On the other hand, if we were the same person who stepped into the changing river at the same point in time, then the fate or destiny of such a linear river would simply have us repeat the path we had taken before (with all our errors)—never really achieving the illusory progress we would seek on repeat (games) attempts to play out our lives’ differently.
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:
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