"He belongs among the handful of modern political leaders who could write with originality, psychological insight, power and flair. Communism was defeated by “the resistance of Being and man to manipulation.” The point of European unification “is not for all European nations . . . to merge in some amorphous pan-European Sea . . . [but] to create a . . . Europe in which no one more powerful can suppress anyone less powerful.” Czech and Slovak officials who collaborated in the Holocaust were “nonhomicidal murderers.” Of the man who hates, Havel wrote, “He is incapable of making a joke, only of bitter ridicule . . . . Only those who can laugh at themselves can laugh authentically.”
As for ideals about governance, he concluded that “We may approach democracy as we would a horizon, and do so in ways that may be better or worse, but it can never be fully attained.” Summing up, he declared himself neither an optimist (“because I am not sure everything ends well,”) nor a pessimist (“because I am not sure everything ends badly”) but, instead, “a realist who carries hope, and hope is the belief that freedom and justice have meaning . . . and that liberty is always worth the trouble.”" I have always argued that there is no body who is more vapid and more unoriginal than this guy, Havel. Nothing he says is of value or depth and yet, Western audiences are so impressed with every word of his, especially when he inserts Hegel into a sentence as in: "We Hegel want freedom." But for Albright to be the judge of the insights of Havel is like Mini-Hariri be judge of the insights of the illiterate Saudi King.
