Vaclav Havel Crushed Communism By Speaking The Truth
INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY, Posted 12/19/2011
Leadership: Europe's outpouring of grief over the death of Vaclav Havel, hero of Czechoslovakia's great Velvet Revolution, says much about its longing for more like him. His honesty and courage liberated Europe.
Some 75,000 Czechs bearing roses and candles lined up in Wenceslas Square beginning Sunday, as they once did in 1989, to pay tribute to one of the greatest freedom fighters of the 20th century. Havel died Sunday at age 75 after liberating his country, leading his nation as president from 1989-2003, and voicing his moral authority to scourge lingering tyrants in Cuba, Burma and China.
Havel, a playwright whose health had been weakened by years spent in communist dungeons, was an unlikely and yet perfect leader for leading Eastern Europe's liberation from communism. He unshackled Europe with the only weapon in his arsenal — words, which he animated and empowered by expressing them truthfully.
In the former Czechoslovakia, the nightmare of communism imposed after World War II was employed with a Nazi-like oppressive intensity, leaving a bleak society whose citizens got by on lies, collaboration, mediocrity and ratlike survival ethics.
"We live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility, or forgiveness lost their depth and dimensions. ... Only a few of us were able to cry out loud that the powers that be should not be all-powerful," Havel told his nation after being elected the first president of the restored democracy in December 1989.
Condemned from birth as a "bourgeois element," Havel was always an outsider who could never become a "new communist man" or a cog in the machine of "progress." Denied admission to university, denied jobs, denied permission to leave the country, spied on by secret police and refused liberty in prison beginning in 1979, he managed to free his country by standing up for freedom against all odds.
It was an incredible dream then — because right up until the end, no one believed communism would ever fall. Havel's Velvet Revolution changed that, as first a few thousand, and then a few hundred thousand flooded the streets calling for the regime's end — and the move spread like wildfire through Europe and eventually hit the gates of Moscow.
Havel's peaceful revolution, unlike almost any other, left all oppressive regimes — to this very day — uncertain about their self-declared permanence.
All the same, the sorry imitations now seen in Egypt and Libya and other places leave people skeptical. That's because they aren't animated by the classical concepts of liberty and human rights that Havel's truth was.
First, his plays pointed out the rampant dishonesty, collaboration and conformity of society under communism and enraged the regime for that alone. Then in 1976, motivated by the regime's arrest of a psychedelic rock band called "Plastic People of the Universe," he initiated the first call for political freedom through his Charter 77, a manifesto for liberty on classical principles. He got 242 others to sign it — only a few years after Soviet tanks crushed Czechoslovakia's freedom fighters in a bloody 1968 invasion.
And yet, Havel himself said that standing up for freedom was the only choice.
"Humanity will pay the price for communism until such a time as we learn to stand up to it with all political responsibility and decisiveness," he said, encouraging a group of Cuban civil society organizers in 2006.
Havel not only articulated the corrosive effect of communism on the human soul as few others did, he also warned the West to defend its liberties and free markets.
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