ABOUT TWO DECEASED LEADERS

This week two leaders died, Vaclav Havel and Kim Jong-il. The Czechs, together with the civilized world, mourn a former playwright, essayist, leader of the Velvet Revolution and president. The North Koreans weep paradoxically over the demise of their leader who was their curse. The sadness in Prague engulfed the world of letters and politics. The hysteria in Pyongyang veers on the absurd but should not be disregarded. The North Korean leadership has created a virtual reality wherein the value system underwent a topsy-turvy manipulation, which led to psychological regression. The tears are probably as real in Prague as they are in Pyongyang, the difference being that the former originate in the soul while the latter emanate from a sophisticated permanent brainwashing of individuals who end up cloned and acting robotic. This does not lessen their grief, but it originates from an implanted chip, which cannot be reversed for the time being. Sadly, the death of some is a riddance rather than a loss. The scenes in North Korea remind me of certain Goebbels/Speer “spectacles” which we never want to see again. The North Korean crying game is the offspring of the Hitler salute. Both are fabricated, inoculated. The paradox is that the North Koreans, who have been “objectified”, became conversely hallucinated true believers.

Havel touched us because his courage and his all-too-human defects made him less a leader than a scholar. Also, as president he remained mostly a writer. It is not accidental that he showed some of the characteristics of that other great genius of Prague, Franz Kafka. He, too, passed his life trying to unlock the contradictions with which every honest man or woman has to deal with, on condition that they can muster the guts to look in the forbidding well of their fears.

In barren, cold North Korea there is no visible room for introspection. Leaders and people applaud each other in a ritualistic, almost primitive continuity. Even the circumstances of the death of the dear leader remain shrouded in some theatrical storyline made up for the masses. I still want to believe that this hell will someday have to face the “stress test” of reality. North Koreans deserve better than a life on an empty tarmac. Few North Koreans will watch the funeral in Prague. Havel defunct remains for the regime as dangerous as he was alive. His ideas would starve in this gulag of permanent alienation. The tears shed in Prague might be more threatening for the remaining lunatics in Syria, Zimbabwe and Sudan, than the bombastic arsenal of a lunar country. Kim Jong–un might be an understudy, but we better stay on guard. I am embarrassed to put Havel and Kim on the same page, but the art collections in the Hradcany Castle did not hesitate to let God cohabitate with Satan on the same canvas.