Vaclav Havel, The Playwright Who Led 1989's 'Velvet Revolution,' dies at 75

For those of us alive in 1989 and paying attention, witnessing the unraveling of the Soviet Empire was heady stuff. After all, we born into a world where the long barrier that cut Europe in twain, in order to keep the East enslaved and the West on constant alert, was just a fact of life.

Then, suddenly, it disintegrated, that barrier. And along with it, the regimes that held that part of the world under their collectivist thumb. And Havel was one of the people who brought it about.

Those of us who remember 1969 remember the terrible fate that befell Alexander Dubcek, who had attempted much the same, only to see the Soviet tanks roll in to Prague to crush all hope. We feared for Havel, and cheered when the citizenry flooded the streets, and freedom won the day.
A few months later, he stood before a joint session of Congress, attempting to explain what had occurred, admitting he was at a loss for words himself.

But the words he chose were pithy, and eloquent for our day:

The communist type of totalitarian system has left both our nations, Czechs and Slovaks, as it has all the nations of the Soviet Union and the other countries the Soviet Union subjugated in its time, a legacy of countless dead, an infinite spectrum of human suffering, profound economic decline and, above all, enormous human humiliation. It has brought us horrors that fortunately you have not known.

It has given us something positive, a special capacity to look from time to time somewhat further than someone who has not undergone this bitter experience. A person who cannot move and lead a somewhat normal life because he is pinned under a boulder has more time to think about his hopes than someone who is not trapped that way.

What I'm trying to say is this: we must all learn many things from you, from how to educate our offspring, how to elect our representatives, all the way to how to organize our economic life so that it will lead to prosperity and not to poverty. But it doesn't have to be merely assistance from the well-educated, powerful and wealthy to someone who has nothing and therefore has nothing to offer in return.

We, too, can offer something to you: our experience and the knowledge that has come from it.

OS hopes we take his words to heart.