Yet mock, we much… we must… and we will much… about… that… be committed. (h/t The Other McCain).
Somebody needs to be committed, that’s for sure:
No one questions that Havel, who went to prison twice, was a brave man who had the courage to stand up for his views. Yet the question which needs to be asked is whether his political campaigning made his country, and the world, a better place.
We’re not entirely sure why that question “needs” to be asked, and we’d rather prefer it if that communist-fellating twatfungus, Neil Clark, would refrain from trying to explain it to us, lest we be overcome with a sudden, irresistible urge to remodel the ridiculous little wanker’s facial features with a weed whacker.
On second thoughts…
Havel’s anti-communist critique contained little if any acknowledgement of the positive achievements of the regimes of eastern Europe
Havel obviously wasn’t a big fan of making stuff up, unlike a certain sniveling socialist sycophant in the West that we could mention.
in the fields of employment,
“Here’s a broom. Now sweep this doorstep 8 hours a day, every day, for the rest of your life. Congratulations, comrade, you’re employed!”
welfare provision,
You haven’t an idea what living in the lap of luxury is truly like until you’ve tried communist “welfare.”
education
While children in the West were barely literate, unable to attend school for more than a few hours a week due to their busy schedules in the coal mines, communist education in the East created the most brilliant minds in the world, leading to every single major scientific discovery of the 20th century.
and women’s rights.
Very true. How envious were Western women of their communist sisters, free to be every bit as miserable as their communist brothers. And, speaking of education, let us not forget the enormous strides forward achieved under communism in the field of forced hormonal and steroid therapy of pre-pubescent girls.
Or the fact that communism, for all its faults, was still a system which put the economic needs of the majority first.
BWAAHAHAHAHAHA!
Sorry, we can’t do this. Surely, SURELY this is Teh Grauniad’s idea of a New Year’s joke or something. Right? RIGHT?
Havel, the son of a wealthy entrepreneur whose companies were nationalised when the communists came to power, showed little concern for the plight of ordinary people who lost out in the change towards a market economy. And there were losers aplenty. While the years following the liberation of eastern Europe from communism by Havel and his fellow dissidents are routinely portrayed in the west as one big success story, the reality is rather different. A 2009 Lancet study concluded…
Wait… Lancet? Weren’t they the same blokes who made a study back in the early years of the Iraq war “concluding” that the U.S. military had exterminated roughly seventyleven quadrifillion Iraqis (and that was only before lunch. After that, they got truly brutal!).
that as many as 1 million working-age men died due to the health problems brought on by mass privatisation.
Nothing more lethal to a working-age man than to arrive at work, only to find out that his factory is now under private ownership. They were dropping like flies as a result, FLIES, we tell you!
At least Teh Lancet has learned since their Iraqi falbulations: They now pull death tolls out of their arses that are actually lower than the total population of the areas they claim to have “studied.”
Funny, though, 1 million happens to also be the death toll of communism in Eastern Europe, but let’s not talk about that. Nor, for that matter, the 99 million that communism exterminated elsewhere. Let’s talk instead of the 1 million strapping, butch Hungarians who keeled over dead as door nails the moment they learned that the Party no longer owned and mismanaged everything.
You would think that such a sudden extermination event would have left gaping holes somewhere, empty ghost towns, single women competing fiercely for the few surviving males, rotting bodies piling up in the streets and such.
As economies across eastern Europe were restructured so inequalities and social divisions grew. A 2011 OECD report found that Havel’s Czech Republic had the joint-second largest rise in income inequality in OECD members since the mid-1980s.
The poor were still poor, but now there were actually individuals around NOT associated with the Party who weren’t poor which, obviously, led to “income inequality.”
No longer were everybody equally miserable.
The HORROR!
Lauding Havel is not only doing a disservice to the millions of ordinary people in eastern Europe who have not been served well by his politics, but to the innocent men, women and children killed by the western military adventures he supported.
Lauding the fictional “achievements” of communism, on the other hand, is not at all a disservice to the 100 million innocents that said diseased cancer of a sick ideology has murdered.
While Havel was a man of undoubted talent and intellect, it’s time we stopped eulogising people simply because they were anti-communist dissidents, and instead look at the bigger picture.
Personally, we can’t think of very many better reasons to eulogize somebody than their disdain for communism.
Heck, the sheer bravery involved in dissenting under a communist regime qualifies for praise, if you ask us.
Unlike pampered, ignorant snots like you, who are free to dissent to your shriveled little black heart’s content with the policies that gave you everything you have, having nothing to fear from doing so other than people with actual brains mocking you mercilessly.
Why don’t you, just for the heck of it, go dissent in communist North Korea for a while. Let us know how that works out for you, you pestilent prickwart.
Thatisall.