The Guardian:

He was the symbol of 1989, the anti-communist playwright who helped free his country – and the rest of eastern Europe – from Stalinist tyranny and who put the countries that lay behind the iron curtain on the road to democracy.

So goes the dominant narrative of the life of Václav Havel, the former Czech president, who died on Sunday aged 75. Havel, we are told, was a hero and one of the greatest Europeans of our age.

But, as with the recent consecration of Christopher Hitchens, another "progressive" opponent of the communist regimes of eastern Europe who found favour with Washington's neocons, there is another side to the story.

No one questions that Havel, who went to prison twice, was a brave man who had the courage to stand up for his views. Yet the question which needs to be asked is whether his political campaigning made his country, and the world, a better place.

Havel's anti-communist critique contained little if any acknowledgement of the positive achievements of the regimes of eastern Europe in the fields of employment, welfare provision, education and women's rights. Or the fact that communism, for all its faults, was still a system which put the economic needs of the majority first.

Although he did clash with his uber-Thatcherite presidential successor, Václav Klaus, over economic policy, Havel, the son of a wealthy entrepreneur whose companies were nationalised when the communists came to power, showed little concern for the plight of ordinary people who lost out in the change towards a market economy. And there were losers aplenty. While the years following the liberation of eastern Europe from communism by Havel and his fellow dissidents are routinely portrayed in the west as one big success story, the reality is rather different. A 2009 Lancet study concluded that as many as 1 million working-age men died due to the health problems brought on by mass privatisation. As economies across eastern Europe were restructured so inequalities and social divisions grew. A 2011 OECD report found that Havel's Czech Republic had the joint-second largest rise in income inequality in OECD members since the mid-1980s.

Havel's true political allegiances came to the fore during his years as president. Like fellow dissident Lech Walesa, he supported the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. In 2002, he sided with the rightwing Republican hawks on Iraq.

Lauding Havel is not only doing a disservice to the millions of ordinary people in eastern Europe who have not been served well by his politics, but to the innocent men, women and children killed by the western military adventures he supported. While Havel was a man of undoubted talent and intellect, it's time we stopped eulogising people simply because they were anti-communist dissidents, and instead look at the bigger picture.

VlastíkPlamínek>Tak Crecka jsi sem nechtěl pustit, a anglického Crecka/Clarka sem nakopíruješ? Proč jako? Že když je to anglicky, že to vypadá líp?

Nejlepší špeky:

„Havlova kritika komunismu nebrala v úvahu pozitivní úspěchy východoevropských režímů v oblasti zaměstnanosti, sociální péče, vzdělání či práv žen. Ani skutečnost, že komunismus, bez ohledu na všechny jeho nedostatky, kladl vždy na první místo ekonomické zájmy většiny.“

„Z výsledků studie zpracované časopisem Lancet vyplývá, že až 1 milión lidí v produktivním věku zemřelo na následky zdravotních problémů způsobených masovou privatizací.“

A ještě jestli jsem to dobře pochopil - není to stanovisko listu Guardian, ale článek přejatý z blogu toho Clarka, zveřejněný v rubrice Comment is free, která je určena k volné výměně názorů - jakože tam může poslat kdokoliv cokoliv... mám pravdu?

PS: A povětšinou mu tam dali v diskuzi pěkně sežrat

Naposledy editováno 20.12.2011 06:09:38