The 25th anniversary celebrations reveal the 'bi-polar disorder' from which Czech politicians suffer.


Havel flying to the USA in February 1990 with his wife Olga.

God bless Vaclav Havel! He has been dead for three years and still the Americans and the Russians are chewing over his bones in search of self-justification.

It was bound to be so: both Washington and Moscow love a good punch-up and neither was ever going to be able to resist using the 25th Anniversary of the Velvet Revolution to force 'their version Havel' on us.

The celebrations began with Vaclav Klaus, former Czech president and Putin fan, dismissing Havel as a pompous, anti-American windbag and his admirers in the US Congress as a bunch of suckers in search of a symbol. See here

Then we had Prime Minister Sobotka, in Washington to unveil a bust of Havel in the US Congress, accompanied by loud American criticism of his government for 'abandoning Havel’s legacy'. In a remarkable piece of symbolism (that no one remarked upon), the political leader of the Czech Republic spent Monday, November 17th 2014, 25 years to the day after his country threw off forty years of Soviet tyranny, not at home with his people, but in the air on his way to Washington. It is difficult to turn down an invitation from the White House, but perhaps the White House might have been considerate enough to offer the Czech prime minister another date?

Meanwhile, President Zeman was busy on the ground insulting the crowds in Prague, which had gathered to pay their respects to Havel above all others. Zeman’s people aggravated the situation by suggesting that both the students and the eggs they hurled at Zeman were supplied by the Americans. The morning after Zeman had been forced to beat a hasty retreat under a Roman legionnaire's tortoise of umbrellas, he announced from his perch in the Castle that he had invited Putin to Prague in January. So there, America!

And just to round the celebrations off, Czech public radio aired an interview with General Alojz Lorenc, the head of the Communist state security services, in which this professional liar and prosperous old man (no one throws eggs at him) revealed that Havel had been under the StB's influence all along.

What is going on? The Czech ruling class is suffering from an acute case of what doctors call 'bi-polar disorder', brought about by the pressures of being crushed between the countervailing powers of Moscow and Washington, between a Russian rock and an American hard place.

The US builds up the Havel myth because it is a myth upon which it too can draw, a symbol of American success. Russia, on the other hand, is keen to debunk this tiresome reminder of Soviet failure.

It is useful to compare the partial assessments made of Havel by Carl Gershman in the Washington Post and Vaclav Klaus in MfDnes.

On the eve of the anniversary, Klaus offered us his reminiscences of that fateful day in February 1990:

“I was with Vaclav Havel on his visit to the USA, when he gave that speech in Congress and the congressmen gave him a standing ovation. I could not bring myself to applaud: the speech struck me as absurd. It was so odd, packed with long, quasi-philosophical, anti-American sentences. And to cap it all, it was badly translated! I guarantee that none of those congressmen understood a word! They were applauding a symbol.”

And here is Gershman's version of the significance of that 'anti-American speech':

“Though the Czech government will be represented by Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka at the unveiling {ceremony on} Wednesday, there is growing evidence that the {Czech} government has strayed drastically from Havel’s legacy. When he addressed a joint session of Congress just three months after the revolution, Havel...emphasized the importance of morality in politics and economics. He believed that people such as himself, who had experienced Communist totalitarianism first hand, had a special responsibility to warn the affluent West about the dangers of appeasement, and he felt that a “politics where economic interests are put above basic political values are not only immoral, they are suicidal.”

Both readings of Havel are intentionally skewed. For Gershman, it is the commitment to economic sanctions against Russia, not Havel’s legacy, that the Czechs have abandoned, as if they were one and the same. As for Klaus' spiteful assessment of his presidential predecessor, it was intended to debunk, not understand, Havel's significance.

Havel spoke out against many things. But above all, he spoke out against the ‘bi-polar disorder’ that has been imposed upon the Czech lands for centuries, the latest manifestation of which is the current conflict between Russia and the US over Ukraine.

There is little doubt that, if alive today, Havel would have been in favour of economic sanctions against Russia. But this is because he regarded Putin's regime as a degenerate system of government combining all that is wrong with both Communism and capitalism: the worst of Russia mixed with the worst of the USA.