[D66] On the death of Václav Havel

[Antid Oto]

On the death of Václav Havel
By Peter Schwarz
21 December 2011

The death of Václav Havel on Sunday has triggered a flood of positive
obituaries. Throughout the international media, this former opponent of the
Stalinist regime who became Czech president is being celebrated as “a statesman
of historic significance,” “a great European” and “a fighter for human rights
and democracy.”

Many in the Czech Republic and Eastern Europe would see this somewhat
differently. Havel was the kind of democrat who above all saw Stalinism as an
obstacle to their own social advance, because they were denied the social
status, wealth and prominence enjoyed by sections of the upper middle class in
the West. He was largely oblivious to the fate of working people.

Václav Havel was born on 5 October 1936 in an influential upper-class family in
Prague. In the interwar period, his grandfather, father and uncle were involved
in the construction of several buildings in Prague and the founding of the
famous Barrandov Film Studios, acquiring a considerable fortune. After the
Communist Party took power in 1948, they were dispossessed.

The Stalinist regime prevented Václav from attending high school because he came
from a bourgeois family. He continued his education at night school, worked in a
chemistry lab and as a taxi driver, beginning a business degree, which he later
broke off. He entered the theatre as a stage technician and he began to present
his own plays in the 1960s.

Havel’s plays were in the tradition of the theatre of the absurd, which shares
much with existential philosophy. They criticized the absurd aspects of the
Stalinist power structures, and contributed to the cultural atmosphere of the
1968 Prague Spring.

After the Prague Spring suppression by troops of the Warsaw Pact, Havel’s plays
were banned in Czechoslovakia. He spent five years in prison for his opposition
to the regime.

In 1977, Havel was among the initiators of Charter 77, which condemned the
restriction and suppression of civil rights and the subordination of state
institutions to the Communist Party. The only demand made by Charter 77 was
compliance with treaties the Czechoslovak regime had signed, especially the
Final Act of the CSCE Conference in Helsinki. The Charter has been published by
leading Western newspapers and is considered the founding document of the civil
rights movement in Czechoslovakia.

Havel always stressed he was not a dissident, because he had not “deviated” from
Stalinism but had always been its opponent. He not only rejected Stalinism but
any form of socialist perspective, and even the Enlightenment’s belief in progress.

The core theme of his plays and writings was the alienation of man from his
“Lebenswelt” or the “natural world”—a term he borrowed, via the Czech
philosopher Vaclav Belohradsky, from the phenomenology of German philosopher
Edmund Husserl. He looked for the cause of this alienation in science, which in
enlightened society had taken on the status of the highest authority, something
previously reserved for a higher unknown (God).

“The natural world, in virtue of its very being, bears within it the
presupposition of the absolute which grounds, delimits, animates and directs it,
without which it would be unthinkable, absurd, and superfluous, and which we can
only quietly respect,” Havel wrote in a 1984 essay Politics and Conscience. “Any
attempt to spurn it, master it, or replace it with something else, appears,
within the framework of the natural world, as in expression of hubris for which
humans must pay a heavy price, as did Don Juan and Faust.”

Havel considered the most extreme form of alienation from the living world to be
the Stalinist dictatorships. Rulers and leaders who were once personalities in
their own right, “have been replaced in modern times by the manager, the
bureaucrat, the professional apparatchik - a professional ruler, manipulator,
and expert in the techniques of management, manipulation, and obfuscation,
filling a depersonalized intersection of functional relations, a cog in the
machinery of state caught up in a predetermined role.”

Finally, Havel writes in the same essay, this alienation is inherent to the
whole of modern civilization: “To be sure, this process by which power becomes
anonymous and depersonalized, and reduced to a mere technology of rule and
manipulation, has a thousand masks, variants, and expressions. In one case it is
covert and inconspicuous, while in another case it is entirely overt; in one
case it sneaks up on us along subtle and devious paths, in another case it is
brutally direct. Essentially, though, it is the same universal trend. It is the
essential trait of all modern civilization ...”

Again and again he comes back to this point: “No error could be greater than the
one looming largest: that of a failure to understand the totalitarian systems
for what they ultimately are—a convex mirror of all modern civilization and a
harsh, perhaps final call for a global recasting of how that civilization
understands itself.”

>From this, Havel concludes there is “one fundamental task from which all else
should follow.” He explains, “That task is one of resisting vigilantly,
thoughtfully, and attentively but, at the same time with total dedication, at
every step and everywhere, the irrational momentum of anonymous, impersonal, and
inhuman power—the power of ideologies, systems, apparatus, bureaucracy,
artificial languages, and political slogans. We must resist its complex and
wholly alienating pressure, whether it takes the form of consumption,
advertising, repression, technology, or cliché—all of which are the blood
brothers of fanaticism and the wellspring of totalitarian thought. We must draw
our standards from our natural world, heedless of ridicule, and reaffirm its
denied validity. We must honour with the humility of the wise the limits of that
natural world and the mystery which lies beyond them, admitting that there is
something in the order of being which evidently exceeds all our competence.”

This backward-looking, irrational, and, in the literal sense of the word,
reactionary ideology made Havel the ideal instrument for the restoration of
capitalism in Eastern Europe in 1989. He was one of the spokesmen of the
so-called “velvet revolution” in Prague, in the course of which the Stalinist
rulers negotiated the gradual peaceful transition of power with Havel’s Civic Forum.

This had less to do with the introduction of democracy, as with the dividing up
of state property under a new class of capitalist owners, recruited from both
the old Stalinist bureaucracy and the emerging “democrats.” The two camps agreed
upon the political and legal mechanisms by which the former state-owned property
was transferred into private ownership.

The intervention of broader social layers was not desirable, since the social
gains of the working class were bound up with state-owned property and fell
victim to the restoration of capitalism.

On December 29, 1989, as a representative of the Civic Forum, Havel was elected
president by the Stalinist-dominated Federal Assembly. Six months later, he was
confirmed in office by the now newly-elected parliament. His chief of staff was
Karel Schwarzenberg, the scion of a centuries-old millionaire aristocratic
family from Bohemia, and currently the Czech foreign minister.

Havel presided over the destruction of the education, health and pension
systems, and the introduction of the “Wild West” capitalism that continues to
shape the Czech Republic, Eastern Europe and Russia to this day. For workers and
pensioners the political changes of 1989 have produced a social catastrophe.
Havel, however, benefited from them; the return of the family assets
expropriated in 1948 made ​​him and his brother Ivan millionaires.

The wave of privatizations sparked violent clashes over the spoils between
different wings of the ruling class, eventually leading to the division of the
country. In 1992, Havel temporarily lost his office as a result, but after the
secession of Slovakia Havel was elected President of the Czech Republic, a post
he held for ten years.

Havel tried to stand above the party bickering through his eccentric political
style, combining feudal pomp with elements of his theatre of the absurd. He
celebrated the presidency at the medieval Prague Castle with fanfares, pomp, and
other rituals, and asked his friend, director Milos Forman, to send a costume
designer from Hollywood to outfit the grey-clad palace guard in new colourful
uniforms.

The musician Frank Zappa and the Rolling Stones were also regular guests at
Prague Castle. Their rock music was popular in Prague opposition circles in the
1960s.The Rolling Stones returned the favour, donating a new lighting system for
the presidential palace.

Despite his eccentricities, Havel pursued an extremely right-wing political
course. He integrated the Czech Republic as quickly as possible into the largest
military alliance in the world and supported the wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan
and Iraq.

Havel refused to hold a referendum on the controversial issue of NATO
membership, on the grounds that this would challenge the mandate of the
democratically-elected representatives of the state and express mistrust towards
the state. One of his last official acts was in 2003, with the Czech Republic’s
inclusion in the “coalition of the willing,” although the government and the
majority of Czech citizens opposed the Iraq war.

Havel’s anti-communism, his arrogance towards working people and his
unconditional support for the wars of NATO and the US made ​​him the darling of
international politics and the media. His chest was not big enough for all the
medals and decorations showered upon him. He was awarded the 1989 Peace Prize of
the German Book Trade, in 1991 the Charlemagne Prize, and in 2003, from the
hands of George W. Bush, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He was also
nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several times.

http://wsws.org/articles/2011/dec2011/have-d21.shtml