Vaclav Havel

One of the most moving moments we experienced in recent years was a visit to the Checkpoint Charlie Museum at Berlin. Its main exhibit is devoted to documenting the attempts to escape Soviet communism in East Germany, and all of it is affecting. But we remember lingering over one exhibit in particular, the manual typewriter that, it was noted, had been used to write Charter 77. We remember trying to explain to our boys, then just beginning middle school, the enormous significance of the manifesto that was tapped out on that typewriter and inspired the anti-communist resistance in Czechoslovakia and beyond.We have been thinking of that moment in the wake of the news of the death of the most famous of the signatories of Charter 77, Vaclav Havel, who died over the weekend at the age of 75. The long, twilight struggle against the communist tyranny at Czechoslovakia and the rest of Eastern Europe and at the Soviet Union had many heroes, on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Yet it is hard to think of any more unifying, dignified, cheerful, enduring, or consequential than the playwright turned president, who turned a protest against the suppression of a rock band into a movement that inspired and changed the world.The rock band — it was called the Plastic People of the Universe — is a point on which to linger. We confess the experimental rock of which it was a progenitor wasn’t something that resonated for us during the climactic years of the Cold War. We were riveted by the arguments in respect of political economy, the free trade union movement, the communist conquest of Vietnam, and the great showdown over theater nuclear weapons in Europe, among other issues at the time. Havel’s comprehension of not only the principles of freedom but also the power of popular culture — and his eloquence and courage as its defender — was what lifted him into the pantheon.One achievement of the movement that came together in Charter 77 was that it led to the merger of the interests of the cultural liberals and the political right in the struggle against communism. Charter 77 also spoke to the importance of religion. It would be too much to suggest that Charter 77 was a movement of hippies. But it would not be too much to say that one of the things that it taught — or at least reminded — all of us is that the suppression of any artistic movement, no matter how avant-garde, strikes at the heart of freedoms that affect everyone. No doubt the fact that Havel himself was an artist, a playwright, gave his insight into this point a special keenness.Not that he was the only great leader who was an artist. Reagan himself went through his triumphant career with, we once read, a self-conception that was not as a statesman or a political theorist but as an artist, in his case an actor. The essay in which we read that also pointed out that Churchill had a similar self-conception. In Havel’s case this gave him great strength in articulating a vision and in making strategic decisions — he was firmly with the West and Nato, and he saw that there could be no compromise with communism, even with the communism of a so-called reformer like Gorbachev.In this sense he was a spokesman for the “new Europe” of which Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld spoke during the polarization of opinion over the expedition to liberate Iraq from the grip of Saddam Hussein’s tyranny. Havel was one of the eight European leaders who signed a statement calling for unity with America on the eve of the war in Iraq. The statement, also signed by the leaders of Spain, Britain, Italy, Poland, Hungary, Denmark and Portugal, was published in the Wall Street Journal and stunned the leadership of the old Europe, particularly France and Germany, and gave an important lift to President Bush as the war clouds were scudding.Mr. Bush returned the support, presenting Havel with America’s highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom, and appearing at a conference on freedom and democracy convened in 2007 at Prague by Havel, Prime Minister Aznar of Spain, and Deputy Prime Minister Sharansky of Israel. The conference affected the American president deeply. Havel was magnificent in support of Free Cuba, issuing as late as March 2008 a column that appeared, among other places, in this newspaper. It was written by a group of co-authors who were all European based members of the International Committee for Democracy in Cuba.* * *Havel’s heroism was marked by a commitment to the democratic process, a point on which he resigned the presidency of Czechoslovakia during the separation of Slovakia and what became the Czech Republic, of which he later was elected president. What an example he set for the world of 2012, when so much of the Middle East is being swept by revolution and teetering between new dictatorships and freedom. It wouldn’t be surprising were it to turn out that somewhere, some writer is sitting down to the equivalent of that manual typewriter on display at the Checkpoint Charlie Museum and writing the draft of a manifesto that may yet change the world for yet a new generation.

Vaclav Havel

Vaclav Havel

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