Tribute to Havel

[Thailandnotes]

“Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.”

http://www.alternet.org/story/153496...as_cool?page=2

[oddlots]

Re: Tribute to Havel

Charta 77 and Solidarnosc were my heroes growing up, but Havel was my favorite. (People I've admired or reviled seem to be dropping like flies. Am I suddenly 80?)

Anyone who can write a play about the comedy in being "cuckolded" is over qualified - humanity-wise - for politics.

RIP.

[Prazak]

Re: Tribute to Havel

Havel changed the arc of my life, and of many lives, for the better. A decent, gifted, and humble man, stubborn, fluid with the Czech language. I can't help but smile, though, at thinking how he would have found some small measure of absurdist humor in dying on the same day as Kim Jong Il.

[Prazak]

Re: Tribute to Havel

“Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.”

http://www.alternet.org/story/153496...as_cool?page=2

And thanks must go on this day to Paul Wilson for his beautiful translations providing a clearer window into the thoughts of a man we admired.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Tribute to Havel

The New Yorker's website links to this profile...

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/200...urrentPage=all

On his last weekday in Prague Castle as the President of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel taped a brief farewell address to the nation and then took a telephone call from George Bush. Havel, who came to office thirteen years ago wearing borrowed trousers that flapped high around his ankles, now wore an exquisitely tailored navy-blue three-piece suit, a white shirt, and a tie that had undoubtedly done its duty at summit meetings and memorial services. A clutch of efficient aides scurried around his office door. A steward with a napkin folded over his arm delivered a glass of white wine. Sunlight streamed through tall windows, and chandeliers lent a glow to the flowers and the Oriental carpets.

The American President might have been surprised to learn that Havel's castle makes the White House seem inelegant, but Bush probably remembered the place well. Just a few months earlier, he had been to the Castle for a NATO summit—the first ever in a former Warsaw Pact capital. Bush, his Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and dozens of generals and other politicians were treated not merely to the usual working meetings but also to theatrical performances organized by Havel himself. The NATO visitors watched an ersatz eighteenth-century dance (complete with powdered wigs and simulated copulation) that might have been considered obscene had it not been so amusing. They listened to booming renditions of the "Ode to Joy," a souped-up "Marseillaise," and John Lennon's "Power to the People."

"I didn't understand anything," Rumsfeld remarked as he headed toward dinner. "I'm from Chicago."

When I got a chance recently to ask Havel about his NATO productions, he smiled and said, "I didn't want it to look like just another meeting of politicians and generals, so I shaped those arrangements, to a great extent. The ballet was set in Central Europe and featured Mozart's music, and it also included elements of the American grotesque, to underline the Euro-Atlantic character of the gathering. It may have been on the verge of what Mr. Rumsfeld and certain others could tolerate."

Awkward and shy, Havel is a curiously natural director. Forty-odd years ago, he started out as a stagehand and a playwright. He was an acolyte of Beckett and Ionesco—the theatre of the absurd. The sense of the absurd extends to his own life. There is surely no modern biography that is more improbable yet dramatically coherent. Havel's is the rare life, Milan Kundera has written, that resembles a work of art and gives "the impression of a perfect compositional unity." Consider: A bourgeois boy becomes a bohemian playwright; he then becomes a dissident, who, for the crime of writing subversive essays and helping to organize a subversive movement called Charter 77, is encouraged by the regime to master the art of welding in a reeking Czech prison; finally, in late November, 1989, everything implodes and he is leading demonstrations in Wenceslas Square, and hundreds of thousands of people are shouting "Havel na hrad!" ("Havel to the Castle!"); within days, he is the head of state, working in the same hilltop redoubt that served as a seat of power for dynasts of the Bohemian kingdom and the Hapsburg monarchy, for the emissaries of Berlin and the satraps of the Kremlin.

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During the uprising, which quickly became known as the Velvet Revolution, and for a while afterward, there were graffiti around town proclaiming, "Havel je král"—"Havel Is King." The King tried to demystify his Castle. He ordered the costume designer for the movie "Amadeus" to create red-white-and-blue uniforms for the palace guards. (Communist-era guards wore khaki.) He himself at first refused the suits that his friend Prince Karel Schwarzenberg brought him. "I can't wear any of these!" Havel said. "I'd look like a gigolo." In jeans and sweater, he rode a scooter through the Castle halls. He threw a "festival of democracy" in the courtyards, with jugglers and mimes performing while he wandered around drinking Pilsner and greeting everyone. Later on, when he discovered that the chandeliers in the gilded Spanish Hall were outmoded, a couple of typical visitors, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, paid for new fixtures. For weeks, he drove his staff crazy as he monkeyed around with the remote control, dimming the lights, then brightening them again.

"When I first came here, there were many things that I found absurd," Havel told me in his office. A sly, can-youbelieve-it smile creased his face. "For example, it seemed to us on the first day that there were three rooms, close to where we're sitting now, which you couldn't enter. When we finally got inside, we discovered a kind of communications facility for contacts within the Warsaw Pact. So we took advantage of that and sent a New Year's greeting to Mikhail Gorbachev. Later, I heard from confidential sources that the K.G.B. chief, Vladimir Kryuchkov, didn't really appreciate the fact that we'd found those facilities."

continued

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/archive/200...#ixzz1h48BgpbT

[Shakespear]

Re: Tribute to Havel

president Vaclav Klaus, a right-leaning, "free market"

Klaus is one of the most vocal and one of few critics of the European Union. He is an economist whereas Havel was not.

Klaus famously argued “civil society” did not exist and that it was merely a leftover, albeit useful, fiction employed by former dissidents to fight the communist regime; Havel believed the absence of civil society in economic reform would inevitably produce economic crime.

Klaus barely concealed his distaste for (and continues to criticize) the European Union; Havel recognized the power of an external anchor to convince Czech citizens that their destinies were tied to “the West,”

I think Klaus is closer to understanding the REALITY than Havel was.

http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/20...vel_desai.aspx

The Slovaks are currently paying the stiff price of accepting the Euro as we read these words. Hungarians are reacting also. However the main press is marginalizing these shifts in views regarding the creature called EU but no matter what the cracks will get wider. In the mean time Germany/France will off load the loaned money unto the "rich" Eastern Europe and anyone one else that has a puppet government.

http://wallstcheatsheet.com/economy/...n-behind.html/

PS: After writing this I found a story where the Czech Minster of Finance demented the story that Czechs will provide funds for the EU stabilization fund . This however is on a none English website.

How is a mistake likes this made? Simple, you are a German paper that does it.

http://www.focus-fen.net/index.php?id=n266736
http://www.spiegel.de/international/...804814,00.html

[Prazak]

Re: Tribute to Havel

Klaus' rhetoric on Europe has always appealed to me as well, but it's difficult to accept because it's so unprincipled. No doubt he genuinely disdains the overweening bureaucrats in Brussels, having chafed under bureaucrats in Moscow. But his rhetoric sweeps too broadly, is calculated to fan nativism in his political base, and is stylized to enhance his iconoclasm. And whatever his howlings at the machinery of the EU, he has at key points promoted his country's negotiation and ascension into those very institutions. One should take his anti-EU rhetoric with more than a pinch of cynicism.

The wisdom of joining the Euro aside, one might also reasonably conclude that the Czech nation will be dominated by one foreign power or another, as it has been for centuries, and that the disfunction of the EU is more benign than the alternatives. In my view that would be the more realist position for a Czech politician to take.

Above all Klaus is a petty egomaniac who would disdain anyone who would wield competing authority, whether from Moscow or Brussels, and especially from within Prague: he could never bear being eclipsed in reputation and regard by someone like Havel. Klaus helped precipitate the dissolution of Czechoslovakia and as prime minister whittled down the office of President of the Czech Republic, which Havel inhabited, then ridiculed it as mere ceremony and Havel as a figurehead -- until his overweening ego drove him to take up the same office, which he will no doubt endeavor to hold longer than Havel did, if for no other reason than precisely to hold it longer than Havel did.

Even in his tribute at Havel's death, there is the subtle dig. The man simply can't help himself, which is why, as satisfying as his rhetoric might be to those of us who distrust centralizing authority, it is difficult to stomach when it always comes served in a broth of his own narcissism.

[Shakespear]

Re: Tribute to Havel

Prazak I suspect you are from Czech Republic. Well I'll just come out and say that my comments are from a view in Poland. In my opinion you have a Plus over the situation here, Klaus, who is Czech nation first the rest last. These words are at least coming out of his mouth. In Poland we have no such thing. The perfect example of this is the following,

The deal also anticipates large contributions from Italy (€23.48 billion) and Spain (€14.86 billion), countries whose rising borrowing costs may lead to a requirement for external aid. Four non-euro countries – the Czech Republic, Denmark, Poland and Sweden – will provide about €20 billion, but there will be no immediate contribution from Britain.

http://www.focus-fen.net/?id=n266733

Poland has enough debt problems and once this money is locked there is less for the nation. If you want more money higher interest rates will follow. Very simple reasons why this is stupid. A country that doesn't even have a strong industrial base is helping to bail out German/French banks !!!! Nuts.

http://emergingmarketmusings.files.w...comparison.jpg
http://emergingmarketmusings.files.w...omparison1.jpg

broth of his own narcissism.

I think that is partly a definition of a politician

[Prazak]

Re: Tribute to Havel

In my opinion you have a Plus over the situation here, Klaus, who is Czech nation first the rest last. These words are at least coming out of his mouth. In Poland we have no such thing.

I was startled to hear this from your foreign minister: "I will probably be the first Polish foreign minister in history to say so, but here it is: I fear German power less than I am beginning to fear German inactivity." I haven't been to Poland for four years or so, but I can't imagine the country has changed so much that it would support such a statement coming from a Polish politician.

I think that is partly a definition of a politician

That's true, and maybe that's better than a leader who is self-loathing (Nixon leaps to mind for some reason). But somehow most of us find politicians whose enormous self-regard we manage to tolerate better than others. Obama and Gingrich are good examples. I had to agree with Krauthammer's opinion on Newt: "Gingrich has a self-regard so immense that it rivals Obama’s — but, unlike Obama’s, is untamed by self-discipline." And yet many of us are able to tolerate one or the other of these two men despite their over-inflated sense of self.

[Shakespear]

Re: Tribute to Havel

I can't imagine the country has changed

Oh it has and only to those who are not on the ground will it seem for the better. I have seen roads built in Warsaw and in 1-2 years starting to fall apart. Municipal swimming pool built and after a year the complex's steel found to rust. And on and on and on ....

That huge stadium in Warsaw for Euro 2012. Well after the matches will not be able to pay for its yearly cost of maintenance. However that is nothing compared to its cost.

Stadium Allianz Arena in Munich cost €340 million. A beautiful thing - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allianz_Arena#Cost

The Polish National stadium in Warsaw is smaller and not as beautiful is said to cost 25% more !!!!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Stadium,_Warsaw

it would support such a statement coming from a Polish politician.

Where they found Sikorski I have no clue but the word that comes to mind is Puppet. Now the question is whose?

As for the People, Not a Peep here from the crowd as they are busy for the time being dealing with ever increasing prices for EVERYTHING. Official inflation rates here are simply a JOKE !!!!

[Prazak]

Re: Tribute to Havel

That's surprising to hear, because I can never imagine the Poles as a docile people. In fact they are among my favorite Europeans. From the several Poles I do business with I am supposing that it's more the case of people ignoring the stupidities of politicians and concentrating instead on accumulating a degree of material wealth that had not been possible domestically until recently.

[Shakespear]

Re: Tribute to Havel

Well, we will see how this ends, because now it doesn't look good. Euro was supposed to be the savior and instead it looks more like battering ram to open markets for Germany and France.