These rebels, no matter how bleak things appeared, had kept alive the possibility of resistance. Their lonely stances and protests took place over forty years of Communist rule. They were pushed to the margins, usually ignored, or periodically denounced and ridiculed by the monolith of state media. The state sought to erase most of their names from national consciousness. Havel was better known abroad than within his own country. Many of these rebels spent years in jail. They were dismissed, when they were even acknowledged, as cranks, foreign agents, fascists, or misguided and irrelevant dreamers. But they persisted. They nurtured and preserved the embers of rebellion. They were to prove that no act of resistance, however solitary, hopeless, and futile it appears in the moment, is useless. These acts keep alive the possibility of resistance and finally hope.