[D66] On the death of Václav Havel

[Antid Oto]

[Geen wonder dat Prins Pils, Rosenthal en de altijd neutrale staatsomroep morgen
van de partij zijn. Het anticommunistisch sentiment moet weer aangewakkerd
worden in deze gure tijden. Lees verder...]

http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/12/20/vaclak-havel-and-the-struggle-for-socialism-in-czechoslovakia/

Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
December 20, 2011
Vaclav Havel and the struggle for socialism in Czechoslovakia

Somehow I find the unctuous outpouring over Vaclav Havel far more off-putting
than anything said about Christopher Hitchens. With Hitchens, you at least got
the impression that he enjoyed being a prick. With Havel, you got the same kind
of overpowering sanctimoniousness you get with religious figures. Keeping that
in mind, it should come as no surprise that Havel was close to the Dalai Lama,
another snake-oil salesman.

[...]

In a review of John Keane’s critical biography of Vaclav Havel, a biography that
Slavoj Zizek used as a peg to attack Havel’s legacy in the London Review, Laura
Secor wrote:

In 1989, five years after Havel’s release, popular demonstrations brought down
the Czechoslovak government. Dubcek, Keane contends, was the obvious choice for
the country’s transitional presidency — but Havel manipulated Dubcek into
stepping aside, by promising to support him in the upcoming free elections.
According to Keane, Havel broke that promise, betraying Dubcek and retaining the
presidency for himself. Not long afterward, Czechoslovakia split.

Once in power, Havel set about the task to dismantle Czech socialism and create
a new state according to the formulas established in George Soros’s Open Society
Foundation and elsewhere. A section from Michael Parenti’s “Blackshirts and
Reds” has been circulating widely on the Internet, including my posting to the
Marxism mailing list. Written not long after the Velvet Revolution of 1989, it
knocks Havel off his pedestal rather deftly:

Havel called for efforts to preserve the Christian family in the Christian
nation. Presenting himself as a man of peace and stating that he would never
sell arms to oppressive regimes, he sold weapons to the Philippines and the
fascist regime in Thailand. In June 1994, General Pinochet, the man who
butchered Chilean democracy, was reported to be arms shopping in
Czechoslovakia–with no audible objections from Havel.

Havel joined wholeheartedly in George Bush’s Gulf War, an enterprise that killed
over 100,000 Iraqi civilians. In 1991, along with other Eastern European
pro-capitalist leaders, Havel voted with the United States to condemn human
rights violations in Cuba. But he has never uttered a word of condemnation of
rights violations in El Salvador, Colombia, Indonesia, or any other U.S. client
state.

In 1992, while president of Czechoslovakia, Havel, the great democrat, demanded
that parliament be suspended and he be allowed to rule by edict, the better to
ram through free-market “reforms.” That same year, he signed a law that made the
advocacy of communism a felony with a penalty of up to eight years imprisonment.
He claimed the Czech constitution required him to sign it. In fact, as he knew,
the law violated the Charter of Human Rights which is incorporated into the
Czech constitution. In any case, it did not require his signature to become law.
In 1995, he supported and signed another undemocratic law barring communists and
former communists from employment in public agencies.



[...]