Vaclav Havel, RIP

The great
anti-communist dissident, writer, and politician
Vaclav Havel is dead at the age of 75
.

From Matt Welch’s great 2003 profile, Velvet President:

Like Orwell, Havel was a fiction writer whose engagement with
the world led him to master the nonfiction political essay. Both
men, in self-described sentiment, were of “the left,” yet both men
infuriated the left with their stinging criticism and ornery
independence. Both were haunted by the Death of God, delighted by
the idiosyncratic habits of their countrymen, and physically
diminished as a direct result of their confrontation with
totalitarians (not to mention their love of tobacco). As
essentially neurotic men with weak mustaches, both have given
generations of normal citizens hope that, with discipline and
effort, they too can shake propaganda from everyday language and
stand up to the foulest dictatorships.

Unlike Orwell, Havel lived long enough to enjoy a robust third
act, and his last six months in office demonstrated the same kind
of restless, iconoclastic activism that has made him an enemy of
ideologues and ally of freedom lovers for nearly five decades.


Read the whole thing.


Reason on Havel
.