Standing Up to Tyranny

We owe a debt to Flagg Taylor and Barbara Day for making Václav Benda's remarkable anti-totalitarian writings available to English-language readers in a handsome and accessible volume. In his thoughtful introduction, Taylor convincingly argues that the Czech belongs in that small coterie of writers, thinkers, and actors—Solzhenitsyn and Havel included—who fought totalitarianism with courage and lucidity. In their distinctive ways, these great figures illuminated “the nature of their totalitarian enemy and how their battle could be fought and won.” Benda is barely known in the Western world outside his native context. But these writings ought to make his witness and achievement much more widely recognized among all those who continue to strive to understand the tragedy of twentieth-century totalitarianism. Benda, who died before age 60, was a patriot, Christian, and lover of liberty who profoundly illuminated the nature of evil in our time. He never confused his Christian faith with a call to passivity. His writings and activities played a major role in setting the stage for the annus mirabilis of 1989, the revolutionary year when Communism behind the Iron Curtain imploded.