"Freedom is nothing but the distance between the hunter and the hunted." —Bei Dao, "Accomplices" Why do we study history? What is our historical responsibility? In today's world, governments teeter towards authoritarianism, democracies towards far-right populism, and truth is constant reinvented through censorship and the rewriting of historical memory. What is the role of an individual in face of these alarming societal currents -- the role of the philosopher, the poet, or the artist? We will take a brief look through the lives and read works of two thinkers and their interlocutors: Czech dissident-playwright-philosopher Vaclav Havel, and Chinese dissident-poet Bei Dao. We will seek to understand how they come together - how Bei Dao's poetry came to be the one chanted by student protestors on Tiananmen Square in 1989 before tanks rolled over their bodies, how Vaclav Havel and his colleagues went to prison for signing a document that reaffirmed truth and civil rights against the then-Communist government, and set the dominos in motion for Czechnoslovakia's famous Velvet Revolution. We will also be engaging briefly with their contemporary and future interlocutors, including Marx, Heidegger, and Ocean Vuong.