Havel was vastly more important than Hitchens. Only a serious set of blinkers puts Hitchens in Havel's league. In fact, Havel easily outstripped Hitchens both as a writer and as a public figure. Obviously, Havel is already in the history books. Hitchens, at best, goes in the occasional history dissertation with lots of footnotes. That's no disrespect to Hitchens. Few of us achieve the status of lively historical footnote. But it's disrespectful to both men's achievements to compare them.

Havel really was a great playwright. It's a shame that small countries have only one or two of their writers, at best, become the international representatives of "Czech literature," but if only one Czech playwright was going to be known outside Bohemia, Havel was a great pick.

I was driving home last night listening to Good King Wenceslaus on the radio, and thinking about Havel. Vaclav, of course, is the name that gets Latinized as "Wenceslaus," so King Wenceslaus is, I think, Vaclav IV. Vaclav Havel didn't want to be a king, but he was a great leader, and he never pretended to be a saint, but he did a lot of good for the world around him.

And here I though Kim Jong was just ill!

Hitch should not be put in the same league as Havel; although the brit did visit all the battlefields in Europe anyway.

Hitch was a stand up comic of the intelligentsia. He had a great vocabulary, a great sense of history and could respond (under the influence) better than any entertainer I have ever seen. As I said somewhere else, he was great when he took my side of things! But many times it was clear that he was present to debate for money and in order to sell his books/newspaper columns.

Havel saw it all. Hitch was my age and I assume saw only a portion of the devastation experienced in Britain as well as Europe.

My God Havel incorporated the full pain of a world wide depression as well as the Nazis and the commies.

I still marvel at how well Europe succeeded in building an economic miracle from all that rubble!

Havel was a God!

I read this at Yglesias Moneybox blog today.  It makes me want to read more Vaclav Havel:

"Many of the great problems we face today, as far as I understand them, have their origin in the fact that this global civilization, though in evidence everywhere, is no more than a thin veneer over the sum total of human awareness, if I may put it that way. This civilization is immensely fresh, young, new, and fragile, and the human spirit has accepted it with dizzying alacrity, without itself changing in any essential way. Humanity has gradually, and in very diverse ways, shaped our habits of mind, our relationship to the world, our models of behavior and the values we accept and recognize. In essence, this new, single epidermis of world civilization merely covers or conceals the immense variety of cultures, of peoples, of religious worlds, of historical traditions and historically formed attitudes, all of which in a sense lie "beneath" it."

In the March 90 NYR, an excellent article by Timothy Garton-Ash about the velvet revolution includes a photo of Havel and Dubcek on a balcony together when they have just heard a piece of news about the gradually unraveling of the Soviet Union. Leaning towards one another and smiling. Two good guys.

I was in Prague in Jan of 1990. Havel and the outgoing Communist leader had reached an agreement but even a non-speaker of that language could sense the tension. The taxi driver scoffed at the name of our Hotel clearly because it resembled the name of the nearly-successful resistance movement. There were fresh flowers and lit candles at impromptu shrines, where protestors had been killed the month before. Also, encouragingly, lots of signs clearly saying, "Havel to the Castle."

A month later Havel was here. Me, too. In his case to address Congress (and go to CBGBs). I listened on the car radio. He'd thought of speaking in English, he said, but his staff convinced him it would be a catastrophe, so we would have the chance to hear the beautiful Czechoslovakian language. Then his first Czech words , repeated by the translator, were, "The last time I was in prison."

Great applause from the joint session and me at the wheel for what that's worth.

From the rest of the speech what I recall was his urging Congress to be patient with the Soviet Union because it was moving in the right direction. Of a piece with his recognizing Dubcek and opposing the "lustration"— the hunting down of ex-leaders from the communist regime—which commenced with the very different Vaclav, Vaclav Klaus whose own subsequent very different Premiership caused him to be known as the Czech Margaret Thatcher. For Klaus anyone associated with the former regime—by which he had been comfortably employed—was an enemy until they could prove otherwise. For Havel, until it was proven otherwise, they were human beings trying to get through the day.

That was Havel.