A Small Hiccup

Having just read the response to the death of Vaclav Havel in the Guardian's Comment is Free section, I'm at a loss to know what to think. The paper itself does often have good and interesting reviews on its arts pages, but the fact that it even considered publishing this article on Havel - let alone actually accepted it - suggests that the the editorial staff believe that the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe was just a small hiccup in the advance of worldwide socialism, a little glitch in the march to victory for the one true faith. Consider this excerpt:


"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 leaves me gasping. I wonder if the person who wrote it (who lists Pravda as one of his former employers, for goodness sake) has ever read with any concentration any of the great essays by Havel. One thing I can be almost certain of - he must never have visited any of the countries of the former Soviet bloc, while the Cold War was going on, let alone had any relatives who had to survive in those places.