Why We Need More Leaders Like Vaclav Havel
The courageous playwright who destroyed Communism in Czechoslovakia could teach us much about the need to defend Western freedoms against totalitarian Islam.
No one could have blamed Havel, in the flush of victory, for feeling less than charitable toward the Communists. But he refused to wreak vengeance, rejected calls to outlaw the Communist Party, and strove to transcend old hatreds; he asked that all Czechs and Slovaks work together to repair the damage Communism had caused — damage to everything from the nation’s infrastructure to its very soul — and to build a new, free society of which everyone could be proud. In “Power and the Powerless” he had imagined the modern world surpassing not only totalitarianism but also Western democracy in its present form and attaining a “post-democracy” even more fully dedicated to individual liberty; in reality, it became difficult enough to take the wreck that was post-Communist Czechoslovakia — a country whose economy was a basket case, whose rivers were sewers, and whose people had been rendered ill-equipped by decades of fear and oppression to make the most of living in freedom — and turn it into a modern democracy with a functioning market economy. Yet Havel and others, to their everlasting credit, managed within a reasonably short time to achieve just this.
In his first New Year’s address to Czechoslovakia, Havel noted that during the Communist era the country’s leaders had filled their New Year’s addresses with glowing words about “how our country was flourishing, how many million tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were.” Havel noted that in fact Czechoslovakia’s economy was a joke (”Entire branches of industry are producing goods that are of no interest to anyone”), that it had “the most contaminated environment in Europe” (at the time, the country’s name was synonymous in many people’s minds with waterways polluted beyond belief), and that, worst of all,
we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. … We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. … None of us is just its victim. We are all also its co-creators.
Yes, co-creators. It was necessary, he insisted, that Czechs and Slovaks refuse to see themselves as victims — for only thus would they realize it was up to them to change their lot. It would do no good to spend their time blaming their former Communist masters for their troubles.
In 1993, Czechoslovakia split peacefully into two countries, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, with Havel becoming president of the latter. He stepped down in 2003, but continued to fight oppression. (He was admirably outspoken, for example, in his criticism of Fidel Castro, whom many other European leaders adored.) He has also talked about Communism’s psychic legacy, which, though in the main profoundly negative, as it stunted its subjects both morally and spiritually, also had a positive side: for it taught people like him to cherish the freedom they didn’t have. And after they had won it, they knew they must never take it for granted. To stand up for freedom — not only theirs but that of others — was for them a profoundly felt moral obligation. It was worth their vigilance, their sacrifice. In the West, Havel knew, this kind of awareness and commitment were largely absent: “Naturally, all of us continue to pay lip service to democracy, human rights, the order of nature, and responsibility for the world,” he wrote, “but apparently only insofar as it does not require any sacrifice.” The West, he worried, had “lost its ability to sacrifice” — a point also made by Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn in a 1978 commencement address at Harvard. “A decline in courage,” Solzhenitsyn told the graduates on that day three decades ago,
may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. … Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course, there are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.
When one examines the responses of many in the West to the challenge of Islam, it’s hard not to feel that Havel and Solzhenitsyn were absolutely right. Living a lie, once ubiquitous behind the Iron Curtain, is now widespread in the West owing to a profound fear of Islam. Every Western journalist who writes that Islam is a religion of peace, who chides terrorists for hijacking a peaceful religion, and who celebrates Muhammed as a messenger of ecumenical harmony — all the time knowing that these are lies — is doing the equivalent of the greengrocer putting a sign in his window to avoid trouble. For most of us in the West today, life is extraordinarily easy compared with life in a dictatorship — and it’s precisely for this reason that jihadists are making inroads upon our freedoms with so little effort. “The only genuine values,” Havel has written, “are those for which one is capable, if necessary, of sacrificing something.” By this measure, how many people in the West today are truly dedicated to liberty? Today, in the Western world, if a group of Muslims starts bullying non-Muslims and seeking to limit their freedoms, most of the latter will not raise a peep in protest — instead, they’ll criticize those who resist. For those accustomed to the comfort of life in the West — a life that’s free of the perils of totalitarian societies and that rarely requires courage — standing up to bullies doesn’t come naturally. It’s scary to confront jihadist gangsters, and far easier to join the mob of people shaking their fingers at the few who dare to confront them. It’s also easy — and self-flattering, and immoral, and irresponsible — to pretend that you’re living in a totalitarian society when in fact you’re free. Those who say that America has become a totalitarian state either don’t have the slightest understanding of totalitarianism or are cowards playing at being heroes.
A dissident hero under Communism, Havel became in the post-Cold War world an international symbol of the triumph of individual conscience over the forces of tyranny. He traveled the world, won prizes, addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress. Meanwhile, back home in Prague, he suffered the fate of all politicians. Though in his first years as president he was almost universally admired, even revered, over the years he was increasingly criticized on a variety of fronts. He was attacked both for being too informal and for putting on airs; for being too conciliatory with the Communist ex-rulers and for being too hard on them; for being too enthusiastic about the free market and too hostile to it. As a dissident, Havel had stood for principle; as a politician he was obliged to make compromises. Keane, who writes respectfully about Havel the dissident, snipes tirelessly at Havel the post-revolution politician, apparently cataloging every last gripe that anybody in Czechoslovakia might have had about him. Keane even goes so far as to describe Havel’s life as a tragedy — the noble crusader who bested the powers of evil ending up just another politician at a desk. This interpretation, however, is obscene; it smacks of Communist-style utopianism. For a person living under totalitarian terror, the greatest dream is simply to be able to lead a normal life. Havel’s triumph is that he and his countrymen liberated themselves into a world in which they were no longer forced to live in terror, a world in which they didn’t put their lives on the line with every action they took and every word they spoke. Havel himself considers his life story inspiring, as well he should — for it shows, as he has said,
that an apparently hopeless cause can have a happy ending. That story may seem somewhat like a fairy tale, somewhat kitschy; you can laugh at it, but at the same time it wouldn’t be entirely right to laugh at it. It’s good when people admire such an outcome. It speaks well of their understanding of values.
Indeed. The person who can’t be moved by Havel’s triumph has no appreciation for his own freedom and can’t imagine what it would mean to lose it.
How familiar are people in the West with Havel and his accomplishments? When he arrived at Columbia University in late 2006 to spend a few weeks on campus delivering lectures and taking part in panel discussions, few of the undergraduates could have picked him out in a lineup. Gregory Mosher, director of the university’s Arts Initiative program, admitted to the New York Times, “They had no idea who he is. … [They] thought he was a hockey player.” Yet is it possible that any of these Ivy Leaguers — supposedly among the best and brightest of their generation — had not heard of those fabled First Amendment heroines, the Dixie Chicks? How many of them not only knew the name of Che Guevara, that bloodthirsty Stalinist, but also thought he was cool (and had t-shirts to prove it)? When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad showed up a year later to give his address at Columbia, was there a single undergraduate on Morningside Heights who didn’t know who he was? In a time when freedom in the West is seriously threatened by Islamism and its Western allies and appeasers, it’s imperative that young people cherish their freedom, that they sincerely honor the memory of the men and women who fought and died for it, that they recognize the forces in the world today that threaten it, and that they be prepared to make an effort — and, yes, even make sacrifices — to preserve that freedom for future generations. In order for them to be able to do this, it is vital that they have before them the rare and remarkable example of individuals such as Vaclav Havel.
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Bruce Bawer is the author of Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom. His website is at www.brucebawer.com.
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33 Comments
1. vb:Thank you for honoring an honorable man. Thank you for helping keep us aware of what words like honor and freedom really mean and what they are worth. Thank you also for your excellent book.
Jun 6, 2008 - 4:36 am 2. SwingShiftCEO:Thanks for this amazing lesson in recent history. I had no idea who Havel was, but now I will never forget him.
Jun 6, 2008 - 6:30 am 3. Bill in New York:Thank you for the history lesson, I loved reading it. To Vaclav Havel, and all those who sacrificed (including those who sacrificed their lives and who’s stories will never be told in this lifetime), may we all give thanks by remembering and honoring their sacrifices lest we fail to learn from and repeat history (which of course we are living now). I can’t help but notice while reading this, that the absence of a belief system in a life after death with a moral code that supercedes the values of a people who only see life as “cradle to grave” and nothing more, makes those people as vulnerable to evil (in whatever form it takes, be it Islamist terrorism, Nazism, Communism, or whatever) as sheep being led to slaughter… which explains their constant efforts to purge Christ and Christianity from our lives… they know the power of good is stronger than evil, that’s their greatest fear… evil is a weak, but incessant enemy that thrives through never-ending insidious small victories in each individual’s life… and thus personal responsibility is the cure… without God, without faith, without liberation as defined in our Declaration of Independence that only comes from God and can never be taken from us… then of course fear of loss must fill the void, and evil rules… Victor Frankl, “Man’s Search for Meaning”, another must read along the same heroic line as this story of Vaclav Havel. Thank you again for sharing this article, it is a tremendous read.
Jun 6, 2008 - 8:03 am 4. Concerned Citizen:Vaclav Havel is one of my heros. He found the truth and accepted nothing short of the truth. Socialism, communism, environmentalism and other ideologies that cannot accept the truth ultimately end in the ruin of humanity.
Jun 6, 2008 - 8:39 am 5. Sandra M:Many heartfelt thanks for teaching me more about this great hero.
I woul be grateful to anyone who translated The Power of the Powerless into Farsi and Arabic and posted it on the web.
Jun 6, 2008 - 10:56 am 6. Fellow Czech:As an American of Czech decent I couldn’t be more proud of the country where my family originated. The Velvet Revolution and their peaceful split into two countries are remarkable. Havel is truly a hero whose story should be taught in our schools. We also need to listen to the current Czech president’s warning about the global warming hoax. I grew up among the Czechs and know their wisdom and goodness. Thanks for a great article.
Jun 6, 2008 - 11:17 am 7. Sandra M:The Power of the Powerless should be translated not only into Farsi and Arabic but into SPANISH.
Decades ago, the Reader’s Digest published an abridged version of THE ROAD TO SERFDOM by Frierich Hayek in North America and in a Spanish version in South America. Very influential.
Want to defeat Chavez, Islamofascism and Adminjihad et al? Translate into Spanish, Farsi, and Arabic, Hindi and Mandarin Ayn Rand’s WE THE LIVING (life in Soviet Russia) THE FOUNTAINHEAD (man’s right to live for himself not the state (Russia) or the race (Nazism), ATLAS SHRUGGED (”evil” industrialists and entrepreneurs et al go on strike and society collapses).
The West’s lamestream media should be totally despised for their failure to investigate our Arab-American candidate (Dad was 87% Arab) half-brother and cousin (google Odinga Obama) to Kenyan terrorists, and more (PJ Media/Jun 4 , 5:25 am comment by Dean in column by Rick Moran on Mc-Cain Obama). Once again, they don’t vet a candidate until it’s too late: Clinton, Kerry, et al.
Worse yet, a timid academia and government bureaucracy abjectly kowtowto Islamofascistm especially in Minnesota and in British Columbia against Mark Steyn (read his most recent column).
It’s time for all of us to push back against the Islamofascists while rigorously defending lapsed Muslims and Lebanese Christians, even Sikhs (first to die after 9/11, killed by a knownothing moron) from the lethal fury of their Islamofascist tormenters, here and abroad.
Jun 6, 2008 - 11:35 am 8. subrot0:Once in a while there emerges a person who exemplifies the true nature of Western civil society. Not a whole lot of them exist currently but Havel is one of them.
A man who has seen the face of evil, resisted it and created two new countries is a rare man indeed. It is refereshing to read this instead of the tripe we are forced to swallow in the name of political correctness and ideology.
Jun 6, 2008 - 12:50 pm 9. karl:Sorry to spoil the love fest party here, but folks should remember that while he was President, the greatest criminal looting of the Czech Republic occured, with countless investment funds being “tunneled” out by their fund managers and the savings of thousands of Czechs being lost. He sat around doing nothing and saying practically nothing while all this occured.
Jun 6, 2008 - 1:37 pm 10. Valle:Dyanmite piece. Thank you.
Jun 6, 2008 - 4:59 pm 11. vb:karl: Even if Havel was not a fantastic administrator, he fought for a government that is capable of self correction. How many millions have lived with corruption, poverty, and unbelievable environmental degradation because they could not raise their voices or cast a vote? And should we not remember that he oonfronted lung cancer during his term of office?
Jun 6, 2008 - 5:11 pm 12. Rubicon:The “corruption probes” that followed, organized by him, uncovered many of the culprits & continues to this day to uncover & return funds to those who lost them.
Jun 6, 2008 - 6:14 pm 13. abu al-fin:The man is among those who freed his nation. Those who were part of the government who decided to steal, were typical bureaucrats. A system with way too many regulatory types & regulations, all designed to allow manipulation. Sounds like what many want for America.
Keep it simple. Keep it small. And allow the people to be free. Havel is a champion of humanity and freedom.
Havel is fantastic. A brilliant and eloquent man with courage and wisdom. Very rare indeed. Havel was re-elected for an excellent reason–the people liked what they saw and wanted to see more.
We live in a decadent age of Peter Pans and Cinderellas–psychological neotenates who will never grow up or take responsibility for preserving the freedoms they were given for nothing. These twits love Che, Fidel, Mahmoud, Hugo, and Karl.
Jun 6, 2008 - 6:34 pm 14. Tom Boutell:Havel is magnificent.
But I have read this piece carefully, and I still have absolutely no idea what the connection with western attitudes toward “jihadists” is supposed to be. It feels completely tacked-on.
Comparing a totalitarian regime which focuses all power in a single state to a world-spanning religion of billions with many distinct sects and attitudes just doesn’t make any sense.
Who are these people “in the western world” who are getting bullied to give up their rights by Muslims and happily acquiescing to it?
Hey, that’s what you wrote:
“Today, in the Western world, if a group of Muslims starts bullying non-Muslims and seeking to limit their freedoms, most of the latter will not raise a peep in protest— instead, they’ll criticize those who resist.”
Yeah, those straw men are awful and they should step off and leave us brave defenders of freedom alone.
You also took a moment to point out that if we criticize our own country for moving in a more totalitarian direction, we’re trivializing what the victims of real totalitarianism go through. But apparently it’s fine for you to compare an entire religion— sunni and shiite, hundreds of millions of moderate Indonesians and, yes, conservative powderkegs like Iran— to a single monolithic totalitarian state. That comparison is A-OK and doesn’t stretch credibility at all because the point you’re making is too important to worry about things like that.
Jun 6, 2008 - 7:07 pm 15. Tom Boutell:P.S. It looks like Havel himself sponsored an interfaith conference in 2004 where criticism of the “clash of civilizations” theory was put forward by moderate muslims. Doesn’t sound like he’d be in any rush to embrace your tortured analogy.
Jun 6, 2008 - 7:12 pm 16. David B.:Some of the acquiesence Mr Bawer is talking about could be interpreted to refer to the mass of “moderate” Muslims whose almost complete silence in the face of murderous fanaticism carried out in the name of their religion could be seen as de facto approval. Or, as he points out, that silence could be the result of fear. To paraphrase a famous quote, “All that it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing.”
Terrific piece of history. This was a pleasure to read and will be long remembered by me.
Jun 6, 2008 - 7:32 pm 17. Benson:I’ll be scolded for adding this to the comments, but the truth is, if Havel attained high office, he would be bad for the world. While he’s been a leader in the transition from the fake communism of Eastern Europe, he’s not a thoroughgoing friend of Liberty. Like most Europeans, he believes in a politically controlled world economy. He said this in 2004 (in, AFAIK, CMIIAW, an article in the journal The New Presence):
“The end of the bipolar world represented a great opportunity to make the international order more humane. Instead, we witness a process of economic globalization that has escaped political control and, as such, is causing economic havoc, as well as ecological devastation, in many parts of the world.”
This mindless babble sounds like something Naomi Klein would say — it’s sloganeering laced with willful ignorance. In fact, the world was never “bipolar,” there is no “international order” (nor should there be), and the more globalization comes under political control, the more likely it will be a disaster for the poor, who could be its biggest beneficiaries. Ecological devastation predates and is not caused by globalization, but by the corruption that is the ineradicable norm in the “developing” nations.
We don’t want people like Havel running governments. There are too many Utopian control freaks already. Give the man credit for the great good he has done; he played his role, and admirably. Now he should retire. It would be a blunder to give him the power to mess up free trade and economic development.
Jun 7, 2008 - 1:14 am 18. vb:Tom B: “Who are those in the West being bullied” I suggest you read Bawer’s book. For one thing, Muslims themselves who live in the West are being bullied. Girls in the bannlieu walking home from school were being threatened and even raped for not wearing a headscarf. They were not protected by the police and the bullies won the neighborhoods. The French have woken up to the problem. How far they have gotten in addressing it is something I can’t judge. And before you object, my information about the bannlieu was not from Bawer’s book. It was from German MSM. The whole point that Bawer is making is that we are too complacent about the values that give us the rights we enjoy.
Benson: In case you haven’t noticed, Havel has been replaced by Vaclav Klaus, who is one of the stronger voices warning against eco-totalitarianism. That both Vaclavs can put their ideas in the marketplace is due in part to Havel’s efforts. We are still debating the Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian views of the world, but we recognize their roles in giving us the right to debate.
Jun 7, 2008 - 5:09 am 19. Steven Brockerman:Stunning anecdotes of personal courage; astonishing conclusions that undermine that courage. And both from the same person! Havel’s notion of sacrifice is old school, to be sure: liberty-or-death as noble sacrifice. It is, nonetheless, genuine sacrifice when expanded and re-applied to other things. Of course, much is the result of this writer’s interpretation and unquestioning worship of sacrifice.
Jun 7, 2008 - 5:13 am 20. Porkov:To fight Islam we must…sacrifice. To fight disease, then, we must become ill.
I wonder how he would have felt about the necessity of a flag pin. Would he have bowed to Gessler’s hat?
Jun 7, 2008 - 6:01 am 21. PJ:Excellent post.
The story of heroes like Dubcek and Havel would make a wonderful movie, but I guess Hollywood is too busy making movies about McCarthyism to care about real oppression.
Jun 7, 2008 - 8:02 am 22. Barry Meislin:Thanks for this. Now I know why Noam Chomsky can’t stand this guy.
Jun 7, 2008 - 11:59 am 23. Vaclav Havel Lived Under Two Totalitarian Regimes « Evynn’s Weblog:[...] clipped from pajamasmedia.com [...]
Jun 7, 2008 - 6:20 pm 24. QwkDrw:While visiting for a short time in Prague, I had an impression of some current generation citizens living in the Czech Republic. Many appeared to be living among the fabulous treasures of a preserved architectural cityscape, without the means to afford admission to a museum. Evident behavior of some showed apathy, if not obvious disrespect, for the ancient buildings created by the work of many, less free, before them. Jumping to mind is the non-caring to destructive behavioral range of some teenagers when left home alone by otherwise repressive parents. A few Czech citizens seem to be visibly struggling while growing into the responsibility of governing themselves in an environment that was inherited.
Jun 7, 2008 - 10:35 pm 25. Chesterton & Lewis warn against tyranny | The Anchoress:[...] president Vaclev Havel, an economist who has some personal acquaintance with the tyranny of evil men, is trying to warn [...]
Jun 8, 2008 - 6:21 am 26. Steynianism 162 « Free Mark Steyn!:[...] PAJAMAS MEDIA– “Why We Need More Leaders Like Vaclav Havel, by Bruce Bawer. “The courageous [...]
Jun 8, 2008 - 8:27 am 27. Robert:Havel is indeed an extraordinary person, and this article presents him admirably, but view its ending arguments skeptically. I was a student at Columbia Univesity during Havels stay, and the author distorts the Columbia studentry perception of Havel to illicit a false argument. A great number of students knew of Vaclav Havels accomplishments, and we were all clamouring to hear his lectures, speeches, and panel discussions. Getting tickets to hear his lectures and discussions were nearly impossible, too many students signed up for every one of his events, making it necessary for the school to allocate tickets on a lottery selection scheme. Despite popular opinion, not all college students are stereotypical stalinists planning a communist takeover of the government while we sit in our dorms underneath our Che Guevara posters listening to the Dixie Chicks croon over our itunes.
Jun 8, 2008 - 9:12 am 28. Jeremy:I second what Robert said above. Though I wasn’t at Columbia in 2006, I did see Havel speak at the Library of Congress around the same time, and there were dozens of young people in attendance–and dozens more who couldn’t get in. Though I do think Noam Chomsky makes a fair point from time, I also consider Vaclav Havel to be one of the singular people of the last 50 years.
Jun 10, 2008 - 6:23 am 29. Jaroslav:I am Czech and I must react ,because all of this is totall lie ,havel was and he still is kryptocomunist euronazi colaborant who stealed property ( about 1 billion Czech Crowns) after socalled velvet revolution(which was only tool to save commies from justice) by socalled restitution of property which was confiscated after WWII because his family was band of nazi colaborants ,he served a and still serve as puppet of eurobolschevik neofeudal Bruxel,neocons promoting multicultralism,PC,criminophilia(”criminals are victims of society” ) puppet of zionists and islamofascist sheiks at the same time,promoting fascist concept of “hate crime”,enviromentalism and all that globalist fascist agenda he love. havel hates people as nobody else and he promoted teror and injustice as nobody else and he served nearly everybody who pays.You are right in one thing – there is no other person like him.
Jun 10, 2008 - 11:55 am 30. Vespasiano:Thank-you, Mr. Bawer, for that inspiring profile of Vaclav Havel. He is, indeed, both a true hero of our time and an inspiration.
I do have one serious concern, however, with respect to what I view as your (if not, Mr. Havel’s) misuse of the word “sacrifice”. To sacrifice is to give up a higher value for a lesser one or a non-value. Because it is an essential requirement of a human life, individual liberty is neither a non-value or a lesser one. Therefore, to defend it, to struggle for it and, indeed, to fight for it even to death cannot be a sacrifice properly understood.
Jun 10, 2008 - 3:14 pm 31. link 749 | Molrak.com:[...] Pajamas Media » Why We Need More Leaders Like Vaclav Havel [...]
Jun 12, 2008 - 6:28 am 32. Club Troppo » Missing Link Daily:[...] Bawer writes about the life and achievements of Czech politician/playwright Vaclav Havel (highly [...]
Jul 21, 2008 - 3:00 pm 33. Douglas Watts:Sorry, this is all laughable and totally wrong. . If you read Havel’s autobiography, “Disturbing the Peace,” (Alfred A. Knopf) you would know that Havel is just as distrustful and skeptical of western corporate monopoly capitalism as soviet-style communism.
The author is dishonestly trying to use Havel as a puppet for his own xenophobic, bigoted views — just as the Czech communists did.
You folks are as warped and ideologically blind as the 1960s Eastern Bloc politburos.
Jan 17, 2009 - 8:45 am