Vaclav Havel on North Korea

Vaclav Havel has been one of my two favorite Europeans of my lifetime (along with Margaret Thatcher) since I was a high school kid in who foresaw that the discontent of the oppressed would bring down the Iron Curtain. In 1990, with the few dollars I had earned working in a mine in South Africa (another land that was then enjoying its liberation) I went to Prague to see the aftermath of the revolution. The country had been free for less than a year.

I’ve never met people as ebullient as the Czechs on August 21st, 1990. I was there the first time they were free to celebrate the anniversary of the 1968 Prague Spring. The Czechs took an old Russian T-54 tank, like the ones the Russians used to steal their freedom from them, and dumped it lifeless on its side, bleeding oil onto the pavement of Wenceslas Square like the carcass of Goliath, an object of terror transformed into a curiosity for onlookers. Thongs of people came to the square carrying the makings of a spontaneous memorial of flowers, candles, and photographs. Happy Czechs were beering each other and everyone who had come to celebrate with them as the hot August evening turned to night. The beer was thick, strong, and cold, and added a purr of sleepy happiness to the exhuberant crowd. It was one of those magical life experiences that words can’t replicate. That week, everywhere one went, there was Havel’s portrait–not in a forced, Kim Il-Sung fashion, but as the heartfelt, free expression of people who genuinely loved the man who had suffered so much for all of their freedom. Just ask them. Now, they can tell you.

Today, Vaclav Havel has written a superb column about North Korea in the Washington Post. He understood before 1989, when no one saw the fall of the Iron Curtain, that there would never be peace in Europe if the West ignored the oppression at the root of its division. Havel has not lost his vision; what divides us from the North Koreans today is not their weapons, it is the oppressive ruthlessness that would give them no pause but self-preservation before using them. If we ignore the human rights of the North Korean people, they will forgive neither us nor the South Koreans. If we speak directly to them and say that we stand with them, it is not a pipe dream to predict that we will celebrate together over the toppled statue of Kim Il Sung. Vaclav Havel remembers the possibilities that come with standing by principle. Revolution is always impossible until it’s inevitable.