Richard Fidler
speaker
218 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 26 Jul
Richard Fidler’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
This was reported on the BBC, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Reuters.
Now, this was a really key moment because it jolted Praguers out of their apathy, their kind of learned apathy, to just accept what the regime was going to dish out to them.
There was a kind of an unspoken contract, which was...
The regime was telling people, if you shut up, we'll take care of you.
If you shut up, we'll pay you these jobs that aren't very onerous.
We'll pretend to pay you with our dodgy money.
But so long as you shut up and don't act up.
But one of the leading dissidents, Jan Urban, said afterwards, this was like breaking that contract.
The feeling was, if you're going to go around killing our kids, more than the deal is off.
And this is when Václav Havel comes to the fore.
A wonderful man.
He's kind of a bit of a hero to me, I have to admit.
And Václav Havel had said, had had a slogan.
He said, truth and love will always defeat hatred and lies.
And night after night in Wenceslas Square, Havel's got himself a stage and hundreds of thousands of people are cramming
into Windsor Square night after night.
He introduces them to the members of this new organisation which he's called Civic Forum, the new opposition organisation.
And bit by bit, the regime then starts to crack.
There's talk that they might have a kind of a Tiananmen Square type attack on these gatherings in Wenceslas Square because that was the alternative.
that the Communist Party could have gone down like they had done in China.
Showing 101–120 of 218 · page 6 of 11
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