Havel versus Kim: Legacies far apart

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Updated: January 21, 2012 8:07AM

On occasion history gives us a lesson written in outsized examples — rarely more so than this weekend in the deaths of two men with astonishingly divergent legacies, one a champion of human freedom, the other an agent of murderous oppression of his fellow human beings.

Czech patriot, dissident, writer and human rights advocate Vaclav Havel, who died Sunday of lung cancer at age 75, will forever be celebrated and honored for bravery and foresight in battling what at the time seemed insurmountable odds against communist domination of Eastern Europe.

North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, who died Saturday at age 69 or 70 from a long illness associated with a stroke, will be consigned to history’s hall of shame for starving his people as he pursued nuclear weapons, making a mockery of his self-designated title of “Dear Leader.”

History may be guided by big events and sweeping currents of trends and ideas, but it also is formed by the occasional indispensable individual. That was true of Havel in the history of Eastern Europe and the country known as Czechoslovakia before its post-communist breakup into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Even when communist reformers in the Prague Spring of 1968 tried to project “socialism with a human face,” Havel saw clearly that the single-party rule of communism violated all notions of human rights and freedom. One of the founders of the dissident “Charter 77” movement advocating human rights, Havel authored a 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless” that inspired the oppressed of the Soviet Bloc.

Like all dissidents in those days, Havel paid a high price for his heroic stand against totalitarianism. He was thrown in prison several times, serving five years, and was reviled in communist media.

As the regimes behind the Iron Curtain crumbled in 1989, Havel led his country in the peaceful “Velvet Revolution.” He would go serve as president of Czechoslovakia and later of the Czech Republic. He never completely left his counterculture past that made him a fan of rock stars like Frank Zappa or his history of dissent that had him advocating for the unfortunate in contemporary Czech society such as Gypsies.

What a contrast to Kim Jong Il! Inheriting power from his dictator father, Kim Jong Il was coddled in paradoxical luxury in a harsh Marxist country — he grew into a bon vivant famous for enjoying lavish meals as his people starved — and was groomed for power in a murderous way. One of his most infamous exploits was ordering the 1987 bombing of a South Korean airliner that killed 115 people.

His rule was absolute in a nation cut off from the rest of the world. He turned to Pakistan’s notorious nuclear materials smuggler A.Q. Khan to develop nuclear weapons. His military spending created one of the world’s largest standing armies of 1.1 million troops even as many as 2 million North Koreans starved in a 1990s famine that the New York Times attributed to “incompetence” as well as natural disasters.

Havel left a country where democracy determines the next leader. Kim Jong Il, like his father before him, anointed a son as the next dictator of North Korea.

As long as mankind struggles for freedom and human rights, Havel will be remembered along with other giants of the anti-communist crusade like Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II and Poland’s Lech Walesa. As for Kim Jong Il, all that can be said is, good riddance.