Vaclav Havel, In Memoriam.

Vaclav Havel the playwright who became president of the Czech Republic died today at age 75.

Mr. Havel’s plays were banned in then Czechoslovakia after the Soviet Union invaded and crushed the “Prague Spring” reform movement in 1968.  In 1976 he became involved in a project drafting the human rights manifesto Charter 77.

In 1989, with the communists still in power, Mr. Havel was unanimously chosen to be president by the dissident legislature. He was elected by popular vote in 1990.

Mr. Havel used his literary talent to skewer communist repression. He referred to the regime as “Absurdistan.”  His 1978 essay “Power and the Powerless” began with a pastiche of the opening sentence in the Communist Manifesto:

“A specter is haunting Eastern Europe: the specter of what in the West is called ‘dissent.’”

 In a nationwide television address after his selection as president in 1989 Mr. Havel said:

“Out of gifted and sovereign people, the regime made us little screws in a monstrously big, rattling, stinking, machine.”

Lei Feng is one of the state-chosen role models of the People’s Republic of China for allegedly writing:

"A man's usefulness to the revolutionary cause is like a screw in a machine. It is only by the many, many interconnected and fixed screws that the machine can move freely, increasing its enormous work power."