The contemporaneous deaths of Vaclav Havel, the first president of the Czech Republic and a worldwide defender of human freedoms, and Kim Jong Il, the supreme leader of Stalinist North Korea, give cause for reflection on the important values of freedom and liberty. Their deaths occurring within a day of each other is mere coincidence, but it warrants comparison of their legacies. Havel dedicated himself in mind and body to freedom. Kim was the personification of totalitarian oppression. When many obituaries brush over a life’s work and highlight the details of a death, it is valuable to show how important one person’s actions can be to change the world, whether for good or bad.
Havel was born in 1936 and Kim in 1941, and they both were indoctrinated in communist ideology at a young age. The totalitarian system burrowed itself into every element of their societies, attempting to eviscerate personal freedom and subvert belief in the essential human dignity granted by God and not the state. Schools instructed students to treat Communist Party leaders as living deities, and the state probed into every aspect of citizens’ lives. In democracy a political party is powerless without support from citizens. Under communism a person was and is powerless without endorsement from the Communist Party.
Communist states did at certain times and by degrees offer freedoms to citizens, but the Gulags are sufficient proof that communism as a system could not tolerate nonconformist individuals. What is significant is that any freedoms conditionally granted were seen as benevolent gifts by an all-powerful state rather than the inalienable rights of man granted by God. In 1776 the United States’ Declaration of Independence first delineated, with religious conviction, government’s responsibility and duty to ensure the freedoms of individuals. In the Soviet Union and other communist states, freedom was and is a point of political negotiations.
In 1948, when Havel was 12, the Soviet Union succeeded in bringing Czechoslovakia under the yoke of communism. For the next 40 years, Havel worked as a poet and writer under this repressive regime. His plays serve as poignant illustrations of the dehumanizing effects wrought by centralization of power and bureaucratic machinery. A reluctant and shy intellectual, Havel courageously opposed the immorality and hypocrisy of the state. He bravely resisted a political system that censored his writings, and he led a peaceful revolution known as the Velvet Revolution.
To realize the fullness of human freedom, for himself and others, was Havel’s prime political motivation. He resented the intrusion of government interference that did not serve the interests of the individual. His friend Jeffrey Gedmin wrote that Havel’s “personality was the antithesis of the bureaucrat, the power seeker, the posturer.” He was, in effect, a resolute spokesperson for the values articulated in the American Declaration of Independence and a philosophical descendant of Thomas Jefferson.
Kim was a dictator who utilized a state bureaucracy manufactured by his father, who founded the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in 1948, to impose his will on more than 20 million people. Intimidation and fear were regularly coordinated by the state as a means to secure political power and extinguish dissent. Military personnel, who together form the third-largest standing army in the world, serve as prison guards against their fellow countrymen more than as defenders against foreign aggression. Interaction with the rest of the world is almost completely forbidden. A black spot on the night view of Google Earth illustrates North Korea’s rampant electricity shortages. This darkness is a tragic indictment of an inept, failed state. With his death, Kim leaves North Korea as the world’s most repressive society.
After decades of communist inculcation and propaganda, democratically elected President Havel and militarily endorsed Supreme Leader Kim chose to commit themselves to opposite pursuits. After 1989, Czech democracy won global attention for its dramatic and thorough renunciation of communist policies. Kim Jong Il succeeded his late father in 1994, but the politics of mass degradation and self-enrichment continued unabated.
In two decades Havel helped the Czech people realize a vibrant democratic identity unparalleled in Eastern Europe and an economic boom evidenced by a 2010 per-capita GDP more than five times larger than in 1990. Against an economy 40 times smaller than neighboring South Korea’s, Kim Jong Il’s most notable achievement is a nuclear weapons program that assured North Korea’s status as a rogue state to be snubbed by much of the global community.
In recent years, it was Havel and other Eastern Europeans who have reminded the West that its principles of freedom and individual liberty, values of morality and respect for human dignity were the forces that in reality led it to persevere over the moribund Soviet Union and that threats to religious and economic freedoms are continuing threats to the American dream.
In 1994, the Philadelphia Foundation awarded its Liberty Medal to Havel, the last president of Czechoslovakia and the first president of the Czech Republic. Havel commended America for harnessing its scientific and technical innovation, free-market opportunities and Judeo-Christian values for the greater good. By challenging all people to better understand the deep importance of human freedom, his acceptance speech rings true as emblematic of his life’s work.
Contrary to some accounts that would decouple Kim from Havel, they were both products of Stalinist institutions. Both Czechoslovakia and North Korea were burdened with an unjust government secured by its monopoly on violence. This obvious disharmony of communist states with universal human rights is a prime reason why Havel noted that communism could not endure. Whether on the Korean peninsula or elsewhere, government-orchestrated mass starvation and city-sized concentration camps for political prisoners violate any notion of human rights.
Havel remarked in his 1994 Liberty Medal speech that along with the end of colonialism, the fall of communism is evidence that “The artificial world order of the past decades has collapsed.” Eighteen years later, it is increasingly plain to see that free-market democracies are the surest protectors of human-rights. The universal morality of America’s founding principles, which obligate governments to respect human dignity, is invoked as a rallying call for individuals around the world protesting non-democratic regimes:
The idea of human rights and freedoms must be an integral part of any meaningful world order. Yet I think it must be anchored in a different place. It cannot be expressed in the language of a departing era, and it must not be mere froth floating on the subsiding waters of faith in a purely scientific relationship to the world.
Havel knew that the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia would not be the last of its kind. He noted earlier in the same speech that “we live in the post-modern world, where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain.” The personal quest for freedom, a core component of humanity, is certain and unending.
At the Jan. 6 memorial tribute to Havel sponsored by the National Endowment for Democracy, dissidents from around the world joined with American diplomats to honor his commitment to free-market democracy. Heartfelt remarks were offered by Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi; Cuba’s Christian Liberation Movement president, Oswaldo Paya; president of the World Uyghur Congress, Rebiyah Kadeer; and other human-rights advocates. The memorial event came on the 35th anniversary of Charter 77, a groundbreaking document that helped propel Czechoslovakia’s peaceful transition out of communism. Havel was indeed a global advocate who spoke on behalf of all human beings. He impugned Kim Jong Il for governing over “one of the most staggering human-rights and humanitarian disasters in the world.” As a man committed to telling the truth, Havel used his reputation to give power to the powerless.
As the world community searches for a 21st century self-conception of the individual, the role of the state, and international systems relevant to its newfound, highly interactive, global orientation, it is all the more crucial to learn the lessons of these two leaders and keep focus on the fundamental role of freedom and individual liberty in assuring justice and opportunity.
Throughout the world are scattered friends and foes of America, to varying degrees admiring or opposing the land of freedom and opportunity. Accordingly, reassuring allies like Vaclav Havel and frustrating foreign enemies like Kim Jong Il are best achieved when Americans rekindle the flames that founded our nation: exploiting the natural synergy between democracy and free-market capitalism, the fusion of political freedom and economic liberty.From 2005-08 Francis Rooney served as the United States’ ambassador to the Holy See. Rooney is chief executive officer of Rooney Holdings Inc. and Manhattan Construction Group, which is engaged in road and bridge construction and other work in the United States, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.