, yet likely contain some threads of truth.

Boleslav the Cruel was Václav the Good’s brother…see what I mean? Anyways, most accounts, including the ones deemed reputable include a tale of Boleslav hatching an assassination plot against Václav. Vratislaus I, was the Duke of Bohemia and a Christian, while their mother, Drahomíra, was a Bohemian pagan, even though she was baptized a Christian prior to the wedding. Dad died in battle when Václav was 13. By the time he was 18, he was now Duke, but it didn’t come without hardship.

Aside from his father being gone, his grandmother, Ludmila was also dead. Killed by the hands, or at least order, of Václav’s mom,Drahomíra. Ludmila had taken to Václav even before his dad died and helped raise him in the Christian tradition. Meanwhile, Drahomíra despised Ludmila and Václav too. She was much more taken to Boleslav, and seemingly more motherly to him as well, since she raised him in accordance with her own pagan beliefs and her resentment for Bohemian Christians; even if they were family.

Legend has it that Boleslav, like any good pagan, was not beyond using someone else’s Christian faith to spring an assassination plot. Boleslav wanted the power that his brother had. He wanted to be Duke of Bohemia. He had his mother’s backing. He likely looked down on Václav’s piety towards the poor, widows, orphans, and even prisoners. So, in an attempt to seize power, he invited Václav to a church dedication. As the tradition has it, Václav was on his way to pray at the recently dedicated church when Boleslav’s men attacked him. As the rightful Duke fell, Boleslav ran him through with a lance.

Before I get too far afield into ancient Czech history, I must steer away from Václav the Good because there are at least two more Václav’s we must get to! Nonetheless, Václav the Good’s martyrdom gave rise to a desire for heroic virtue in the region, and undoubtedly led to Václav becoming a prominent name there (and why there are two others we have to talk about) even into the present era.

About a month before Romania’s bloody revolution kicked off in Timișoara, Czechoslovakia’s relatively peaceful revolution, or “Velvet Revolution,” began in Prague. The dominos of communist rule were falling, and in rapid succession. In Romania, 1300 protestors would die and nearly 3000 of them would be wounded. This was not the case in Czechoslovakia. All it took there was the myth of one death.

On November 16, 1989, students organized a peaceful protest in Bratislava. The following day marked the 50th anniversary of the Nazi storming of Prague University in 1939 where 1200 students were arrested and 9 killed. The 16th was the kindling. The 17th, the match. A myth about a student killed at the hands of the feared “red berets” was the spark (or red phosphorous striking surface for you literalists out there 😂).

November 17, 1989, brings us to our next Václav. Václav Havel. He helped organize and push for additional peaceful protests throughout the country. Following Havel’s lead, more students organized a mass demonstration on the 17th to honor International Students' Day, and mark the 50th anniversary of student Jan Opletal's murder by the Nazi regime. By around 7:30pm that evening, riot police stopped the peaceful protestors who had taken to the streets of Prague. The blocked off all escape routes and attacked the protesters.

This government led action created an atmosphere of fear and despair by suppressing the peaceful protests in Prague which led to a hoax about a deceased student named Martin Šmíd. The story was fabricated by Drahomíra Dražská while she awaited medical treatment after being injured in the protest herself. Dražská, who worked at the college, shared her false account with several people the following day, including the wife of a journalist who helped spread the false account. This incident galvanized the public and ignited the revolution. Within a few days, protests surged to 500,000 people. Nothing would stop the toppling of Czechoslovakia’s communist regime.

By the end of December 1989, Václav Havel was Czechoslovakia’s president. The first non-communist president there in more than 40 years. He would remain president of Czechoslovakia, and then the Czech Republic, until 2003. There was nothing ordinary about his rise to such a position. He was a playwright turned political dissident. His stance against a corrupt and evil government led to numerous imprisonments, along with continuous government surveillance and interrogations by the secret police (wouldn’t be a Last Line Substack post without some secret police!)

Still, to understand peaceful revolutionary Václav and to understand the 1989 Velvet Revolution, we must go back a couple of decades. Havel’s political activism, which really is a poor term since he quite simply was a patriot standing firm on his convictions and beliefs, began to intensify in 1968. Czechoslovakia was invaded by the Soviet Union, Poland, the Bulgaria, and Hungary. All of these countries were signatories of the Warsaw Pact, so one would imagine they’d be allied. But, Czechoslovakia was essentially not communist enough. There was a movement swelling there. The government began to loosen restrictions on media and speech.

In essence they were taking steps to move away from being a police state. All good police states have to have government intervention in the press and privates citizen’s speech. A few other Warsaw Pact countries refused to participate in the invasion, including our friends in Romania. Nonetheless, the Soviet Union being the mothership, could not let these new steps towards freedom stand. It was during this time that Václav Havel assisted the resistance. Once the iron fist of mother Russia had control, he was banned from the theater which had been his primary source of income because of his playwright background.

If we jump forward another decade or so, Havel is seen as an instrumental figure in Charter 77, a Czechoslovak human rights initiative formed in January 1977. Charter 77 was a response to the government’s failure to uphold the human rights provisions outlined in the 1975 Helsinki Accords. It was not an official organization but rather an informal civic movement that criticized the communist government for its repression and lack of political freedoms.

The manifesto, signed by intellectuals, dissidents, and activists, including Václav Havel, demanded that the Czechoslovak government honor its legal obligations to protect human rights. The document was quickly deemed subversive by the regime of course, leading to persecution, arrests, and job losses for many signatories. Despite government repression, Charter 77 played a crucial role in the broader dissident movement, laying the groundwork for political change and influencing the 1989 Velvet Revolution, which ultimately led to the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia.

Václav Benda, our third Václav for this tale, was also a signatory on Charter 77. Of Benda, Christian author Rod Dreher says of Benda, that he is “the only believing Christian in the Charter 77 dissident community — that I placed Benda’s ideas at the heart of my book’s chapter on politics.” Here, Dreher is talking about his book The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation. Dreher is also author of Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents. Both are important works as they relate the importance of the Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrate. Dreher turned to Václav Benda to assist in extrapolating it’s importance to the Christian faith.

One of Benda’s most influential written works is his 1977, Parallel Polis where he calls for Czechs to abandon hope that they could change the current communist systems in Czechoslovakia and, instead, calls on them to create new, parallel systems to combat the evils of communism. Reflecting on this in The Benedict Option, Dreher writes, “In other words, dissident Christians should see their Benedict Option projects as building a better future not only for themselves but for everyone around them. That’s a grand vision, but Benda knew that most people weren’t interested in standing up for abstract causes that appealed only to intellectuals. He advocated practical actions that ordinary Czechs could do in their daily lives.”

Like Havel, Benda too fell victim to the secret police. In a conversation with Benda’s widow, Kamila, Dreher recounts, ““Because we lived just down the street from the place where the secret police tortured people, victims would often come here as soon as they were released, just to talk.” They knew there would be comfort at the Bendas’ house.” Even in light of government persecution, the Benda’s were not only willing to live out their faith, they actually did so by welcoming other secret police victims into their home.

Both Havel and Benda were imprisoned for their role as dissidents in Czechoslovakia from 1979 to 1983. This 1989 memorandum from the Czech secret police shows that the two Václav’s continued to be monitored by the Státní bezpečnost (StB), or State Security leading up to the Velvet Revolution. It includes statements like, “Prosecution of these individuals can be successfully carried out only in the event that all of the organizers, including Václav HAVEL, about whom there is also incriminating material, be tried,” and “Witnesses have proven that GØEGOØ also visited the representative of CH-77 Václav BENDA [9] many times in Prague. In his established correspondence GØEGOØ expresses his resolve to fight by any means against the rising socialist leadership and the CPCz, and his decision to influence youth in this spirit.”

Those statements do not sound too dissimilar to what you would find in current fbi FD-302’s. Where the Czechs had the StB, we have the fbi. But more on that later. First, what was the StB? Well, like we’ve discussed before, secret police organizations target their social, political, and religious enemies. The StB was no different. Aside from targeting their religious enemies, like Benda, and their political enemies, like Havel, they also kept a massive informant network.

The StB was established in 1945 and became a key instrument of oppression under communist rule, closely modeled on, and cooperating with, the Soviet KGB. Its primary tasks were surveillance and repression, infiltration of opposition groups, harassment and arrests, and psychological pressure. They monitored, interrogated, and intimidated anyone deemed a threat to the communist regime.

The StB infiltrated religious groups, student movements, intellectual circles, and political dissident organizations like Charter 77. Dissidents were frequently imprisoned, forced into exile, or had their careers and families destroyed through blacklisting. The psychological pressure they used, known as "aspoň tak" (at least this much) tactics, often relied on subtle but relentless pressure, including spreading false information, creating distrust among opposition members, or staging "accidents."

ALL of these tactics are akin to what we see being employed by the fbi today. Take the fbi’s targeting of Catholics who participate in the Latin Catholic Mass for instance, or arrests of Catholics like Mark Houck who was defending his own child against a vile counter protester. Or people like Amy Nelson and her husband Carl who had their careers destroyed. There is also the story of Eithan Haim who exposed widespread illegality in the Texas medical industry who was targeted by the fbi’s Paul Nixon and others in the DOJ. That is not even to mention the countless J6 protesters who have recently been pardoned because of the gross weaponization unleashed by our own secret police.

The fbi has become, undoubtedly, another secret police society. Listen to the first seven minutes of the video below if you don’t think they have gone that far off the deep end. No secret police entity, or their backers in government, would fight so hard against someone like Kash Patel becoming Director if their deeds weren’t so akin to those of all secret police organizations before them. Check out the first 25 minutes if you want to hear quotes from numerous whistleblowers who were retaliated against for speaking out against these tactics.

Back to 1989. Václav Havel became the symbolic face of nonviolent resistance against the communist regime. His writings, notably his 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless,” articulated the idea that living in truth was a revolutionary act. His call for personal integrity and the courage to dissent resonated deeply with those longing for freedom. He was instrumental in forming the Civic Forum, a broad coalition that united various dissident groups, intellectuals, and ordinary citizens. This platform became a vital tool in mobilizing mass protests and coordinating peaceful demonstrations against the regime.

Havel’s calm, principled stance and insistence on nonviolent protest helped shape the character of the revolution. His leadership demonstrated that change could be achieved without bloodshed, a legacy that has since inspired similar movements worldwide. Following the revolution, Havel’s moral authority and international stature facilitated the transition from a repressive state to a democratic society. His election as president symbolized the hope for a new era in which human rights, transparency, and civic engagement would prevail.

In essence, all of the Václav’s we’ve briefly looked at were not only key figures in the mobilization of the people during uncertain times in Bohemian history, but also guiding lights in the establishment of freer societies throughout their land’s history. Their commitment to truth, justice, and care for others continues to serve as an inspiration for movements seeking freedom and reform around the world. There is more to get to regarding our Václav’s and what happened in the wake of the Velvet Revolution, but we’ll save that for another installment.

Postscript