How odd that we’d just been noting the death of one Cold Warrior (the commie Christopher Hitchens), when now I’ve just read about the death of two much more important Cold War figures: Vaclav Havel and Kim Jong-Il. Havel was, of course, a great hero of the anti-Communist resistance, while Kim was one of the last of the old-style communist dictators. Both of them seem oddly out of place today. The ultimate issue is the same now as it was forty years ago, but the forms are changed, and many of the old labels are no longer useful. (How odd it sounds to me when I hear someone accused of being a “socialist”.)
Havel’s classical liberalism seems like something from another age; it doesn’t address the questions that vex us, now that the choices we face are no longer “communism” vs. “democracy”. We certainly must honor him for fighting the great evil of communism, and for fighting it on the correct grounds: not that it was inefficient, but that it was morally corrupting. Still, I could imagine his anti-totalitarian writings inspiring either side of today’s great debate, since each side accuses the other of forcing the public to profess obvious falsehoods.
And how quaint is North Korean brutality! It’s as if they’re the only ones to get the memo that that isn’t how the Left operates anymore. Now that the society-altering visions of today’s Leftists are less ambitious than were those of Lenin and Mao, but they’ve learned how to work toward them without yielding a huge crop of martyrs. People and organizations who openly oppose the Left will get broken, but they won’t be martyrs. Can you imagine a professor losing his job for writing against a cherished Leftist belief? Perish the thought! Of course, sometimes people must be let go for creating hostile work environments, environments where gay and transgendered students feel insufficiently “affirmed”. Can you imagine a Leftist government confiscating Church property because it disapproves of Catholic doctrines? That’s so 1920s! Now we look for some crime, like adolescent sexual abuse, that Catholic clergy engage in at the roughly same rate as the rest of the population, gather together every accusation–viable or not–over the entire globe over the course of 60 years (which inevitably creates a large absolute number sure to impress the mathematically illiterate), and use your pet media to create a moral panic. Then bend statute of limitation laws only against the Church and award order-of-magnitude larger settlements than other organizations face for comparable offenses, and pretty soon you can eradicate the communal patrimony of an entire religious group (made largely of working-class ethnic whites and hispanics) while making sure that they get no sympathy in the process. No, anyone who objects to this ongoing cultural genocide will be accused of not caring about “the chiiiillllddddrrren!!!!” (Me: “But how does it help children to obsess every few years over the same set of accusations from the 1970s? Today, priests in most parishes aren’t even allowed to be alone with children anymore. And why don’t we spare some attention for the much vaster problem of child sexual abuse in other institutions?” Them: “Don’t change the subject! If you really loved your children, you wouldn’t ask those questions!”) Don’t you see how stupid the communists were? They allowed people to go to jail explicitly for their beliefs. When the Left attack me, they’ll tell the world either that I don’t respect my students or that I don’t love my kids. Today’s Kims have learned how to avoid making Havels.
Filed under: Defense of Christianity, Down with journalism, Europe, The Dark and Terrible Springtime of Vatican II |
Throne and Altar 
Good evaluation of Havel.
I regard him as a great man of the mid twentieth century, for seeing the and expressing the main issue of his time and place so clearly and of course for his courage, incorruptibility – and his loving attitude.
He did not see all the way down to the bottom of things in the way that – say – Solzhenitsyn did. Still, with both now dead, you look around and see no other political figures of that integrity.
Pitch perfect post.
The right is still largely lost in the cold war and needs to be explicitly alerted that they are no longer fighting lowbrow monsters. Now they are fighting middlebrow monsters. Calling Obama a “socialist” is evidence that one has lost the thread.
“Today’s Kims have learned how to avoid making Havels.”
Chilling, but beautifully said. I hope it’s not true. I fear it is.