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Why do leaders like Havel not win more accolades*?

December 19, 2011 by B. Daniel Blatt

“Don’t expect the media to make a big deal of it,” writes Rand Simberg about the passing of an artist who devoted much of  theatrical career to challenging Communism.

Although Vaclev Havel stood up for artistic freedom and defended the political systems which allowed for freedom of expression, he never achieved the accolades as did many with fewer accomplishments and a smaller vision.  He was, as Simberg put it,

. . . the wrong kind of dissenter, being too American for Europe. The fact that he never won a Peace Prize, while Yasser Arafat and Barack Obama did, says something very fundamental about the corruption and uselessness of that once-honorable achievement.

(Via Insapundit.)  Why do so many on the left so often champion those voices dissenting not just the systems which oppressed them, but also the Western ideals which promote the very idea of dissent?

Bruce Bawer thinks we need more leaders like Havel.   More on this great man, anon.  Much more.

*from Western intellectuals.

Filed Under: Anti-Americanism Abroad, Anti-Western Attitudes, Freedom, Great Men

Comments

  1. Heliotrope says

    December 19, 2011 at 4:38 pm - December 19, 2011

    Havel was one of six people who signed Charter 77 in 1977 who were sent to jail for doing so. Charter 77 was written in a manner that was meant to fit the rules and and the signers when out of their way to state that Charter 77 was not representing any formal or organized group of dissenters.

    The state reaction to Charter 77 was to call it a “manifesto” and “an antistate, antisocialist, and demogogic, abusive piece of writing” signed by “traitors,” “renegades”, “servants of imperialism,” etc.

    Copying the Departamentul Securității Statului in Ceausescu’s Romania, the Czech StB (Státní bezpečnost) began building an extensive file of handwriting samples of suspected dissidents and registering all typewriters in the country and making a file of sample writing produced on each typewriter for possible forensic identification of which typewriter produced a given document in question.

    The point being, that Havel was speaking out for human rights in a socialist state. That activity is simply not worthy of a Nobel Prize. Havel was a literary figure, but he unleashed Czech capitalism and was therefore, in the eyes of the Nobel Committee nothing less than being the “servant of imperialism” for which he was jailed.

    Why would you give the Nobel Peace Prize to a man who helped dismantle state socialism? In fact, the StB were so thorough, there were not enough weapons in citizen hands to support the most minor of up-risings. What better condition for “peace” than total state subjugation could you ask for?

    No way was Havel a candidate for the Nobel Committee. What anti-communist ever was?

  2. Cinesnatch says

    December 19, 2011 at 8:42 pm - December 19, 2011

    Thank you for commemorating Vaclav Havel on this site.

  3. Bastiat Fan says

    December 20, 2011 at 10:28 am - December 20, 2011

    Why do leaders like Havel not win more accolades*?

    That’s a rhetorical question, right? Only statists win that stupid prize. The fact that both Jimmy Carter, Yasser Arafat and our nitwit in chief won it tells you everything you need to know about it’s value.

  4. V the K says

    December 20, 2011 at 2:59 pm - December 20, 2011

    Indeed, some leftists seem to feel anti-communism is over-rated

    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.

    That last sentence is breathtakingly ignorant or dishonest, I don’t know which.

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