Vàclav Havel: Hero, Freedom Fighter, Leader

  

 Václav Havel  5 October 1936 - 18 December 2011



 



“The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility.”

― Václav Havel

 Václav Havel:  Thinker, Statesman, Hero of the People.

It says much about Vaclav Havel that, perhaps alone among European politicians, his face can often be seen gracing the walls of restaurants in his homeland. People might wish to pay such a tribute to their monarch, or in some parts of Europe their religious leaders; rarely to politicians. How many of Britain or France's former heads of government might inspire such genuine affection?

 “Keep the company of those who seek the truth- run from those who have found it”

― Václav Havel

Havel, who died in his sleep today at the age of 75 in the Czech Republic, was something rare in history. He was one of the heroes of the anti-Communist movement, but uniquely he was both one of the great intellectual heroes of the Eastern Bloc and one its political heroes. Indeed in politics, where more often than not vapidity and managerialism is rewarded, he was an unusual thinker-statesman. How many other politicians of his era had a Samuel Beckett play dedicated to them, or were genuine friends of leading musicians and poets? While the Communist leadership was ugly, old, predictable and pedestrian, its number one critic was cooler than a rock star.

 

Freedom fighter: Pictured in May 1978 as the spokesperson for the Czechoslovakian dissident group Charter 77, Havel went on to become a key figure in the country's 'Velvet Revolution'

It was Havel who helped, as much as anyone, to put across the idea that Communism was built on an illusion and that, once people began to doubt the illusion, it would collapse. His essay "The Power of the Powerless" described a system based on the Emperor’s New Clothes, a fairytale that would perfectly suit the bizarre shadow world of Marxist-Leninism. In Czechoslovakia the “brotherly help” given by the Soviet Union in 1968 was followed by “normalisation” whereby 145 historians were expelled from universities and any praise for the inter-war Czechoslovakian democracy banned. Havel, in trouble with the authorities from 1968 when he worked for a radio critical of the Soviets, and spending many years in jail, expertly described the world of “Post-Totalitarianism”, where people “live within a lie”. (Or as the Russian joke went: we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.) No political system based on a lie could ever be just. So his slogan, “Truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred”, was not an empty one.

“Hope is not a feeling of certainty that everything ends well. Hope is just a feeling that life and work have a meaning.”

― Václav Havel

 

  Revolutionary: Havel waves to massive crowds of demonstrators in Prague's Wenceslas Square in 1989, following the collapse of communism and introduction of a new government

  

It must be remembered that, though a generation later Communism’s downfall seems inevitable, it was by no means so and was not achieved without sacrifice. After Poland’s Communists took 10 years to fall, Hungary’s 10 months, and East Germany’s 10 weeks, the 10-day collapse of the Czechoslovakian regime was shocking and wonderful. Havel toasting the crowd in Wenceslas Square became, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, symbolic of the end of the short 20th century and the battle between liberal democracy and authoritarianism.

He was a great man, and I should imagine visitors to Prague will see plenty more of this great European’s gentle image around that beautiful city.

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
 

― Václav Havel

From an article in 1990:

In the West, Vàclav Havel's work is known as theater of the absurd. Yet from the vantage point of his native Prague and the absurdities of his own life, the plays must seem closer to socialist realism. Havel, after all, is an internationally acclaimed playwright who has only rarely seen his work performed. For decades a persecuted dissident, he lived nevertheless in relative luxury, at one point driving a white Mercedes to his menial job in a brewery. And now, in a supremely ironic twist, the shy, strong-willed intellectual has been named Czechoslovakia's president in spite of himself. "All my life I understood my role in society as that of a writer whose mission is to tell the truth," he has said. "I have never longed for a political post."

Finally it could not be avoided. Over the past few tumultuous months, Havel, 53, emerged as his nation's most potent symbol of reform—an intractable opponent of the regime who chose to make a stand rather than follow many of his fellow artists into exile. He has been jailed repeatedly since 1968, when Soviet troops moved into Prague to replace the maverick Dubcek regime with reliable communist hard-liners. His phones have been bugged, his friends harassed, and his papers confiscated time and again. Fellow writers worldwide, including Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow and Graham Greene, petitioned for his release from prison. When Joe Papp invited Havel to be play-wright-in-residence at his Public Theater in New York City, the Czech authorities, eager to get rid of him, said he could go. But Havel was adamant. "The solution to the situation does not lie in leaving it," he declared. "Fourteen million people can't just go and leave Czechoslovakia."

Instead, Havel learned always to carry toothpaste, razor blades and his favorite unfiltered cigarettes in case he was seized by the police. He stashed pages of his work in various hiding places and then smuggled it out to the West—each new play a biting indictment of the status quo. Tom Stoppard, who was born in Czechoslovakia, described his friend Havel's 1965 satire of a communist-run company, The Memorandum, as "the invention of an absurd society raised only a notch or two above the normal world of state bureaucracy."

Now Havel has been tapped to help dismantle that world—to the amazement of those who knew him as a young man. "He was the most shy, courteous, soft-spoken boy who was always trying to avoid the spotlight," recalls film director Milos Forman, who attended boarding school with the new president. The son of a wealthy Prague restaurateur, Havel was sent to the best schools and pampered by maids and governesses. But when the communists came to power in 1948, the family's assets were seized. Because of his bourgeois background, Havel was barred from attending college. He took a job in a chemical factory and managed to attend a technical school at night, writing essays on poetry and drama in his spare time.

In the late '50s, Havel became a stagehand at the Theater on the Balustrade, the leading avant-garde troupe in Prague. Enthralled by the works of Ionesco, Kafka and Beckett (who would later dedicate a play to him), Havel began writing drama. In 1963, before the crackdown, his play The Garden Party, which satirizes the circular logic of communist bureaucracy, became a huge success in Czechoslovakia. In 1965, The Memorandum—in which a state-run company imposes a nonsensical language on its employees—opened in Prague; in 1968 it was staged in New York City by Papp.

"Havel's writing is European, but it has a good American sense of humor," says Papp, who arranged for Havel to attend the U.S. opening. "He was like a conservative hippie. His behavior was not hippie. But he loved the Beatles. He loved Hair." Adds Havel's friend and English translator Vera Blackwell: "He even wanted to try LSD, but he didn't." Havel did, however, attend an antiwar demonstration in Central Park and was moved by the spirit of the protesters.

Three months after Havel's return to Prague, Soviet tanks rolled through the streets. His work was outlawed, and he—like most Czech intellectuals—was consigned to manual labor. Yet, inexplicably, he was able to collect his foreign royalties and enjoy some material privileges. He and his wife, Olga, whom he married in 1964, had a spacious, book-lined apartment and a country home furnished with stereo components, embroidered tablecloths, goose-down comforters and rock posters.

In 1977, after he helped launch the human rights group Charter 77, Havel's house was robbed and ransacked by government agents, and he was jailed for four months. In 1979, he was convicted of subversion and imprisoned again for four years, during which he developed a serious lung infection. But even when he was sick and depressed, he refused offers to emigrate.

Through it all, Havel continued to write—and to publish. Some of his prison correspondence with his wife evaded the censors and appeared in the West as Letters to Olga. In these musings, on everything from metaphysics to hemorrhoids, he demonstrated an irrepressible spirit. "What is fascinating about the letters is his acceptance of the place that he is in," says actress Lee Grant, who has directed Havel's works. "The fact that he is being governed by idiots becomes part of his humor. He didn't see his jailers as ogres, but as fools. If you laugh at something, it can't stay that way forever."

Grant, who had been blacklisted in the '50s, directed Havel's A Private Viewat the Public Theater in 1983. She found that the three one-act plays about citizens going along to get along in an oppressive system evoked the climate of McCarthyism. "He doesn't let his characters get away with anything," she says. "He nails them. These are wonderful pieces."

In 1986 Papp produced Havel's Largo Desolato, a prophetic work about a human rights activist who is forced into a position of leadership. That play so moved actor Wallace Shawn that he visited Havel in Prague. "It was an emotional moment, telling a man about his own play," Shawn said later. "Not to be able to see your work performed would have to be extremely demoralizing."

Rise to power: Pictured in his days as a dissident playwright, Havel, right, jokes with a member of the Polish dissident union 'Solidarity' in June 1989

Yet Havel, was undaunted. Arrested again in January 1989 and sentenced to eight months in prison, he was released in four after thousands of artists protested to the Prime Minister. The state's endless persecution had finally made him a national hero. Once released, he was drafted into the gathering movement for change. He has declared that he will return to his writing once he has seen the country through free elections, probably in June, but Papp, for one, worries that Havel may find himself at a loss for material. "I don't know what he would have written had the country not been oppressive," says Papp. "Who knows what he will write now?"

Grant thinks she knows. "Havel writes so personally about his experiences that maybe this [becoming president] will be the next experience," she says. "I would bet on it. All his plays are like personal letters—letters to the world."

 “As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it.”

― Václav Havel

 

In all, Havel was imprisoned four times. “Prison hammered into Havel’s hide the painful realization that responsibility is the key to human identity,” Havel biographer John Keane writes.

"Courage did not come easily to Havel. It was a matter of will, of resolve. In prison, swarming with worries about what prison would do to his soul, his sense of humor, he struggled to keep up his spirits. … He was riddled with guilt over having dragged other people into Charter 77. He was deeply suspicious of utopians with their “radiant tomorrows”: “What is a concentration camp but an attempt by Utopians to dispose of those elements which don’t fit into their Utopia?”

 - Havel biographer, John Keane

The playwright, who was Czechoslovakia's former president, oversaw the country's turbulent transition into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993.

“You can't spend your whole life criticizing something and then, when you have the chance to do it better, refuse to go near it.”

― Václav Havel

Havel was his country's first democratically elected president after the nonviolent 'Velvet Revolution' that ended four decades of repression by a regime he ridiculed as 'Absurdistan.'

 “Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not.”

― Václav Havel

  


Even out of office, the diminutive Czech remained a world figure. He was part of the 'new Europe' - in the coinage of then-U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld - of ex-communist countries that stood up for the U.S. when the democracies of 'old Europe' opposed the 2003 Iraq invasion.

 “The truth is not simply what you think it is; it is also the circumstances in which it is said, and to whom, why, and how it is said.”

― Václav Havel

National hero: President Havel and his wife Dagmar wave from the balcony of Prague Castle after Havel was sworn in for a second term as president in 1998

A former chain-smoker, Havel had a history of chronic respiratory problems dating back to his years in communist jails. He was hospitalised in Prague on 12 January 2009, with an unspecified inflammation, and had developed breathing difficulties after undergoing minor throat surgery.

 “Man is not an omipotent master of the universe, allowed to do with impunity whatever he thinks, or whatever suits him at the moment. The world we live in is made of an immensely complex and mysterious tissue about which we know very little and which we must treat with utmost humility.”

― Václav Havel

Icon:  George Bush, who later described Havel, as 'one of liberty's greatest heroes,' presents Havel with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in July, 2003

Havel left office in 2003, 10 years after Czechoslovakia broke up and just months before both nations joined the European Union.  He was credited with laying the groundwork that brought his Czech Republic into the 27-nation bloc, and was president when it joined NATO in 1999.

Because of his passionate support for non-violent resistance, former American President Bill Clinton compared him to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.  

"There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause."

― Václav Havel, Summer Meditations 

Shy and bookish, with a wispy mustache and unkempt hair, Havel came to symbolise the power of the people to peacefully overcome totalitarian rule.  "Truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred," Havel famously said.  It became his revolutionary motto which he said he always strove to live by.

Thousands of people gather in Venceslaw's Square in Praque as a flag is passed over the crowd the mourners

Soldiers stand guard next to a portrait of Havel set in his memory at the Prague Castle today 

 

Hundreds of candles have been lit this evening in tribute at Wenceslas Square in Prague this evening 

"The real test of a man is not when he plays the role that he wants for himself, but when he plays the role destiny has for him." 

- Vàclav Havel

Havel was a quiet man, who loved rock-n-roll music (Frank Zappa and Lou Reed) and preferred his artistic work to politics; nonetheless, he was a GIANT in the cause of freedom during the second half of the 20th century.  His autobiography, To the Castle and Back, was published in 2007 and is an absolute must-read.  The best first-hand account of Havel and the Velvet Revolution, during those historic days, can be found in the British historian and journalist Timothy Garton Ash's The Magic Lantern.  Today, not only marks the end of the life of a real hero in a world full of too few luminaries, too many demagogues, too few brilliants, too many gems of paste, too  few leaders, too many sheeple, too few individualists, too many collectivists, too few dissidents, too many conformists, it also reminds us of how absolutely ridiculous and pathetic the Nobel Peace Prize has become.

1.  Nobel Laureate Jimmy Carter:  Anti-Semite

2.  Nobel Laureate Al Gore:  Fraud, as was proven IN COURT in London

3.  Nobel Laureate Yasser Arafat:  Terrorist
4.  Nobel Laureate Barack Obama:  Assassin

Who hasn't received a Nobel Peace Prize?

1.  Baroness Margaret Thatcher
2.  President Ronald W Reagan
3.  Pope John Paul II
4.  Dissident, Leader, Prisoner, President Vàclav Havel


One can easily see why the first 3 would be rejected by the oh-so-PC Nobel Committee (by the way, have you ever read my piece on Norway?  They don't want THAT to get out!).  They are too right-wing for the Left Intelligentsia.  One would think the Lou Reed-Frank Zappa-Bob Dylan-loving-Vàclav Havel, who was a jailed dissident, poet, playwright, essayist, etc., that went on to become the first President of a free Czechoslovakia would have been a shoe-in for a Peace Prize, but damn!  He had to go and destroy Communism, too!  He sank the Left Intelligentsia's Commie battleship and went on to speak for decades against the other collectivist fads that they globed onto lock, stock, and two non-carbon-emitting barrels!

Unreal.  Barack Obama Snubs Czech & International Hero, Vàclav Havel, at Nuclear Summit

By Jim Hoft

Vàclav Havel is a Czech playwright, essayist dissident and politician.  He was the tenth and last President of Czechoslovakia (1989-1992) and the first President of the Czech Republic (1993-2003).  He has written over twenty plays and numerous non-fiction works, translated internationally.

Beginning in the 1960s, Havel's work turned to focus on the politics of Czechoslovakia.  After the Prague Spring, he became increasingly active.  In 1977, his involvement with the human rights manifesto, Charter 77, brought him international fame as a leader of the opposition in Czechoslovakia; it also led to his imprisonment.

His political activities resulted in multiple stays in prison, the longest being 4 years under the Communist regime.  The 1989 "Velvet Revolution" launched Havel into the Presidency.  In this role, he led Czechoslovakia and later the Czech Republic to multi-party democracy.

The Democracy and Security Conference in Prague, Czech Republic, opened tonight with a reception at the Lord Mayor's Residence.

L - R:  Jose Maria Aznar, Vaclav Havel, and Natan Sharansky at The Democracy and Security Conference in Prague, Czech Republic in June, 2007

This week, international human rights activist, former political dissident and prisoner, and Czech hero, Vàclav Havel, was snubbed by Barack Obama.  From USA Today:  

 

"Europe's most famous Cold War warrior and former communist political prisoner was excluded from a ceremony yesterday where Russia and the U.S. took steps toward world peace.

Vàclav Havel, the president of Czechoslovakia and then Czech Republic for 13 years, was not invited to the signing of the START II nuclear arms reduction treaty by President Obama and his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev, which took place in Prague Castle where the playwright-politician was first inaugurated as president after the fall of communism in 1990 and in the Castle's Spanish Hall where he gave his farewell speech to a standing ovation from the Czech Parliament.

Was the ceremony snub Obama's revenge because Havel, along with 20 other ex-Central and Eastern European leaders, signed an open letter to the American president last summer that warned of a menacing Russia and complained that their region was "no longer at the heart" of U.S. foreign policy?"

President Thin-Skin mustn't have appreciated Havel's feedback last year:

Vàclav Havel on Obama:  Soiling Your Pants Prematurely Will Not Gain You International Respect

Foreign Policy interviewed former Czech President, political prisoner, human rights activist, and playwright, Vàclav Havel on Barack Obama and the costs of moral compromise:

Question:  How, as president, do you decide when these small dangerous compromises are worth it and when they might lead to something more dangerous?

Havel:  Politics, it means, every day making some compromises, and to choose between one evil and another evil, and to decide which is bigger and which is smaller.  But, sometimes, some of these compromises could be very dangerous because it could be the beginning of the road of making a lot of other compromises, which are results of the first one, and there are very dangerous compromises.  And, its necessary, I think, to have the feeling which compromise is possible to do and which could be, maybe after ten years, could be somehow very dangerous. I will illustrate this with my own experience.  Two days after I was elected President, I invited the Dalai Lama to visit.  I was the first head of the state, who invited him this was, directly.  And, everybody was saying that this was a terribly dangerous act and issued their disapproving statements and expressions.  But, it was a ritual matter.  Later, the Chinese Deputy Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister came for a visit and brought me a pile of books about the Dalai Lama and some governmental documents about what good care they have taken of Tibet, and so on.  They were propagandist, fabricated books, but he felt the need to explain something to me.

I had a press conference with this minister of foreign affairs and he said, "It was a wonderful meeting because we were speaking openly.  Mr Havel gave me his opinion and I explained the opinion of our government.  I gave him this book, and he thanked me for it."

This was unbelievable!  Why did they feel the need to explain their point of view to the leader of such a small nation?  Because they respect it when someone is standing his ground, when someone is not afraid of them.  When someone soils his pants prematurely, then they do not respect you more for it.
 

Jennifer Rubin has more on Vàclav Havel's advice to Obama.


Another MUST READ on Vàclav Havel  Why We Need More Leaders Like Vaclav Havel.

Why, O, why, could we not have had Vàclav Havel rather than Barack Obama?




 

Václav Havel on Kim Jong-il

václav havel

Globe and Mail Update

Published Thursday, 17 June 2004

Last updated Sunday, 18 December 2011

It is exactly 60 years since Rudolf Vrba's and Alfred Wetzler's successful escape from Auschwitz, an escape that brought to light accounts of Hitler's extermination camps.

The testimony given by Messrs. Vrba and Wetzler forced representatives of the democratic world to face facts that many did not want to believe, even after the end of the war. Thanks to them and countless numbers of other witnesses, the horrors and extent of the Nazi final solution are universally known.

Like the Nazi Holocaust, the crimes and brutal reality of Soviet communism were also outlined and understood, thanks to the writings of Arthur Koestler, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and others.

Fortunately, people who use direct eyewitness testimony in attempts to expose the greatest crimes against humanity can be found in each era and all over the world. Rithy Panh described the terror of the Khmer Rouge, Kanan Makiya detailed the brutal prisons of Saddam Hussein and Harry Wu has tried to show the perversion of the Laogai system of Chinese forced labour camps.

Today, the testimony of thousands of North Korean refugees, who have survived the miserable journey through Communist China to free South Korea, tell of the criminal nature of the North Korean dictatorship. Accounts of repression are supported and verified by modern satellite images, and clearly illustrate that North Korea has a functioning system of concentration camps. The Kwan-li-so, or the political penal-labour colony, holds as many as 200,000 prisoners who are barely surviving day-to-day or are dying in the same conditions as did the millions of prisoners in the Soviet gulag system in the past.

The Northern part of the Korean peninsula is governed by the world's worst totalitarian dictator, who is responsible for taking millions of human lives. Kim Jong-il inherited the extensive Communist regime following the death of his father Kim Il-sung, and has shamelessly continued to strengthen the cult of personality.

He sustains one of the largest armies in the world and is producing weapons of mass destruction. The centrally planned economy and the state ideology of juche have led the country into famine. The victims of the North Korean regime number in the millions.

Despite the ever-present army and police, tens of thousands of desperate North Koreans have escaped to China. In defiance of international treaties, the Chinese government does not recognize the status of these people as refugees, and Chinese officials have prevented the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees from having access to any North Korean in China.

The Chinese government hunts the refugees in the woods along the border and deports them back to North Korea, where the journey ends in the Kwan-li-so. All of this is happening right now, and the world is standing idly by.

Some refugees are fortunate enough to make it successfully to South Korea. But their existence in South Korea flies in the face of that country's official Sunshine Policy, which however well-intentioned, is based on constant concessions and appeasement. The policy costs South Korea hundreds of millions of dollars, but it is not helping to reach a solution to the overall problem or saving innocent human lives. In the end, the policy only keeps the leader of Pyongyang in power.

Kim Jong-il is able to blackmail the entire world with the help of his million-man army, nuclear weapons, long-range rockets and the export of weaponry and military technology to like-minded dictators around the world.

Kim Jong-il wants to be respected and feared abroad, and he wants to be recognized as one of the most powerful leaders in today's world. He is willing to let his own people die of hunger, and uses famine to liquidate any sign of wavering loyalty to his rule.

Through blackmail, Kim Jong-il receives food and oil, which he distributes among those loyal to him (first in line being the army), while the international community has no way to ascertain who is receiving aid inside North Korea.

This year, at the UN Commission for Human Rights in Geneva, a resolution was passed condemning the practices of the North Korean government. Even with this condemnation, it is difficult to believe the commission has criticized the North Korean regime for gross violations of human rights on only two occasions since the commission was founded.

Less shocking, but equally disturbing, is the fact that the North Korean government has yet to fulfill any of the concrete recommendations included in the resolution from the previous year.

Innocent North Koreans are dying of hunger or are closed in concentration camps, as Kim Jong-il continues to blackmail the world.

Now is the time for the democratic countries of the world - the European Union, the United States, Japan and, last but not least, South Korea - to unify under a common position. These countries must make it perfectly clear that they will not make concessions to a totalitarian dictator.

They must state that respect for basic human rights is an integral part of any future discussions with Pyongyang. Decisiveness, perseverance and negotiations from a position of strength are the only things that Kim Jong-il and those similar to him understand.

Let's hope that the world does not need any more horrifying testimony to realize this.

Poet and playwright Vaclav Havel is a former president of the Czech Republic.