Vaclav Havel is dead. Among other forces and powers, he is
one of the seven individuals most responsible for peacefully ending
the Cold War; the great liberators who brought freedom and
democracy. They are Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, Mikhail
Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, Margaret Thatcher, Lech Walesa, and
Havel.
With Havel’s death, a majority of these seven are now
gone, giving new voice and added meaning to what Chesterton deemed
the democracy of the dead.
All waged battle against what Reagan inspiringly called
the “Evil Empire,” a brute creation cobbled out of a diabolical
ideology that generated the deaths of over 100 million in the last
century. At the core of that evil was what Mikhail Gorbachev
characterized as a “war on religion,” which, among other forms of
malevolence, spawned what Vaclav Havel described as “the communist
culture of the lie.” As they engaged the beast, John Paul II
admonished all to “Be not afraid.”
Vaclav Havel was unafraid. He and his Charter 77 movement
were courageous, willing to go to jail rather than take orders from
the devils who installed themselves as dictators from Budapest to
Bucharest, from Warsaw to Prague.
As if all of this, unfolding here on earth a short time
ago, was not profound enough, I’m suddenly struck at the profundity
of Havel passing into the next world alongside Christopher
Hitchens, and both shortly before Christmas.
Peter Robinson, who knows about the collapse of communism,
having written Ronald Reagan’s Brandenburg Gate speech, interviewed
Hitchens for his PBS show Uncommon Knowledge. Robinson was
troubled by Hitchens’ willingness to concede credit to Havel for
the collapse but none to Reagan. He took on Hitchens at that
moment, not letting him get away with the slight against Reagan. I
wish Vaclav Havel himself would have been there to set Hitchens
straight. Havel said of Reagan, ironically at Reagan’s death: “He
was a man with firm positions, with which he undoubtedly
contributed to the fall of communism.”
Havel had a lot to teach to Hitchens. Hitchens would have
listened to Havel.
Indeed, of all people on this planet whom God might have
chosen to counsel a stunned Hitchens as he sits outside the Pearly
Gates shaken in awed confusion, Havel would have been perfect, the
one intellectual to merit Hitchens’ intellect and respect. If
Hitchens’ un-merry band of atheists will forgive me, the religious
romantic in me can’t help but indulge an image of Hitchens sitting
there, hunched over, head in hands, only to look up at a smiling
Havel and saying, “Fancy that I’d see you here. You just getting
here?”
Vaclav Havel was not just a man of politics and intellect,
but a man of the arts, theater, literature — and, yes, of God. He
exhorted the West and the wider post-modern world to seek
“transcendence.” Hitchens might have figured God “the
ultimate totalitarian,” but Havel saw God as the solution to
totalitarianism, as tyranny’s antidote, as the fountainhead of
freedom. This was something Havel deeply admired about America and
its roots — its fusion of faith and freedom and the recognition
that the latter cannot genuinely exist without the former. “The
Declaration of Independence states that the Creator gave man the
right to liberty,” Havel concluded in his July 4, 1994 lecture at
Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, home of that very sentiment. “It
seems man can realize that liberty only if he does not forget the
One who endowed him with it.”
Vaclav Havel never forgot that principle nor its Endower.
Neither did any of the Cold War seven that laid waste to the Soviet
beast. And it was with the power of that conviction that they
tapped the ultimate force that resolved the Cold War and won the
victory for freedom and good against oppression and
evil.
Vaclav Havel now joins the Heavenly majority. May he rest
in peace, at last reaching true transcendence.
