Havel: the 1976 trial of the Plastic People of the Universe, not a political dispute, created the climate that produced Charter 77

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In "The Power of the Powerless" (October 1978), Václav Havel states directly that Charter 77 — the Czechoslovak human-rights declaration he principally drafted, and which Charter 08 explicitly named itself after three decades later — did not originate in a political dispute. Its founding climate was created instead by the 1976 trial of an underground rock band, the Plastic People of the Universe: "The spiritual and intellectual climate surrounding its appearance, however, was not the product of any immediate political event. That climate was created by the trial of some young musicians associated with a rock group called 'The Plastic People of the Universe.'"

Havel goes on to characterize the trial itself the same way: the prosecution "was not a confrontation of two differing political forces... but two differing conceptions of life," and asks, rhetorically, who could have foreseen that punishing "one or two obscure rock groups" would help produce Czechoslovakia's most consequential dissident document.