Note: The primary location for this content is now over at Charter24.org.
On January 5, 1977, Czechoslovakian citizens including Vaclav Havel published a resolution called “Charter 77” that called on the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic to respect its own declaration of human rights that had become law in March of 1976.
On January 6, 1977, those same citizens were arrested by the Communist secret police and charged with “subversion” and “hostility to the social system.” Between 1977 and 1989, Havel and others served multiple prison terms. And finally, on November 17, 1989, peaceful popular uprisings known as the Velvet Revolution toppled the totalitarian government. Before the year was over, Havel had been elected president of the country.
Totalitarians never quit, though, and today they are active in numerous Western countries including the “United States” of America. Under the guise of “safety” and other fraudulent rhetoric, they are violating the Constitution and erasing fundamental freedoms that even Soviet bloc Communists said were “essential” for “peace, justice and well-being.”
America needs its own version of Charter 77. The list of totalitarian transgressions is long, well known, and expanding, so I won’t itemize them here. (See my previous work on the subject here and at The ReDeclaration.)
We also need our own Velvet Revolt, but that will probably occur only after enough dissidents are either willing to — or actually do — go to prison for “subverting the social system.”
And those dissidents will be Charter 24: “a loose, informal and open association of people of various shades of opinion, faiths and professions united by the will to strive individually and collectively for the respecting of civic and human rights in our own country and throughout the world.”
We have already seen other such loose associations taking shape. I do not discount them, but they have been dominated by intellectuals, influencers, and political action groups. In addition to them, we need a non-political coalition of everyday people who will call on our government to respect its own Constitution and enforce the Bill of Rights for all Americans.
I’m one of those people, and I’m signing on the dotted line. I hope you will, too. Watch this space for updates
Update #1. November 30, 2023.
I just discovered that #Charter24 is also the official Twitter (X) hashtag for the Multi-Party Charter for South Africa.
A first rough draft of our opening declaration has been created at Google Docs: a declaration outlining how the Government of the United States of America has repeatedly violated the Constitution, refused to redress a long and growing list of many grievances of its citizens, and must now be forced to account for its actions and recommit itself to the nation’s founding principles.
If you want to help with the writing, please email me at Charter24US@proton.me.
It will be short, hopefully requiring only the front and back of an 8.5x11 sheet of paper. It is thus designed to be printed and distributed at various places in your own city: churches, cafes, offices, government buildings, etc.
The document will be available publicly on January 1, 2024. It will be signed by me and anyone else who chooses to be a voluntary member of the informal association called Charter 24.
Update #2. December 7, 2023.
Thinking and reading, trying to craft the Charter 24 statement with more clarity, and I opened the Bible to Haggai 2, in which the Lord promises to bless the people who have been defiled by their government.
“Who of you is left who saw this house in its former glory?” the Lord asks. “How does it look to you now?”
Thus it is with America, which has been defiled by leaders who do not believe in the Constitution they swore to defend.
The thing is that the Soviet Union — rising as it did out of the murderous regimes of the Tsars going all the way back to Ivan the Terrible (aka “the first Tsar of all Russia”) — may have had a Constitution that “guaranteed” “human rights,” but it never had a government that operated by the consent of the governed.
And yet the signatories of the Czechoslovakian Charter 77, and their followers, were still able to exert enormous pressure on the Communist regime by simply insisting that the government follow its own laws regarding human rights. As that original declaration stated:
“Charter 77 does not aim, then, to set out its own platform of political or social reform or change, but within its own field of impact to conduct a constructive dialogue with the political and state authorities, particularly by drawing attention to individual cases where human and civic rights are violated, to document such grievances and suggest remedies…”
In his seminal essay from 1978, The Power of the Powerless, Vaclav Havel explored how powerless (and yet courageous) people can exert enormous power by the simple act of “living within the truth.” He explained how this works by using the analogy of the greengrocer, a nobody who simply had enough of the lies spewed by his own government.
“Let us now imagine that one day something in our greengrocer snaps and he stops putting up the slogans merely to ingratiate himself. He stops voting in elections he knows are a farce. He begins to say what he really thinks at political meetings. And he even finds the strength in himself to express solidarity with those whom his conscience commands him to support. In this revolt the greengrocer steps out of living within the lie. He rejects the ritual and breaks the rules of the game. He discovers once more his suppressed identity and dignity. He gives his freedom a concrete significance. His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth.
“The bill is not long in coming. He will be relieved of his post as manager of the shop and transferred to the warehouse. His pay will be reduced. His hopes for a holiday in Bulgaria will evaporate. His children’s access to higher education will be threatened. His superiors will harass him and his fellow workers will wonder about him. Most of those who apply these sanctions, however, will not do so from any authentic inner conviction but simply under pressure from conditions, the same conditions that once pressured the greengrocer to display the official slogans. They will persecute the greengrocer either because it is expected of them, or to demonstrate their loyalty, or simply as part of the general panorama, to which belongs an awareness that this is how situations of this sort are dealt with, that this, in fact, is how things are always done, particularly if one is not to become suspect oneself. The executors, therefore, behave essentially like everyone else, to a greater or lesser degree: as components of the post-totalitarian system, as agents of its automatism, as petty instruments of the social auto-totality.
“Thus the power structure, through the agency of those who carry out the sanctions, those anonymous components of the system, will spew the greengrocer from its mouth. The system, through its alienating presence in people, will punish him for his rebellion. It must do so because the logic of its automatism and self-defense dictate it. The greengrocer has not committed a simple, individual offense, isolated in its own uniqueness, but something incomparably more serious. By breaking the rules of the game, he has disrupted the game as such. He has exposed it as a mere game. He has shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system. He has upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together. He has demonstrated that living a lie is living a lie. He has broken through the exalted facade of the system and exposed the real, base foundations of power. He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, the greengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth. Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate everything. There are no terms whatsoever on which it can co-exist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety.”
In America, the people who proclaim “that's not who we are” are exactly who they say they are not. They are the “post-totalitarians” who must punish anyone who dares to threaten their power by living within the truth.
And in America, that truth is the Judeo-Christian truth. So ask for strength from the Lord and make your voice heard by the overlords who would see you and your country defiled forever.
Update #3. January 5, 2024.
Fight, Get Arrested, Win. The resolution will be published at the new website on January 6, 2024.
Update #4, January 6, 2024.
The new website has been launched at Charter24.org. New information will be added periodically.