Radio Prague hailed Havel as an anti-communist dissident who spent five years in Soviet prisons before being seated as his country’s President in the wake of the 1989 “Velvet Revolution” that dismantled the oppressive communist regime. It also described how Havel helped lead a revitalized Czechoslovakia into two separate entities — the Czech Republic and Slovakia — continuing as the Czech Republic President until 2003.
However, not all anti-communists agree with Radio Prague’s assessment. William F. Jasper, senior editor of The New American, who has covered Havel’s career since the late 1980s, said that before we accept the beatification of Havel as Czechoslovakia’s great liberator, it might be worth doing some basic fact-checking concerning his record, and to heed the warnings of KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn, who accurately predicted the false, controlled “democratization” movements in the communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe.
Jasper pointed out that, contrary to the dominant media mythology surrounding Havel, the deceased Czech politician was key to the continued communist control of the principal Czech institutions after the vaunted Velvet Revolution supposedly swept the Communist Party from power.
Said Jasper: “Petr Cibulka and other genuine anti-Communist Czech patriots have provided detailed chronicles of Havel’s administration and crucial role he played in guaranteeing that, while the Czech Republic would adopt a surface image of liberal reform and democratization, in reality, the country’s most important power centers would remain in Communist hands.” Jasper noted that, with Havel’s knowledge and assistance, former Czech Communist Party leaders have continued to rule through new parties with different names. “Havel helped make sure that the judiciary, the legislature, the military, the police, the media, and the intelligence agencies all remained essentially in the same Communist Party hands,” said Jasper. “This was also the case with regard to the false ‘privatization’ he oversaw."
In his online journal Uncensored News, Cibulka has exposed the connections of the top 10 wealthiest men in the Czech Republic to the Communist Party and its secret police, the STB. “This connection has since been confirmed in reports by other Czech media,” said Jasper, adding that it is “a repeat of the same process that we have seen in Russia, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, and virtually all of the ‘former’ Communist states of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. The oligarchs, the new ‘capitalist’ millionaires and billionaires, did not earn their vast fortunes through entrepreneurial effort. They became instantly wealthy by having Communist authorities transfer enormous state assets to their private control.”
Another noteworthy distinction in Havel’s curriculum vitae was his successful sabotage of efforts to uncover STB agents operating throughout the Czech society — especially those still in the government under Havel and beyond. “This is a pattern that we have seen throughout the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe,” said Jasper. “There has been no equivalent of the denazification program employed in Germany after World War II that rooted out Nazi Party officials and Nazi influence. With relatively few exceptions, ‘lustration’ efforts to expose Communist Party officials and Communist influence have been thwarted by agents or allies.”
In the Czech Republic, the individual most responsible for shielding the communists from exposure was Vaclav Havel. “After Petr Cibulka released the names and codenames of some 200,000 STB agents and collaborators, Havel denounced him and aided those who prosecuted and persecuted Cibulka,” recalled Jasper. “Czech historian Radek Schovanek, Czech authors Premysl Vachalovsky and John Bok, and others have likewise attempted to expose Havel’s role in covering for and aiding the communist continuity in the Czech Republic.”
The standard bio on Havel notes that he was born in 1936 into a prosperous and intellectual family, and that as a young boy was witness to the 1948 communist takeover of Czechoslovakia that stripped his family of its wealth. He was denied a good education because of his “bourgeoisie” roots. Nonetheless, according to the stock profiles, he took up writing in the mid-1950s, and his plays began to appear in 1963, gaining international prominence before communist censorship stifled his works following the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Havel’s eulogizers make much of his role as one of the authors of "Charter 77," a dissident manifesto that challenged the communist regime on human rights abuses. Due to this activity, Havel, reportedly, was subject to years of harassment and jail time, with his January 1989 arrest becoming, in part, the impetus for a national uprising that pulled Czechoslovakia into what was to be the “fall of communism” across Eastern Europe.
But Jasper said that there are a number of problems with the accepted account. “KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn, in his definitive books New Lies for Old (1984) and The Perestroika Deception (1995) provided detailed information on the background of the earlier controlled, false liberalization in Czechoslovakia under ‘reformist’ Communist Alexander Dubcek, the so-called Prague Spring of 1968,” Jasper recalled. “Golitsyn marshaled devastating evidence to demonstrate that Dubcek and the other leaders of the ‘dissident’ movement were controlled opposition run by the KGB/STB.”
Of particular relevance to Havel and the present situation, added Jasper, was Golitsyn’s amazingly accurate prediction “that a KGB/STB-controlled operation of even greater magnitude than Prague Spring could be expected soon in Czechoslovakia. He published this in 1984, four years before Havel’s rise to power. Although he didn’t mention Havel by name, he described him to near perfection.”
The Associated Press, like many other news agencies, offered an idealized — and misleading — account of the process by which Havel was installed in Prague Castle as President of Czechoslovakia. Within weeks following the fall of the Berlin Wall, according to the AP, “hundreds of thousands of Czechs and Slovaks took to the streets,” communist power was toppled, and on December 29, 1989, “Havel was elected Czechoslovakia’s President by the country’s still-communist parliament. Three days later, he told the nation in a televised New Year’s address: ‘Out of gifted and sovereign people, the regime made us little screws in a monstrously big, rattling and stinking machine.’”
However, the Golitsyn analysis, together with what is plainly evident in the ongoing communist-progressive symbiosis in the Czech Republic today, suggest that these standard bios of Havel are more than merely suspect. Friends, associates, and political observers noted that Havel appeared somewhat ill-suited to the political duties required of him. “He did not want to be a president,” said fellow Czech dissident Petruska Sustrova, whose signature was one of the first on "Charter 77." “He was not very keen to enter politics.”
An obituary from Reuters News noted that Havel’s trademark slogan from his “dissident” years, “Truth and love will overcome lies and hatred,” would later be “quoted in sarcasm as the Czechs’ early enthusiasm towards free market democracy collided with the reality of economic reforms and corrupt politics.” Reuters recalled that the Czech hero “lost some of his allure in the later years of his time at the castle. As president-philosopher, he struggled to uphold morality in a tumultuous era of economic transformation and murky business deals.”
Jasper, noted however, that “far from upholding morality and promoting free enterprise, Havel presided over the kind of planned corruption that was specifically designed to discredit capitalism and assure that the Soviet-era nomenklatura would remain in power.”
The Associated Press recalled that during Havel’s presidential tenure, the Czech Republic embraced some free-market reforms, but those were largely credited to the Prime Minister at the time (and current President), Vaclav Klaus, with whom Havel found himself at odds.
Significantly, Havel was given credit for the Czech Republic’s membership in two globalist entities — the European Union, which it joined in 2004, months after he left office, and NATO, which it joined in 1999, as Havel exulted, “I can’t stop rejoicing that I live in this time and can participate in it.”
According to Jasper, these two accomplishments, usually cited as great accolades for Havel, should actually be seen as dangerous steps toward “convergence,” the plan for gradual economic and political merging of the former Soviet Union with the West.
“Convergence is not a term most people are familiar with,” said Jasper, “but to Vaclav Havel, Mikhail Gorbachev, [former Carter National Security Adviser] Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, and other one-worlders it is a desideratum that is fast becoming reality.”
Added Jasper: “I have attended and reported on the Gorbachev Foundation’s State of the World Forums with all of those I’ve just mentioned and they have made it clear by their words and actions that they are working assiduously to end national sovereignty and merge all nations into a world government. Golitsyn, from his former vantage point inside the top levels of the KGB’s strategic planning center, recognized this as a top communist objective. Vaclav Havel was a major, active, conscious player in this subversive and treasonous process.”
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Photo of Vaclav Havel: AP Images
