With the death of the playwright, dissident and former president Vaclav Havel on Sunday the Czech Republic has lost its philosopher king and Europe one of the few figures who can comfortably be compared to Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela in terms of intellectual clarity, personal bravery and mule-like stubbornness in the face of oppression.
Many people played their part in helping bring down communism and piece together a divided continent. But few did it with the consistency of purpose as Havel, whose 1978 essay ‘The Power of the Powerless’ exposed the intellectual bankruptcy of authoritarian regimes across eastern Europe.
In one of the most memorable passages in the essay, Havel ponders why a greengrocer feels compelled to place a “workers of the world unite!” slogan in his shop window among the onions and carrots on display. Not through any sense of conviction, he concludes, but because the shopkeeper wants to declare: “I am obedient and loyal – leave me alone and I’ll leave you.” It is nothing more than political window-dressing in a system where meaningless rituals have replaced meaningful thought.
Having witnessed the devastating effects of fascist and then communist ideology on his native Czechoslovakia, Havel was deeply suspicious of all closed thought systems. “Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world,” he wrote. “It offers human beings the illusion of identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them.”
Havel accepted that most people would publicly hide behind the facade of ideology and “live within a lie.” But he was also aware from the example set by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the Soviet Union that just one person “living within the truth” would pose an existential threat to the regime and the hollow ideology it was based on. “Every free expression of life indirectly threatens the post-totalitarian world politically, including forms of expression to which, in other social systems, no one would attribute any potential political significance.”
Havel refused to live the lie – and paid the price. After the Prague Spring of 1968 his plays were banned, his appartment was bugged and his name was tarnished. He suffered countless arrests and interrogations and was imprisoned for three years – during which he was hospitalized with pneumonia. But Havel refused to be silenced, continuing to harangue the communist regime in essays, articles and open letters to the president.
In his 1975 ‘Letter to Gustav Husak’ – the then president of Czechoslovakia – Havel compared the outward calm imposed on his country after the crushing of the Prague Spring as “calm as a grave or morgue.” When I visited Prague for the first time in September 1989 the city was still gripped by fear. Troops patrolled the streets and badly disguised secret policemen lurked in hotel lobbies. There was little to suggest that the communist system was on the verge of collapse, although Havel – as he observed in ‘The Power of the Powerless’ – would have recognised the scene as a “world of appearances trying to pass for reality.”
Two months later, the whole hollow edifice came crashing down in the ‘Velvet Revolution’ that Havel played such an instrumental role in fermenting. By the end of the year the chain-smoking writer of absurdist plays was installed as president in Prague castle.
Havel, a man with a shuffling gait and mumbling, monotonous speech, represented a radical break from the ossified politics and personalities of the past. In addition to books and beer – he worked in a brewery for nine months in 1974 – the man who paved the way for the Czech Republic’s entry into the EU and NATO loved rock music.
He founded the Charter 77 movement in protest against the arrest of members of the rock group Plastic People of the Universe. He appointed Frank Zappa as a special ambassador shortly after his election as president. And when the Rolling Stones rolled into Prague in August 1990 he welcomed the group on stage. So when a jean-clad man tapped me on the shoulder and asked for a cigarette at a punk-rock concert in Prague that summer I wasn’t entirely surprised it was Vaclav Havel. “Sorry, Mr President but I don’t smoke” I replied. For once in my life I wished I did.
#1 by Simon McGuinness on December 19, 2011 - 3:06 pm
Vaclav Havel was not open to reason when it came to one country: Cuba. He maintained an unwavering blindness to that country’s struggle to protect its citizens from the might of the USA and sided with US policy against Cuba at every opportunity. In that, he was wrong. Arrogantly and irredeemably wrong.
#2 by Victor on December 19, 2011 - 11:12 pm
Wasn’t Cuba communist?
#3 by humberto on December 20, 2011 - 6:29 pm
He was an apologist for American militarism at every step. The last thing that can come from a gunpoint is peace and freedom. European powers spent hundreds of years insisting this was their mission, but in reality they just wanted more power.
#4 by Patrick a Critical American Patriot on December 20, 2011 - 7:04 pm
This man was intellectually brave and should be treated as a standard for the rest of us. And the Cuban crisis was treated badly by the American Military Machine, that is what he opposed; not support for the Cuban Regime
#5 by myles on December 20, 2011 - 7:19 pm
Simon, Humberto have you forgotten castro is a communist dictator? He may be a fashionable anit American, as you two are, but to his people he is a murderer and prison warden.
#6 by Simon McGuinness on December 21, 2011 - 11:58 am
Actually Castro, like all Presidents of Cuba, is thrice elected – a fact you will not read in the corporate media.
(1) Every member of the Cuban parliament must achieve 50% approval of his constituents in parliamentary elections held by secret ballot every 3 years, any citizen is free to stand in those elections.
(2) Members of elected parliament propose and elect from within their ranks the members of the Council of State (cabinet) and
(3) the members of the Council of State elect their president.
I know of no other president has to pass such a rigorous electoral process. Now myles, how do you justify that dictator charge?
#7 by Simon McGuinness on December 21, 2011 - 12:02 pm
Apologies – I should have said “his or her” constituents – Cuba has one of the highest proportion of female members of parliament in the world.
#8 by Ardath Blauvelt, Hollis, NH on December 21, 2011 - 10:25 pm
No wonder Europe is in the trouble it is: keep whistling in the dark, folks. If Castro is your ideal then indeed when you recognize your error, it will be too late. Chavez will approve. He, too, is popular and elected…. This was a man who knew oppression, didn’t just opine about it from the comfort of a nanny state still wearing some of the trappings of freedom.
#9 by Daithi Mac an Mhaistir on December 22, 2011 - 7:58 pm
From Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds ( USA, 1997) pp. 97-99:
Must We Adore Vaclav Havel?
No figure among the capitalist restorationists in the East has won more adulation from U.S. officials, media pundits, and academics than Vaclav Havel, a playwright who became the first president of post-Communist Czechoslovakia and later president of the Czech Republic.
The many left-leaning people who also admire Havel seem to have overlooked some things about him: his reactionary religious obscurantism, his undemocratic suppression of leftist opponents, and his profound dedication to economic inequality and unrestrained free-market capitalism.
Raised by governesses and chauffeurs in a wealthy and fervently anti-communist family, Havel denounced democracy’s “cult of objectivity and statistical average” and the idea that rational, collective social efforts should be applied to solving the environmental crisis. He called for a new breed of political leader who would rely less on “rational, cognitive thinking,” show “humility in the face of the mysterious order of the Being,” and “trust in his own subjectivity as his principal link with the subjectivity of the world.”
Apparently, this new breed of leader would be a superior elitist cogitator, not unlike Plato’s philosopher, endowed with a “sense of transcendental responsibility” and “archetypal wisdom.” Havel never explained how this transcendent archetypal wisdom would translate into actual policy decisions, and for whose benefit at whose expense.
Havel called for efforts to preserve the Christian family in the Christian nation. Presenting himself as a man of peace and stating that he would never sell arms to oppressive regimes, he sold weapons to the Philippines and the fascist regime in Thailand. In June 1994, General Pinochet, the man who butchered Chilean democracy, was reported to be arms shopping in Czechoslovakia – with no audible objections from Havel.
Havel joined wholeheartedly in George Bush’s Gulf War, an enterprise that killed over 100,000 Iraqi civilians. In 1991, along with other Eeast European pro-capitalist leaders, Havel voted with the United States to condemn human rights violations in Cuba. But he has never uttered a word of condemnation of rights violations in El Salvador, Columbia, Indonesia, or any other U.S. client state.
In 1992, while president of Czechoslovakia, Havel, the great democrat, demanded that parliament be suspended and he be allowed to rule by edict, the better to ram through free-market “reforms.” That same year, he signed a law that made the advocacy of communism a felony with a penalty of up to eight years imprisonment. He claimed the Czech constitution required him to sign it. In fact, as he knew, the law violated the Charter of Human Rights which is incorporated into the Czech constitution. In any case, it did not require his signature to become law. in 1995, he supported and signed another undemocratic law barring communists and former communists from employment in public agencies.
The propagation of anti-communism has remained a top priority for Havel. He led “a frantic international campaign” to keep in operation two U.S.-financed cold war radio stations, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, so they could continue saturating Eastern Europe with their anti-communist propaganda.
Under Havel’s government, a law was passed making it a crime to propagate national, religious, and CLASS hatred. In effect, criticisms of big moneyed interests were now illegal, being unjustifiably lumped with ethnic and religious bigotry. Havel’s government warned labor unions not to involve themselves in politics. Some militant unions had their property taken from them and handed over to compliant company unions.
In 1995, Havel announced that the ‘revolution’ against communism would not be complete until everything was privatized. Havel’s government liquidated the properties of the Socialist Union of Youth – which included camp sites, recreation halls, and cultural and scientific facilities for children – putting the properties under the management of five joint stock companies, at the expense of the youth who were left to roam the streets.
Under Czech privatization and “restitution” programs, factories, shops, estates, homes, and much of the public land was sold at bargain prices to foreign and domestic capitalists. In the Czech and Slovak republics, former aristocrats or their heirs were being given back all lands their families had held before 1918 under the Austro-Hungarian empire, dispossessing the previous occupants and sending many of them into destitution. Havel himself took personal ownership of public properties that had belonged to his family forty years before. While presenting himself as a man dedicated to doing good for others, he did well for himself. For these reasons some of us do not have warm fuzzy feelings toward Vaclav Havel.
— Michael Parenti
#10 by Marcel on December 22, 2011 - 11:36 pm
A few sore lefties above, probably all sad that the Soviet Union is gone. This might be why they are in favor of the Eurosoviet Union, it is politically similar after all.
#11 by Simon McGuinness on December 28, 2011 - 12:48 am
600million, the largest suprantaional community of humans on the planet, are all wrong then, Marcel?
Is that why they joined together under the statue of Simon Bolivar in Caracas to sign the historic CELAC agreement earlier this month establishing the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Google it, in case your media didn’t manage to find space to report it).
Their first decision: permanently exclude the USA and Canada from their meetings and unanimously elect Cuba as the host nation for their next gathering.
A few sore lefties perhaps?
#12 by Ruben alba on January 6, 2012 - 10:08 am
dear Gareth and EUobserver colleagues,
This kind of article is one-sided and does not justify a balanced story worth publishing. The comparison with Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela is exxagerated.
Mr Havel had a very limited concept of freedom and followed systematically Washington’s diktak which is in the cold War times was not much better than Moscow’s.
See the excerpt from Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds ( USA, 1997) quoted above.
#13 by sewa on January 10, 2012 - 1:17 pm
It were indeed men like Havel who, thank God, tore communism down. Those above who did not experience it (I did) simply have no clue.
#14 by Joe on January 11, 2012 - 6:59 pm
So, what you’re saying that the yonly way to be open-minded is to agree with your ideology? That’s interesting, because the last time I experienced that ideological response to someone taking umkbrage with an oppressor was when I lived in the German Democratic Republic.
Thanks for that nostalgic voyage to a lethal, impoverishing, and oppressive dead ideology from the previous century.
Oh, and by the way, Hitler was also a leftist.
#15 by Joe on January 11, 2012 - 7:07 pm
Actually, no figure other than Groby, Walesa, Pope John Paul II, the protestors in Tianianminh Square, etal…
So, in other words what this guy is arguing is that he would be perfectly okay if he only stood for what the regime he disposed of stood for, plus ask him to make good on the Communists flase promise that the “people’s land” was really theirs, and that the post-oppressor regime should have redistributed it.
Got it. It’s always fun to read a display of recreational ideology of a boob like Parenti who thinks that free markets are fascism, and doesn’t see that you need governments to create monoplies and cronyism.
#16 by Oscar Spooner on January 12, 2012 - 2:03 pm
This is one of the few obit features on Havel I’ve read, that actually quotes from his own writing. Now I shall read ‘The Power of the Powerless’ in full.
Sadly, many of the comments seem to miss the point. Havel may not have been right about everything, but he deserves great respect for his moral strength in opposing the injustice and cruelty of communism.
Political views aside, his artistic flamboyancy brought some much needed colour to Prague and made him all the more loved amongst the people. He had the Castle illuminated at night to stunning effect and clad the guards in new outfits by the costume designer of Miloš Forman’s film Amadeus.
#17 by Betterworld on January 16, 2012 - 9:19 pm
Glad to have you back with us, Joe. Now perhaps you can spare the time to actually read the comments and engage your brain before shooting your mouth off? That’d be nice.
#18 by janak1977 on January 22, 2012 - 3:27 pm
“Having witnessed the devastating effects of fascist and then communist ideology on his native Czechoslovakia”
is the writer aware of the fact that Havel’s father very actively collaborated with the nazis? That there are childhood photographs of Havel sitting on Reinhard Heydrich’s lap?
Havel did not had a skeleton in a closet he had whole mass graves.
#19 by Josef Straka on January 27, 2012 - 6:39 am
Over two decades ago Vaclav Havel, the pampered scion of a wealthy Prague family, helped usher in a period of reaction, in which the holdings and estates of former landowners and captains of industry were restored to their previous owners, while unemployment, homelessness, and insecurity—abolished by the Reds– were put back on the agenda. Havel is eulogized by the usual suspects, but not by his numberless victims, who were pushed back into an abyss of exploitation by the Velvet revolution and other retrograde eruptions. With the fall of Communism allowing Havel and his brother to recover their family’s vast holdings, Havel’s life—he worked in a brewery under Communism—became much richer. The same can’t be said for countless others, whose better lives under the Reds were swept away by a swindle that will, in the coming days, be lionized in the mass media on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s demolition. The anniversary is no time for celebration, except for the minority that has profited from it. For the bulk of us it ought to be an occasion to reflect on what the bottom 99 percent of humanity was able to achieve for ourselves outside the strictures, instabilities and unnecessary cruelties of capitalism.
http://gowans.wordpress.com/2011/12/20/we-lived-better-then/
William H. Dawson, in his sympathetic exposition, Bismarck and State Socialism (1890), explained the difference:
“Socialism would abolish the existing political order altogether, while State Socialism would use the State for the accomplishment of great economic and social purposes, especially restoring to it the function, which Frederick the Great held to be the principle business of the State, of ‘holding the balance’ between classes and parties.”
http://www.fff.org/freedom/0194b.asp
#20 by Josef Straka on January 27, 2012 - 6:47 am
Instead of naming symptoms of sicknes we have to diagnose it’s roots.
http://www.reformed-theology.org
click SRT Books