How the Left sees the Life of Vaclav Havel, and why they Do Not Mourn his Passing
PJ Media readers know why we mourn the passing of Vaclav Havel. On this site, Michael Ledeen beautifully laid out the reasons why the world knows it has lost one of its greatest leaders. Ledeen put it in these words: “he was one of a handful of people who changed the world by fighting totalitarian Communism and then, having defeated it, inspired his people to rejoin the Western world, embrace capitalism, and support democratic dissidents everywhere.”
But now that almost a week has passed since Havel’s death, some on the Western Left have decided to let their true feelings about Havel out. Despite having to give some lip service to Havel’s integrity and what he accomplished, these men of the Left quickly get to what they really think: Havel helped destroy the great ideal of Communism as a worthy goal, and for that, he cannot be forgiven.
The most egregious is the blog in the British paper The Guardian. The headline to Neil Clark’s article reads, “Another Side of the Story.” Clark immediately ties Havel up with another individual who has just passed way, Christopher Hitchens, whose “consecration” he strongly objects to. For Hitchens was, he writes, “ another ‘progressive’ opponent of the communist regimes of eastern Europe who found favour with Washington’s neocons.”
Clark does not question that Havel was “a brave man” who stood up for his views. That he cannot deny. It is Havel’s views, and his anti-Communism, that he detests. For Havel, he writes, did not help make his country “and the world, a better place.” In particular, denying everything we know about the nature of Stalinism in Eastern Europe — the repression, the bureaucracy, the lack of necessary consumer goods to lead a decent life, the ever pervasive secret police — he faults Havel for the following:
Havel’s anti-communist critique contained little if any acknowledgement of the positive achievements of the regimes of eastern Europe in the fields of employment, welfare provision, education and women’s rights. Or the fact that communism, for all its faults, was still a system which put the economic needs of the majority first.
Surely Mr. Clark must be kidding. Has he not read any of the scores of books revealing the nature of life under what his comrades then called “really existing socialism”? Does he not realize that all these so-called “positive achievements” were there mainly in the minds of the state and Party propaganda apparatus, and that the only people to have them were the Party’s apparatchiks? Does he really believe that communism put the needs of “the majority first”? What accounts, then, for the scores of brave crowds who swept Havel into office, and who openly taunted the regime’s spokesmen as liars and no different than the Nazis who ruled before them?
Clark does not stop with the above. In true Communistpeak, he attacks Havel as “the son of a wealthy entrepreneur,” in other words used by the Maoists of the day, a “capitalist roader.” How dare the son of a bourgeois merchant becomes a national hero? Havel, to Clark, as to the comrades who ruled for decades, had no right to power, since he came from the hated capitalist class.
Clark comes up with statistics meant to prove how life became horrible in the Czech Republic after privatization. He cites a study that one million died due to health problems which resulted. We see no statistics about how many died during Communist rule, both in political prisons or from the polluted lakes and rivers and air from uncontrolled industrial pollution, which under Communism was a concern no government addressed. And horror of horrors, there is now “income inequality” in the Czech Republic. Certainly, Communism took care of that problem. All were equal, and shared the scarce resources available, making everyone poor except the Party rulers.
Even worse, Havel had the temerity to support “the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999,” and then “sided with the rightwing Republican hawks on Iraq.” As we look at both cases, it is clear that Havel had it right both times. NATO intervened to destroy massacres carried out by the Serbs under the leadership of the last brutal ruler of post-Tito Yugoslavia, and under the Bush doctrine, the Iraqi people were freed from Saddam Hussein’s tyranny. Clark ends by saying we should “look at the bigger picture,” and realize how Havel supported the killing of innocent men, women and children” conducted by “western military adventures he supported.”
Writing at The Daily Beast, Geoffrey Robertson also is displeased with Havel, but even more displeased with the fact, as he sees it, that “the American right has claimed him as their own,” while in fact, he believes Havel wanted only to “balance socialism and freedom.” Havel, he argues, wanted most of all “to lift the Stalinist miasma that had wearily settled over Czechoslovakia,” so that in its place there could be created “the democratic socialism in which he believed.”
Unlike Clark, who thinks Stalinism was good for the Czech people, Robertson knows it was bad, but claims that Havel was himself a socialist. Robertson at least knows how bad life was under Communism, and how repressive the government was. A supporter of Czech dissidents at the time and of their Charter 77, he tells us how “its leading members were sacked from their jobs” and later “arrested on charges of ‘unlicensed trading.’”
Certainly, Havel talked about “socialist legality,” a mechanism for showing how the regime ignored its own vaunted standards, which never meant much. But Robertson writes that “Havel’s presidency was plagued by…the difficulties of keeping any socialist faith at all in a free-market free-for-all.” And Robertson shows his own, but not Havel’s, disappointment that the Czechs wanted “guidance in contract law and in the conveyancing of private property.” In other words, having ended communism, they failed to move on to the kind of socialism favored by Robertson.
Robertson, unlike Clark, honors Havel for things like support of the NATO intervention against Yugoslavia, which he writes “was an influential contribution to the evolving principle of humanitarian intervention,” and he honors him for standing “with Sakharov at the head of the pantheon of people prepared to sacrifice their own liberty so others could enjoy theirs.” But he faults him for being unable to “reconcile his beliefs in both socialism and freedom.”
In 2002, the writer Joshua Muravchik wrote a book about socialism’s failure called Heaven on Earth:The Rise and Fall of Socialism. On the book’s back is a blurb from none other than Vaclav Havel, who wrote: “I have always been suspicious of people who claim to have the key to heaven on earth. This book shows why.” Muravchik’s book is the story of the failure of any form of socialism, not just its Soviet style variant. Would Havel have endorsed its central conclusion if he still was a socialist?
In both the case of Neil Clark, who believes Havel was bad for destroying communism, and Geoffrey Robertson, who is sad that he didn’t bring democratic socialism in Communism’s place, you have the two poles of Leftist criticism of Havel. They amount to sadness that the socialist alternative to democratic capitalism ended with the destruction of the Soviet client states. That tells us more about the writers of these pieces than it does about Vaclav Havel.
Here, I submit, is a relevant example of sloppy thinking, poor grasp of logic, and willful ignorance, from an old friend’s posting on facebook:
The problem is: who’s the “some” people, and why are they saying “it”? The one usually answers the other. If you ask a thief what he is doing, it will never be, “stealing something from someone else”. You may very well hear tales of “liberation”, “social justice”, “compassionate rescue”, or some such drivel. In fact drivel abounds in the world of thieves, thugs, and liberals.
Unless I know who “some people” are, and what their game is, I really don’t give a single fig for their opinions. My mother taught me, “Always consider the source”. As with so many self-evident truths, liberals tie themselves in knots to avoid it, because the lie becomes evident immediately.
The Communists left death and misery behind, while during the same era Democracy brought forth plenty never even imagined previously, yet these idiots will argue that the railroads were on time, and unemployment was low. Let’s leave off the fact that if I could pay employees the way the USSR paid its employees, we could have full employment tomorrow. “We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us” was not just a joke. Just eliminate minimum wage and things like overtime and vacation pay, and , by the way, don’t actually keep accurate records, because who’s counting? That’s Communism. And that’s what Socialism eventually must become…or die.
“We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”
In fact, told to me by an old, now departed, friend who was born and died in the Czech Republic. He also went on to tell me he had all his assets taken by the Communists three different times. Assets he had worked hard for and saved taken away every time he felt a little comfortable. He praised all who had a part in getting rid of Communism in the Czech Republic. Unfortunately, he was already an old man by that time and so lived and died with very little.
All valuable criticisms of the never have “bins” and the never will “bees” of this world, may you pass bye us all having achieved nothing.
Communism is the logical endpoint of left-liberal assumptions. Therefore, the criticism of Communism on objective grounds cannot be allowed to go unopposed — even while the Left insists, deceitfully but at the top of its collective lungs, that it has no affection for socialism or any of its offshoots.
Vaclav Havel opposed Communism on objective grounds. Therefore, the Left must “take him down a peg.” Any praise bestowed on him must be adulterated to an extent that makes it morally possible for left-liberals to refrain from mourning him.
It really is that simple.
“…to an extent that makes it morally possible for left-liberals to refrain from mourning him.”
This assumes Lefties have morals, a thing I have increasingly come to believe is the heart and soul of Liberalism: No morals, no ethics, nothing. Nothing but ego and arrogance and intolerence and greed.
It is wrong simply to conflate liberal anticommunists with full-fledged Leninists. But it is an understandable error since both are anticapitalist. And left-liberals are rarely aware how weak their anticommunism was. See http://clarespark.com/2011/04/09/jean-francois-revel-and-father-mapple/. So in a way, I can see why Mr. Porretto believes as he does.
“Havel helped destroy the great ideal of Communism as a worthy goal…”
Not really. That had been done by Viktor Kravchenko many decades ago. Just check your history.
Neither did Havel defeat totalitarian Communism (had there ever been any other?). At best, he pin-pricked it. The laurels go to Reagan. Mr Ledeen might want to check his history.
Robertson makes some good observations, and is worth a read. I believe you twist his remarks on the legal issues. Law remains a sore point in Havel’s country, just as in other post-Soviet territories.
I think the point is that Mr. Vaclav Havel fought Communism from within the gulag-like system. Ronald Reagan, and, indeed, Pope John Paul are greatly respected by the people they helped free, but to fight tyranny from a strong, safe position, far away, is a far cry from taking a stab from the very belly of the beast. That takes a real man. And to do it with style and grace, without resorting to violence and destruction, propells one towards Sainthood.
They cannot be equivalent things.
Lefties hate freedom lovers. Ron Radosh, a half-lefty, is ambivalent about freedom, because there are some truths that must not be spoken, donchyaknow.
I posed this question in the comments to Clark’s article in the guardian: “Why, exactly, was it necessary for Vaclav Havel to have this ‘bravery’ of which you speak? Answer carefully…”
The left is ready for another blood bath. They wish to do the killing.
The lefties commenting on SFGate didn’t wait a week. They were going to town the first day. They know an enemy when they see one.
Something always to remember…
Social Democrats and Communists agree on the ends, only disagree on the means.
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/atw.php?id=641
It is sad that Professor Radosh continues to throw red meat to the hungry knownothings: Read a genuine “left post” on “Remember Havel, and Don’t Forget Hungary” by Jo-Ann Mort.
Last week, the world lost the great dissident and leader Václav Havel. Havel fought for human rights, and the Czech Republic that he founded remains politically liberal. Not so its neighboring Hungary, which experienced its own revolution in 1990. After years of socialist rule, the right wing has taken charge there and directly attacked the very freedoms won by the generation of Central and Eastern European left-liberal visionaries that includes Havel and his ilk.
At the beginning of 2011, Havel joined with other stars from the revolutions of 1989 to appeal to the European Union regarding Hungary’s crackdown on liberty. The Budapest Appeal, organized and signed by Havel, Miklos Haraszti, Adam Michnik, and others, asks the EU to consider the fragile state of democracy in the region.
We the undersigned are members and supporters of the democratic movements that fought against the Communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe—fought for our nations to join the community of European democracies. We can never forget the risk of losing basic rights to power-hungry governments.
This time, the destruction of democracy’s guarantees is unfolding right before the eyes of the European Union, the very alliance founded to ensure that respect for our common values remains indivisible…Just twenty years after communism collapsed, Hungary’s government, though elected democratically, is misusing its legislative majority to methodically dismantle democracy’s checks and balances, to remove constitutional constraints, and to subordinate to the will of the ruling party all branches of power, independent institutions, and the media…Our hard-won freedoms need to be made accountable! There exist no common European democratic values if they are not served by a common European law.
Havel’s legacy is secure in the Czech Republic, but not so in Central Europe overall, or in Hungary especially. The region’s intellectuals came together with trade unionists and others a generation ago to fight for freedom. Perhaps a new generation will take on the struggle to reaffirm that censorship and attacks on liberties must disappear for good, not reemerge after communism under new labels and under the European umbrella.
Norman of course you socialist/communists are upset about Hungary the audacity of passing a flat rate income tax just goes against the Marxist grain. Cutting the size of parliament from approx. 1 member for every 25000 people to 1 for every 50000 totally outrageous. The only time lefties worry about the will of the people is when they loose the election, then the people just didn’t know what they were doing and need to be reeducated.
“It is sad that Professor Radosh continues to throw red meat to the hungry knownothings: Read a genuine “left post” on “Remember Havel, and Don’t Forget Hungary” by Jo-Ann Mort.”
So the Daily Beast and the very widely circulated Guardian piece were written by agent provocateurs commissioned by Karl Rove. Or is it the Koch brothers now?
Looks like Norman is doing its best to throw red meat to the hungry knownothings of the left.
‘Read a GENUINE left post’? You mean, one claiming that any weakening of the Communist front guarantees a resurgent fascist wave? The One True Progressive Way must prevail or we’ll all be coerced out of our freedoms?
Stalin tried, millions died.
I see that someone from Obama’s Office of The Director of Progressive Media and Online Response has joined us.
He cites a study that showed a million Czechs died after the regime was ousted? A million? Where does he get that? Thirty seconds of Google would show him that this can’t possibly be right.
But someone who feels a tinge of sympathy for Stalinism isn’t likely to be deterred by facts.
And of those who died, how many were due to the pollution caused by the communist regime?
The million that died every X years under communism’s “free” pour-some-vodka-on-it medical care are considered natural and unavoidable to European leftists. They don’t count.
Where does he get that?
Plucked from the thin air, that is where.
I think the idea that communism eliminated income inequality by making everyone equally poor is incorrect. The 99% were equally poor perhaps but the 1% communist leadership lived a life of privilege. It is the worst sort of hypocrisy and corruption.
Well, yes, but I grant the liberals their point in general for the sake of moving the argument where it belongs. Collectivism certainly does increase equality and decrease income disparity. That’s why liberals want to define “poverty” as “inequality” – the solution for poverty is more people making more money, while the solution for inequality is definitionally more socialism.
Woe to the envious. A public that reaches its avaricious hand to take from its neighbor by force deserves what it gets, even if no one but God is left to see the irony.
And the Nazis put Germany back to work…
What this illustrates is the undeadness of Communism. Fascism is dead. Communism is undead.
Neither Fascism nor Communism are dead.
But only Communism owns an immense reservoir of organized indoctrinating power and wealth, lodged in NGOs and Western University systems, and entrenched against any intrusion of diverse beliefs such as wealth-creating capitalism.
It’s the same reason the left engaged in such a vicious character assassination of Augusto Pinochet. He was one of the few men who ever overthrew and reversed a Communist takeover and rescued his country from the Communists.
STeve do you know who Pinochet really was? That’s a rhetorical question; you obviously don’t. Pinochet was scum through and through, whether he represented the left, right or center.
Pinochet saved his country from the communist thugs.
And he relinquished power when the time came.
How many commie regimes can you say that about?
Lol! At what price? You should read more. It’s no secret that he killed and tortured thousands. Is that ok with you?!
Who cares how many commie regimes you can say that about? Pinochet was still scum. I guess you could say that about russia until Yeltsin came to power– but then he is probably a hero of yours too since he did everything Washington bureaucrats told him like a good boy.
To gauge you better, how would you describe Allende? Salvador, not Isabel, that is.
All I can tell you is that allende was elected and supported by a majority of the people in chile, then, he was overthrown and killed in an illegal coup.
36% of the vote is not a majority, Jazzy. The vote opposing him was split by the two center and right parties. Pinochet, as much a bastard as he was, was responding to a majority resolution from Chile’s legislature to remove Allende.
The U.S.S.R. died 20 yeare ago today. What an amazing shift in world events… and I have not seen one word about it in any medial. Go figure!
M
How can you put these two in the same category?
Vaclav Havel was a hero who paid a price for his quest for freedom
Hitchens was an alcoholic, bi sexual hack who was a whore for whoever gave him booze and money.
He was a close friend of holocaust denier David Irving and a rabid anti-Christian –good riddance to bad rubbish
“He was a close friend of holocaust denier”
That’s rich coming from a Turk who denies the Armenian holocaust that murdered millions of Christians and who goes out of his way to pimp antisemitic islamofascist savages like Erdogan.
At least Clark is being honest. He is one of many so-called neo-marxists who still hold on to the belief that communism would work splendidly with just a few iddy biddy tweaks. They are too far gone to even discuss basic issues because in the end they refuse to look at the empirical evidence – for them the slaughter of millions was simply a necessary evil to be endured for a better world. Poverty and brutality, lack of basic freedoms? Who cares as long as the prophets (false) dream is perpetrated on the masses.
Like Keynesian daydreamers, history and existing societies are to be discounted because those few enlightened tweaks that they have cooked up have not yet been imposed on the lucky masses.
I long for the day when apologists for communism will be viewed with the same contempt we feel for apologists for nazism.
It’s amusing in a way how the apologists for communism still believe in it as something that could possibly work if only the “right people were in charge” (meaning themselves, of course). They read Marx as theory and compare it to the messy reality of actual governments, ignoring the ugly reality of every country that tried communism. They either deny or overlook the secret police agencies, the arrests and mass murders, the corruption of the ruling elite and the misery of the people. No, they still think a communism utopia (literal meaning: “no where”) is possible. They either fools or insane enough to believe they can keep trying the same thing and get a different outcome.
Clark’s article about Havel claims that his reforms increased general population mortality. He supported his claim by referring to 2009 paper in Lancet. The referenced publication explicitly states (p.6) that there is no significant correlation between post-communist reforms and mortality in Czech Republic.
Mr. Clark, like most of communist propagandists, is a liar.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE30TH6Y7cI
Any man, any candidate can be defeated. A movement based on an idea whose time has come however, is invincible. Merry Christmas PJMers. You’re about to be in the same position as those East German border guards who stood mouths agape as tens of thousands of Berliners from both sides (West and East) came up to them chanting, “Open the gate!” in 1989. Bankster corporatism (aka Too Big to Fail) is the new Communism, and it will crumble.
Try occupying common sense, X. #clueless
As Churchill noted, democracy is a terrible form of government, but it is the best we have yet discovered. I would say, ditto for democratic capitalism. There is much less personal freedom in all of the nations of Europe, both with respect to say and think as you wish and to make personal economic progress.
Socialism always foments the creation of a politico-economic elite who tell the masses how to do “things.” Eventually they “invent” reasons to become ever more authoritarian/totalitarian in order to remain in power. Havel knew this very well. I lived in the Czech Republic during a brief part of his time as President. Then and now, the Czech people are working on their democracy. They need to establish a better legal and court system; too much of it is a hold over from both the First Republic and the communist era.
Think of it this way: the margin of error in estimating the number of innocent men, women and children murdered by communism is larger than the entire number killed by that other leftist mass murder, the Holocaust.
I recently read Whittaker Chembers for the first time and was struck by his definition of communism being the world’s second oldest religion. The version of communism we have experienced since the Russian Revolution in 1917 is merely the updated version of feudalism. This will always be with us because there will always be a criminal sub-culture taking the Robin Hood angle.
As I seem to recall Robin Hood stole from the government and gave to the people. I don’t remember it being “From each according to his means, to each according to his needs”.
“what they really think: Havel helped destroy the great ideal of Communism as a worthy goal, and for that, he cannot be forgiven.”
Ron Radosh has no idea of “what they think”; as if the entire, even majority of the collective Left think this way. Just because an idiot like Neil Clark makes a ridiculous statement Radosh thinks he has a right to broad-brush the entire Left. Sloppy and stupid. A piece expressly written to create dissension instead of enlightenment.
Please. You lefties are about a doctrinaire and unforgiving of straying from the party line (indeed, “party line” is a standard leftist trope) as it’s possible to me. Claiming otherwise us just a flat-out lie.
While giving Mr. Havel his due, let us also remember who helped him and other anti-communist leaders in their push for a freer society: George Soros.
As Mr. Havel wrote in November 2009:
“I recall vividly—and it’s something we should commemorate and give thanks for—that among those who tirelessly supported civil society in Central and Eastern European countries was George Soros and his network of foundations and institutes. Without the contributions from him and his network, the fundamental political changes would not have taken root so quickly in the civic consciousness of people throughout Central and Eastern Europe.”
If you are hinting that Soros is some kind of a hero in Czech Republic, maybe so. But his plans to replace the dollar with SDRs and his support of pot initiatives, gay marriage, stacking the coutrts with left-leaning judges, paying for select new writers at NPR, suggesting a 23% revenue that would dramatically increase taxes, vilifying any news organization that opposes his goals, well – to me he is simply a power hungry leftist with a hidden agenda.
A little good now and then can mask a lot of bad.
The Black Book of Communism has citations by its French authors documenting over 100 million early and often horrible deaths at the hands of this inhumane ideology. And that the absence of price signals and foolish dicta of central planning often meant that the output of their factories was worth less than the inputs – so billions of lives of effort in these systems have gone absolutely wasted in terms of improving the lives of humankind – save for the efforts of a few exceptional artists and scientists – and the occasional weapon system that advanced the state of the art over the best the West could do.
Even George Kennan had early doubts of the wisdom of containment given these costs (vice serial destruction of the dictatorships until the regions’ peoples could voice a free choice – which the West could have accomplished at the cost of a few million lives up until the early 70s in response to what were yearly provocations). This is perhaps free mankind’s greatest sin of omission ever, standing by while entire cultures were raped, plundered and enslaved in full view of at least our political leaders, if not all – given the self-censorship and the (delusional) beliefs of our elites and their press (that mankind could be perfected, and heaven forbid – that free exchange by a free-people and their enterprise (w/ governance used to maximize freedom rather than limit with law and regulation) be discovered and promoted as the best and most moral system for advancing humankind).
It seems to take about 50 years after a cataclysm for cold and factual history to emerge, written well after the passions have faded, principals have died and their papers published. We’re only 20 years from 1990 and the fall of the wall. I suspect it’ll take even longer for International Socialism to be condemned with the ferocity of its less destructive sibling, National Socialism.
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Book-Communism-Crimes-Repression/dp/0674076087
Most articles, like this one about Havel, set, or upset best after reading the comments that follow. I mentally compile reading lists as I go, then don’t bother to enter the fray. The Black Book of Communism is often at the top of that list. Thanks, Ari Tai.
“NATO intervened to destroy massacres carried out by the Serbs under the leadership of the last brutal ruler of post-Tito Yugoslavia …”
Sorry, this is propaganda. There were no massacres being carried out by the Serbs; there was a nasty little guerrilla war between the Albanian KLA and the Yugoslavs, with both Albanian and Serb drug-running mobs participating and taking advantage of the chaos — to which NATO bombing contributed.
My respect for Havel is second to none, but in this case I believe his opinion is more due to the traditional Croat/Slovenian/Czech “racial” (actually cultural, due to Habsburg influence) contempt for the Serbs than from any enlightened humanitarian views.