Vaclav Havel: A Critical Evaluation

The death of Vaclav Havel on December 18, 2011, last president of Czechoslovakia and first president of the Czech Republic, has brought accolades from media pundits and political and plutocratic luminaries for the role he played in the dismantling of the Soviet bloc. Given that the Warsaw Pact was the only geopolitical entity that constrained American global hegemony Havel’s contribution to its demise is lauded as a great victory for “democracy” and “freedom.” However, those are words that are used by many regimes and systems, no matter what their character, and have been euphemisms since the time of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points for post-war international reconstruction in the image desired by the USA, for the subordination of all nations, peoples and cultures to everything that is conjured by the word “America.”

Havel is said to have been an idealistic opponent of the consumerist ethic, yet what is one to think of an individual who allowed himself to be mentored and patronized by the likes of George Soros, and flitted about among the luminaries of plutocracy? His critique of “The West” was perceptive, stating:

There is no need at all for different people, religions and cultures to adapt or conform to one another…. I think we help one another best if we make no pretenses, remain ourselves, and simply respect and honor one another, just as we are.[1]

Is a Clue to China’s Future on Its Dinner Tables?

In Vaclav Havel’s essay “The Power of the Powerless,” the central character is a grocer who hangs a sign in his window: “Workers of the World Unite!” Havel wondered: “Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world?” On the contrary, he concluded, the grocer’s slogan is the lament of a double life, a public substitute for the truth that he bears only in private: “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient.” The grocer’s silent concession, Havel wrote, is “one of the thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil life ‘in harmony with society,’ as they say.”

Twelve years later, on New Year’s Day, 1990, just days after being elected the first president of post-Communist Czechoslovakia, Havel delivered a famous speech and returned, I notice, to the political implications of produce: the doomed regime, he said, cultivated “special farms, which produce ecologically pure and top-quality food just for them” rather than send “their produce to schools, children’s homes, and hospitals.”

To a reader in China, Havel’s focus on the symbolism of “special farms” has a certain resonance. There are few issues more deeply and universally felt in China than the safety of its food; after years of scandals on cooking oil sifted from gutters, glow-in-the-dark pork, deadly infant formula, and so on, it has become a proxy for fraying public trust in the system to put the public interest above all. So it was grim news last fall when Chinese reporters uncovered a network of “special farms” dedicated to providing Party leaders with top-quality vegetables, chicken, pork, rice, beef, fish, and tea oil. In the province of Zhejiang, for instance, forty “high-class eco-farms” were said to have been earmarked to supply the land-resource department, water conservancy, agricultural units, and other government offices. (What are we to make of the fact that the offices receiving special food are exactly the ones overseeing the public’s supply?)

The Power of the Powerless - Vaclav Havel (1978, Excerpts)

{1}A SPECTER is haunting Eastern Europe: the specter of what in the West is called "dissent" This specter has not appeared out of thin air. It is a natural and inevitable consequence of the present historical phase of the system it is haunting. It was born at a time when this system, for a thousand reasons, can no longer base itself on the unadulterated, brutal, and arbitrary application of power, eliminating all expressions of nonconformity. What is more, the system has become so ossified politically that there is practically no way for such nonconformity to be implemented within its official structures. . . .

{2}Our system is most frequently characterized as a dictatorship or, more precisely, as the dictatorship of a political bureaucracy over a society which has undergone economic and social leveling. I am afraid that the term "dictatorship," regardless of how intelligible it may otherwise be, tends to obscure rather than clarify the real nature of power in this system. . . Even though our dictatorship has long since alienated itself completely from the social movements that give birth to it, the authenticity of these movements (and I am thinking of the proletarian and socialist movements of the nineteenth century) gives it undeniable historicity. These origins provided a solid foundation of sorts on which it could build until it became the utterly new social and political reality it is today, which has become so inextricably a part of the structure of the modern world. . . . It commands an incomparably more precise, logically structured, generally comprehensible and, in essence, extremely flexible ideology that, in its elaborateness and completeness, is almost a secularized religion. It offers a ready answer to any question whatsoever; it can scarcely be accepted only in part, and accepting it has profound implications for human life. In an era when metaphysical and existential certainties are in a state of crisis, when people are being uprooted and alienated and are losing their sense of what this world means, this ideology inevitably has a certain hypnotic charm. . . .