Be Realistic, Demand The Impossible!

No one can stop history.

"Be realistic, demand the impossible!" This great slogan erroneously assigned to Che Guevara (this international terrorist could have never thought of such a thing) appeared over the student barricade in Paris. Jean Duvignaud (sociologist) and Michel Leiris (poet) shouted it in the spring of 1968.

Numerous actions held by radical students transformed into demonstrations, riots, a national walkout with ten million participants and, finally, led to the change of the government and the resignation of President Charles de Gaulle.

Events in France raised a wave that reached Warsaw and Prague. People in Poland and Czechoslovakia also demanded the impossible – "socialism with a human face." Warsaw managed to sort out the situation using local forces, in Czechoslovakia, the Warsaw Pact brought tanks. They did that to make people in Prague to no longer demand the impossible, to make them forget about this forever.

The dream of freedom was crashed by caterpillar tracks.

On December 13, 1981, Poland introduced martial law to stop the work of the independent trade union Solidarity. Union leaders were realists and also demanded impossible for the then-communist Poland: free elections.

No tanks can stop the flow of history: now Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia are free European countries, members of the EU, and the Warsaw Pact does not exist.

Are there any realists in Belarus who demand the impossible – change of the regime, freedom, openness, tolerance?

Of course, everyone knows them.

Therefore, I read the Charter, which is struggling to bring the impossible.

Yauhen Lipkovich, Facebook