– The Czech Heritage Museum & Genealogy Center will present “The Bonfire of Liberties: Censorship of the Humanities,” an exhibition by Humanities Texas, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities during March and April.
The exhibit addresses the difficult topic of censorship. Censorship has been practiced for nearly as long as there have been materials to censor. The Bonfire of Liberties gives an overview of censorship in its various guises over time. It examines the struggle between those who want to censor difficult, controversial, and revolutionary material from sensitive viewers and those who want to protect the freedoms of all people to read, view and think for themselves.
The exhibit includes information on Venus of Dolní Věstonice, one of the oldest known ceramic articles in the world. The Venus was found near Brno, Moravia and is dated to approximately 30,000 BCE. The Venus of Dolní Věstonice suffered censorship by an East Texas newspaper in the not-so-distant past.
Two films and a lecture are being presented in conjunction with the exhibit.
On March 28, a live, interactive on-line presentation on “Contemporary Challenges of (Dis)information” will be given by Kiril Avramov, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Avramov's work includes non-western political warfare, Soviet and Russian propaganda, Soviet and Russian influence and psychological operations, "weaponization of information" and cognitive hacking, as well as elite and mass cognitive resilience. The live event will begin at 3 p.m. on the museum's Facebook page and YouTube channel.
The film, Chuck Norris vs Communism, about the censorship of Hollywood films in the late 1980s was screened at the Beltonian Theatre in Belton, Texas.
The second film is a documentary about Marty Kubišova titled The Magic Voice of a Rebel. Kubišova was only 26 when tanks rolled into Prague in 1968, but she was already a public figure, famous as a singer and television star. Those in power during the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic destroyed her career and tried to destroy her reputation. She was a signer of Vaclav Havel's Charter 77. During the Velvet Revolution in 1989, she stood on a balcony with Havel on Wenceslas Square and sang her signature song, which became the anthem of the revolution. More information on the screening of this film will be available at CzechHeritageMuseum.org.
The exhibit will also include Czech references on censorship during occupation periods.