Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie on How Václav Havel and The Velvet Underground Defeated Totalitarianism

Václav Havel, the legendary anti-communist dissident, writer, and president of the Czech Republic, has died at the age of 75. In an essay adapted from their book The Declaration of Independents, Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie explain how Havel, together with the music of The Velvet Underground, an American band known for singing about soul-sapping heroin rather than consciousness-raising LSD during 1967's Summer of Love, built a blueprint for toppling totalitarians and other censors.