Counter-revolutionary and Revisionist Die on the Same Day

While people were still spilling too much ink writing peonages to a petty bourgeois essayist who, regardless of whatever skill he possessed as a stylist, will eventually be forgotten, two historically important figures died.  Vaclav Havel and Kim Jong-Il are now dead; the closeness of their respective deaths is simultaneously marked by a vast political distance.  Whereas Vaclav Havel represented the aspirations of the global bourgeois class, the frenzied excitement at the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the elevation of capitalism as "the end of history", Kim Jong-Il represented the continuation of the kind of "communism" that served as a straw-person justification for victorious capitalism.  And the demonization of the latter figure, that will doubtless continue after his passing, will also serve to justify the hagiography of the former.

Indeed, expect the hagiography of Vaclav Havel to reach frenzied heights in upcoming weeks.  Although the cultural industry that thrust him into the position of "velvet revolution" hero was no longer necessary in the decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall, we will all be reminded of his importance, his bravery and self-sacrifice, in innumerable obituaries.  Doubtless, Bono will speak at his funeral and U2 will produce a chart-topping hit about Havel's accomplishments.  The historical amnesia regarding Havel's very existence (for we so often forget the heroes force-fed to us by the bourgeois media industry) will be replaced by that previous historical amnesia, the one that made us believe he was a saint in the first place.  Although we must agree that the state capitalism of Czechoslovakia needed to be criticized by the left, the fact that we were told to celebrate Havel and his "velvet revolution" rather than the Czechoslovakian Communists and their Prague Spring (an authentic communist rebellion against Soviet chauvinism where "Lenin wake up, Brezhnev is speaking bullshit!" was the rallying cry) is the most cynical expression of historical memory.

The official obituaries of Vaclav Havel, all of which will be devoted to elevating the man to the status of St. Francis of Assisi, will never mention that Havel was a dedicated counter-revolutionary, not the humanist that the Bonos of the world like to claim, whose presidency in Czechoslovakia demonstrated, as Michael Parenti pointed out years ago in Blackshirts & Reds, "his reactionary religious obscurantism, his undemocratic suppression of leftist [even anti-communist liberal leftist] opponents, and his profound dedication to economic inequality and an unrestrained free-market capitalism."  And if we were told anything honest about Havel's social background we would know the following:

"Raised by governesses and chauffeurs in a wealthy anti-communist family, Havel denounced democracy's 'cult of objectivity and statistical average' and the idea that rational, collective social efforts should be applied to solving the environmental crisis." (Parenti, 97)

Havel also whole-heartedly supported the original Gulf War, suspended his own parliament when he was in power so that he could rule without worrying about constitutional niceties (and to speed up free-market reforms), sold weapons to the repressive regimes in the Philippines and Thailand, signed a law that made the advocation of socialism in Czechoslovakia a felony, advocated that any self-proclaimed "communist" be barred from employment, and passed a law that made criticisms of corporations a "hate crime."  He regained his family fortune, becoming extremely wealthy, while pushing through privatization laws that ensured massive poverty.

And yet we will celebrate him as a hero, a great statesman, a pacifist standing against "totalitarianism."  Especially since he died almost simultaneously to Kim Jong-Il, the perfect spectre of the very totalitarianism we are told communism means.  So while Havel's praises are sung with utter historical amnesia, Kim Jong-Il's crimes will be perfectly remembered (along with a bunch that will be added without any historical evidence).  A saint and a demon, we will be told, died on the same day: a tragedy and celebration at the same time.

Obviously I am not one of those uncritical leftists who imagines the DPRK was the communist wonderland proclaimed by "juche thought".  And though I celebrate the Korean revolutionary resistance led by Kim Il-Sung against the forces of reaction led by US imperialism, the extremely problematic feudalized communism that would eventually be promoted by Kim Jong-Il was history repeating first as tragedy and then as farce.  At the same time, however, we cannot ignore the brutal sanctions that were applied to North Korea following the imperialists' failure to win the Korean War, sanctions that grew more brutal when China became state capitalist in the 1970s and stopped supporting the DPRK.  We know that similar sanctions levelled upon Cuba were a serious problem for the revolutionary government, and North Korea was far more isolated than Cuba.  Always the target of imperialist intervention, even though it lacked the power to do anything aside from trying to feed its people and throw parades for a communist leadership distorted into an imperial dynasty, one has to admire the tenacity of the DPRK's people (though not, admittedly, the politics of their leader).

Although we will be told that Vaclav Havel was the hero and Kim Jong-Il the villain on this shared obituary date, we should ask why this is the case.  What makes Havel more of a "hero" than Kim?  Really, only the fact that he served the interests of empire.  A plutocrat, an autocrat, a man who used political power to take away democratic rights and who now uses his economic power to ensure that poverty flourishes in his country… How is this man more of a hero than his counterpart in death?  Only because Kim Jong-Il more obviously fits the role of villain.

Vaclav Havel is a statesman, a staunch opponent of "totalitarianism", a cultural icon who wrote literature and was thus loved by a small but vocal group of the western literati.  Kim Jong-Il is a "buffoon", a totalitarian despot, the kind of dictator who fancied himself a cultural icon but whose literary and artistic worth was the product of a self-inflated ego.  But Havel was a statesman because he was a manufactured to be a statesman by the imperialist forces behind his "velvet revolution"; his opposition to "totalitarianism" was matched by the anti-democratic laws he pushed through his post-communist parliament; and he's only a cultural icon because he was promoted as such by the imperialist industry.  (I mean, really, have you actually tried to read The Memorandum?  When I was a confused quasi-anarchist who believed the lies told about Havel I actually tried… Try it for yourself: it's derivative of Beckett, a pantomime of absurdism barely hiding the woefully typical "Animal Farm" anti-communism, the sort of thing no one would care about if Havel had been anyone other than who he was.)

Havel cuts a mean figure, sauve and smooth and proto-individualist… and, we must not forget, absurdly rich.  The shorter Kim, an easy outlet for orientalism, is the perfect archetype of the "asian despot" which is part of the imperialist collective unconscious… is it any wonder that every so-called "satire" of the man has primarily involved, despite the fact that there is so much that could actually be satired, the most racist "chinaman" depictions?

So here is what we will encounter in the piles of obituaries produced in the following weeks: Vaclav Havel the friend of humanity died, a great loss for the world; Kim Jong-Il, totalitarian enemy of existence, is finally gone and this is cause for celebration.  But I would suggest that, while not mourning the passing of the latter, those of us who proclaim that we are anti-capitalists, that we are leftists, should celebrate the passing of the former whose death was, like the deaths of so many imperialists and capitalists who promoted the starvation and death of the masses, worth less than the weight of a feather.