First Hitchens, and now Vaclev Havel has died. Here’s what Matt Welch had to say about him a few years ago.
Don’t expect the media to make a big deal of it. He was 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. I’d also note (to cite a tweet) that he’s an example of the ancient dictum (that I just made up) that a country can do a lot worse than having a dissident playwright as a president. Mamet, 2012!
[Monday morning update]
More thoughts (from a couple years ago) from Bruce Bawer. And here’s a roundup over at National Review Online.
Perhaps a bit or a reprieve. Kim Jong Il just kicked the bucket!
How sad!
I’m not one to weep over dead dictators* – the only sadness is that it took so long. South Korean and American military forces in the area are on alert. Nature abhors a vacuum and so do dictatorships. Things could get very unpleasant over there.
*The notion that “any man’s death diminishes me” is a crock. The only ones diminished by a dictator’s death are the dictators and their cronies. Freedom loving people should rejoice whenever a dictator is deposed or dies.
Or is removed by US military action.
Mmm, I’d be a little more cautious than that. Tyrants, at least ancient one, loved to take people with them. The asses who ran fifteen-century Calicut, for instance, took the practice of suttee to an obscene standard, allegedly immolating their harem of thousands upon their demise.
I couldn’t begin to eulogize someone like Havel. A link will have to suffice.
Titus, I thank you for that link!
You are most welcome.
I wonder if Havel enjoyed Hitchens?
Here’s Hitchens on Kim Jong Il.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2010/02/a_nation_of_racist_dwarfs.html
Notable excerpt for this blog: “The whole idea of communism is dead in North Korea, and its most recent “Constitution,” “ratified” last April, has dropped all mention of the word. The analogies to Confucianism are glib, and such parallels with it as can be drawn are intended by the regime only for the consumption of outsiders. Myers makes a persuasive case that we should instead regard the Kim Jong-il system as a phenomenon of the very extreme and pathological right. ”
🙂
They said the same thing about Stalinism.
Right and Left have no legitimacy. There is only freedom, and the rationale for departing from it.
Libertus Sum.