Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot?

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

When I watched the crowds of mourners screaming at Kim Jong Il's grotesque funeral, I thought of a scene from the Vincent Price horror flick Cry of the Banshee in which a group of women are loudly mourning some dead royalty and Price asks a servant, "How much did you pay the keeners?" When the servant tells him the amount, Price says, "Make sure they mourn until dawn."

On 19 December I noted the coincidence of the deaths of two world leaders who couldn't have been more different, the "glorious leader" of North Korea and Václav Havel, poet, playwright, dissident, and the first president of the Czech Republic. If their deaths had their different meanings, their funerals, while on a comparable scale and having some superficial resemblances, were utterly different.

I heard one North Korea expert on the BBC comment that the hysterics of the mourners in Pyongyang (a singularly sad city) were probably genuine. But the official video footage of the event shown around the world gave away the game: one cameraman on the street approached the crowd and the front row surged towards him. The following shot, from the cameraman's vantage point, showed the crowd up close, with every one of them wailing on cue in perfect unison. Their faces bore a striking resemblance to those of the damned in medieval illustrations of hell.

I no longer try to imagine what those people must be thinking. They have been told all their lives that they are in heaven, which is in fact much closer to being hell. At the time of Kim Il-Sung's death, I recall listening to a U.S. Navy admiral say that the people of North Korea were going to be very angry when they found out how they've been lied to all this time. But are they really, living in their self-generated twilight zone, unaware of the extent of the lies?

A genuinely solemn occasion was the funeral for Havel in Prague. Watching the cortège as it advanced slowly past the thousands of ordinary people who had come voluntarily to pay their last respects to a genuinely great and sincerely beloved leader brought tears to my eyes, rather than the horrible compulsory grief on parade in Pyongyang. In a typically bizarre twist, the North Korean news agency released video of people shedding tears for Havel. Perhaps they needed warming up for the funeral of their dear (feared) leader?

At least Havel's funeral made me recall the beautiful (if overexposed) words from the Auden poem the first of "Two Songs for Hedli Anderson". The photo above, of an old Czech man playing his violin on a Prague street, speaks volumes more of genuine grief than the tens of thousands of North Koreans keening in chorus.


Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

The Road Not Taken

"London had an aspect of a proletarian Byron: illegitimate, handsome, wildly romantic, casting himself as the rebel and revolutionary, admired by Leon Trotsky for his anti-capitalist polemics. He was the archetypal early burn-out, dead at 40 from the excesses that he lived and wrote about....How he could write!... [London's] perfervid rhetoric matches the great narrative force of his stories, long and short. He is fascinating to read, about beast and man, in fact or fiction."
—The Wall Street Journal

"As a boy, the first heroes that I put into my Pantheon were Napoleon and Alexander the Great. Later on I destroyed this Pantheon and built a new Pantheon in which I began inscribing names such as David Starr Jordan, as Herbert Spencer, as Huxley, as Darwin, as Tyndall." - Jack London in a letter of 1915


I wonder how many readers familiar with White Fang and Call of the Wild are aware that Jack London was a committed socialist, or that he was convinced - at the turn of the 20th century - of an impending world revolution.

About six years ago, when I was living in Des Moines, I went to the public library downtown when it occupied an elegant old classical-style building by the river. The library has since been moved to a ridiculously expensive, ultra-modern monstrosity that snakes through downtown Des Moines. I located a volume of the Library of America edition of the collected writings of London, the Novels and Social Writings, that included The People of the Abyss (his reportage of the slums of East London), The Road, and a prophetic novel, The Iron Heel.

I suppose that I should've examined the book before I checked it out, because when I got it home and sat down to read it, I opened it to the section that, according to the table of contents, contained London's socialist journalism, I found that the entire section, a few hundred pages' worth, was missing. The pages must have been removed during the binding stage, since the book was otherwise intact. So it hadn't been a disgruntled reader who had found London's socialist writings objectionable but someone involved in the manufacture of the book itself.

I was a little astonished that no one had noticed the missing pages or hadn't brought them to someone's attention at the library. Evidently, someone was made uncomfortable with the idea that Jack London, outdoorsman, adventurer, and all-American, has been a committed and passionate enemy of capitalism I had to wonder if there were any more books in the Library of America's edition of London's writings in a similar condition.

To understand London's attraction to socialism, you have to know the bare facts, which were especially bare, of his early life. The circumstances surrounding his birth in 1876 read like one of his stories. His father and mother were unmarried, and when his mother became pregnant, his father demanded she get an abortion. When she refused, he abandoned her and she attempted suicide.

At the age of 13, London began working in a cannery, his first of many grueling jobs. After the labor unrest known as the "Panic of '93" in Oakland, he joined "Kelly's Army" of tramps that made a march, along with "Coxey's Army" of Ohio, all the way to Washington to protest unemployment. 6,000 of them made it to Washington, only to see the leaders of the protest arrested for walking on the grass. London only got as far as the Ohio River, where he was arrested for vagrancy and jailed 30 days in Buffalo at the Erie County Penitentiary.

On his release, he turned hobo, was a sailor for a short time, and eventually returned to Oakland to attend Oakland High School. It was his experiences on the road as a bum that he immortalized in his extraordinary book The Road, published in 1907.

John Law was up and out after the early worm. I was a worm. Had I been richer by the experiences that were to be fall me in the next several months, I should have turned and run like the very devil. He might have shot at me, but he'd have had to hit me to get me. He'd have never run after me, for two hoboes in the hand are worth more than one on the get-away. But like a dummy I stood still when he halted me. Our conversation was brief.

"What hotel are you stopping at?" he queried.

He had me. I wasn't stopping at any hotel, and, since I did not know the name of a hotel in the place, I could not claim residence in any of them. Also, I was up too early in the morning. Everything was against me.

"I just arrived," I said.

"Well, you turn around and walk in front of me, and not too far in front. There's somebody wants to see you."

Arrested, London was taken, with a group of other hoboes, before a judge, who listened just long enough for the charges against each one ("Vagrancy, your honor")before delivering the invariable verdict "Thirty days". London saw how each hobo was given exactly fifteen seconds, from charge to sentence. He waited his turn, thinking of the words for his defense,

. . . my American blood was up. Behind me were the many generations of my American ancestry. One of the kinds of liberty those ancestors of mine had fought and died for was the right of trial by jury. This was my heritage, stained sacred by their blood, and it devolved upon me to stand up for it. All right, I threatened to myself; just wait till he gets to me.

He got to me. My name, whatever it was, was called, and I stood up. The bailiff said, "Vagrancy, your Honor," and I began to talk. But the judge began talking at the same time, and he said, "Thirty days." I started to protest, but at that moment his Honor was calling the name of the next hobo on the list. His Honor paused long enough to say to me, "Shut up!" The bailiff forced me to sit down. And the next moment that next hobo had received thirty days and the succeeding hobo was just in process of getting his.


London was an erratic writer who wrote far too much. His 1,000 words a day is half of Trollope's daily output but twice that of Graham Greene. But he possesses a powerful, if simplistic, view of life that he managed to convey in his best writing, like the stories "Love of Life," "Make Westing," "The Francis Spaight", and "A Piece of Steak," and the books The People of the Abyss and The Road.

London led an interesting life that, after he had made himself rich from writing on an industrial model, had about it a rather driven zeal for adventure and physical risk-taking. London placed his characters in situations that provoked the response he was trying to illustrate, like the starving man and wolf in "Love of Life," or the crew of the sinking ship "The Francis Spaight". London's prose is blunt and does not suggest depths. There probably weren't any depths that he wished to explore. But his political convictions, while they may have stood in contrast to his brutal understanding of life, were genuine and determined by his life experience.

Meet John Doe

"Below is a letter which reached my desk this morning. It's a commentary on what we laughingly call a civilized world. 'Dear Miss Mitchell: Four years ago I was fired out of my job. Since then I haven't been able to get another one. At first I was sore at the state administration because it's on account of the slimy politics here we have all this unemployment. But in looking around, it seems the whole world's going to pot, so in protest I'm going to commit suicide by jumping off the City Hall roof!' Signed, A disgusted American citizen, John Doe.'
Editor's note: If you ask this column, the wrong people are jumping off roofs."


It was 1941. Europe was locked in the second year of the most terrible war in history, while most Americans were thinking that they might just sit this one out. FDR was serving his third term as president. And Frank Capra, son of Sicilian immigrants, set out to make a movie that had no suitable ending.

A seventy year old movie that flopped when it was first released, that tried to warn Americans of a hidden menace: a group of powerful businessmen clandestinely manipulate a grassroots populist movement whose expanding membership has the potential to sweep a candidate of their choosing into the White House.

If this story sounds familiar, it might have something to do with a perceptible change in the moral atmosphere of America that resembles the one in 1941. Fascism was a reality in American politics, and popular figures like Charles Lindbergh argued for isolationism. Philip Roth's novel The Plot Against America directly examines the consequences for America of Lindbergh becoming president in 1940. Lindbergh persuades Americans to stay out of a war in Europe, and the consequences - for Europe and for the world - are dire.

Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, which I wrote about at length a few years ago, is probably the most recognizable Christmas movie in America, even if it only touches on Christmas in its final scene. What still strikes me about that fulsome movie is how Frank Capra could've gone through the Second World War just so he could retreat into a fantasy America when the war was over. His nightmare vision of Pottersville, with its disillusion, its bars, strip clubs, and prostitution, was much closer to the real America than hokey old Grovers Corners.

The final scene of Meet John Doe takes place on Christmas Eve. It was one of several scenes that Capra shot and tested with preview audiences. In one of the discarded scenes, the hero actually jumps to his death, and the Colonel (Walter Brennan) is last scene holding the dead man in his arms in a kind of impious Pietà. That ending worked, dramatically at least, but audiences weren't at all ready in 1941 for Gary Cooper committing suicide.

Earlier in film, Cooper gave a speech that is riddled with hokey sentiments, but is still powerful in its simple appeal to human decency.

Meet John Doe, despite its unevenness, is my favorite Christmas movie because it reminds us of what the holiday is supposed to be about. It is also, at the end of a year of populist movements, of peaceful and belligerent protests, a movie molotov cocktail aimed at Wall Street and all the D.B. Norton's of the world who want to take control of a democracy out of the hands of its people.

Here is the best contemporary review of the film by Otis Ferguson. I wonder what Ferguson would make of the fact that there is now a musical of Capra's movie?


Democracy at the Box Office
Otis Ferguson
The New Republic, March 24, 1941

Though Frank Capra is still right in the formula he has been holding to for five years now, Meet John Doe is at least a promise that he may be coming back to pictures. It is almost a point-for-point replica of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, but some of the old felicity is there again and there are actually comedy sequences in it. I am not holding out too much hope, for today there is nothing Americans so like to be told from the screen as that they are Americans. So why should anybody with a formula and a credit line like skywriting bother with making a swell simple movie as his "production for 1941"?

The John Doe of the story is Capra's familiar and favorite American type, the easy shambling young man, shrewd and confused, rugged, a lovable innocent but don't tread on him - the uncommon common man, in short, with a heart of gold and a limestone fist, and integrity in long fibers. Eyewash, of course, but there is something in it, for a national hero is some sort of national index after all, and it is not so much how miserably short we fall of being an ideal as what ideal we choose to dream of. Anyhow, this young man, a bush-league baseball player with a glass arm, is caught up in a freak stunt for tabloid circulation-building which turns out to be dynamite both ways. As J. Doe, he is supposed to be a social reformer with a deadline for a suicide of protest; as a national news personality, he becomes so arresting and eloquent in his plea for love and understanding - the Sermon on the Mount with a drawl - that miracles are passed and John Doe clubs are formed, and it is presently worth someone's while to own him as political property. It started as fraud but eventually led to the young man's believing his own spiel and wrecking the sinister plans when he found out their antidemocratic aim. Love was a part of it, of course, and there are various clever wrinkles; but the outline is enough.

The fascination of gossip and the awe of prestige make it impossible that the question of what makes a picture should ever have a chance against the question of who. But while the names of Robert Riskin and Frank Capra are behind the production and writing and direction of John Doe, I think we can see even behind the names to what is under our noses. The message is that since it is all the little men who truly make the big world, they should live together and hang together, doing away with hate and suspicion and bad-neighborliness. Fine. Ringing. Of course there are present among us oppression and injustice and scorn for all unsung heroes whose names are Moe Million. Too bad; an outrage; something should be done. So the lift of the story comes in the doing, in the rallying to a new simple faith, as people and as Americans, through homely things but as a mighty army under the flag. In this story the powers of darkness are able to check the advance, but the victory in defeat is that there will be advance again.

I have no doubt the authors of such theses believe in them, just as it is easy for a songwriter to believe that God should bless America after he has glanced over the recent sheet-music sales. But sifted in with any such half-thought-out hoorah must be the true motivating conviction that the box office is out there and will be terrific. And that is where the thing begins to crack like Parson Weems's Liberty Bell, for in art there is a certain terrible exaction upon those who would carry their show by arousing people to believe, and it is that any such show must be made out of belief, in good faith and pure earnest, in the whole of belief itself. This rhetoric and mortising of sure-fire device of a success today is its sure betrayal by tomorrow - the flag in a game of charades, the mock prayer at a picnic.

As a picture, it does well the things which have proved highlights before: the tender concern over the little fellers with great faith; the underdog finally getting on his hind legs to tell them off; the regeneration of even a hard-boiled newspaper gal; the final blow-off scene with the nation as audience. But it talks too much to no purpose and in the same spot. The musical score is both arch and heavy (the most undeveloped department in all Hollywood anyway). And one of the saddest things is to find Capra so preoccupied with getting over a message of holy-hokum that he lets in half a dozen of the worst montage transitions - mumming faces, headlines, wheels and whorls - that have been seen in a major effort since the trick first turned stale.

Whether this much of hollowness and prefabrication will spoil the picture for you, I wouldn't know. There are things in it to see. The business of promoting a thesis has distracted Frank Capra's attention from much that he was superb at doing, and he still skips over many of the little fitted pieces which make a story inevitable. But now and then he lingers and you can see the hand of the loving workman bringing out the fine grain - as in the direction of the little crowd around the local mayor when Joe Doe is apprehended, with its naturalness and light spontaneous humor; as in the edge of satire in the management of the radio broadcast; as in the bringing out of homely humorous quirks in John Doe himself; and as always in the timing of a line, its cause and effect, so that it comes out with just force and clarity among the shifting images. But Capra and Riskin now seem content to let good actors fill out a stock part and stop at that, so Edward Arnold, Walter Brennan, Gene Lockhart, J. Farrell McDonald, and several others have nothing more incisive to do than they would in any B picture. Barbara Stanwyck has always needed managing, and apparently got it here, though her idea of a passion is still that it is something to tear to firecrackers. But one man the director did give a chance to and smooth the way for, and that is James Gleason, who made more of this chance than there was in the lines and their meaning. The one scene which came through all these stream- lined Fourth of July exercises with true sincerity and eloquence was Gleason's drunken talk in the bar, the one that starts, "I like you, you're gentle. Take me, I've always been hard. Hard. Don't like hard people, you hear?" It was just talk, with business, but he made it his, and it will remain one of the magnificent scenes in pictures.

That leaves only the star, who is so much an American John Doe type you could never say whether he was cast in a part or vice versa - Gary Cooper. It is he who has the human dignity which this two hours of talk is talking about, and talking about; and it seems impossible for him to be quite foolish even in the midst of foolishness. His is the kind of stage presence which needs no special lighting or camera magic; he makes an entrance by opening a door, and immediately you know that someone is in the room. Meet John Doe has its humor, inspiration, and interest in uneven degrees; but whether you find it good, fair, or merely endurable depends more on Cooper than on what we know as sound moviemaking.

Gunpowder and Atom Bombs

While reading the Essays of George Orwell, which is an obligatory activity for me, I found what I think is the most carefully reasoned argument against the Second Amendment that I know. Of course, Orwell wasn't addressing it directly, and the essay is deceptively topical. It was published just two months after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic explosions, so the subject foremost on everyone's minds was who's next?

One of the most cherished myths of the NRA is that a populace that is in possession of firearms, as Americans are, thanks to the Second Amendment, is unlikely to become victims of a police state, that the threat of armed resistance would dissuade any government from trying to violate civil liberties. The lesson of Libya is obvious: the revolt was successful only because of outside intervention on behalf of the rebels. This has nothing to do with what is right and whose side is in possession of it. It has to do with who has the bigger guns, the tanks, the fighter planes, etc. I remember hearing supporters of the Second Amendment, when martial law was declared in Poland, saying that such a thing could never happen in America because Americans have the right to bear arms. The image of a Russian tank bearing down on a crowd of civilians with handguns and hunting rifles sprang to mind. Paragraphs three, four, and five of Orwell's essay make mincemeat of this argument.


You and the Atom Bomb
Tribune, 19 October 1945


Considering how likely we all are to be blown to pieces by it within the next five years, the atomic bomb has not roused so much discussion as might have been expected. The newspapers have published numerous diagrams, not very helpful to the average man, of protons and neutrons doing their stuff, and there has been much reiteration of the useless statement that the bomb ‘ought to be put under international control.’ But curiously little has been said, at any rate in print, about the question that is of most urgent interest to all of us, namely: ‘How difficult are these things to manufacture?’

Such information as we — that is, the big public — possess on this subject has come to us in a rather indirect way, apropos of President Truman’s decision not to hand over certain secrets to the USSR. Some months ago, when the bomb was still only a rumour, there was a widespread belief that splitting the atom was merely a problem for the physicists, and that when they had solved it a new and devastating weapon would be within reach of almost everybody. (At any moment, so the rumour went, some lonely lunatic in a laboratory might blow civilisation to smithereens, as easily as touching off a firework.)

Had that been true, the whole trend of history would have been abruptly altered. The distinction between great states and small states would have been wiped out, and the power of the State over the individual would have been greatly weakened. However, it appears from President Truman’s remarks, and various comments that have been made on them, that the bomb is fantastically expensive and that its manufacture demands an enormous industrial effort, such as only three or four countries in the world are capable of making. This point is of cardinal importance, because it may mean that the discovery of the atomic bomb, so far from reversing history, will simply intensify the trends which have been apparent for a dozen years past.

It is a commonplace that the history of civilisation is largely the history of weapons. In particular, the connection between the discovery of gunpowder and the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie has been pointed out over and over again. And though I have no doubt exceptions can be brought forward, I think the following rule would be found generally true: that ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, thanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak.

The great age of democracy and of national self-determination was the age of the musket and the rifle. After the invention of the flintlock, and before the invention of the percussion cap, the musket was a fairly efficient weapon, and at the same time so simple that it could be produced almost anywhere. Its combination of qualities made possible the success of the American and French revolutions, and made a popular insurrection a more serious business than it could be in our own day. After the musket came the breech-loading rifle. This was a comparatively complex thing, but it could still be produced in scores of countries, and it was cheap, easily smuggled and economical of ammunition. Even the most backward nation could always get hold of rifles from one source or another, so that Boers, Bulgars, Abyssinians, Moroccans — even Tibetans — could put up a fight for their independence, sometimes with success. But thereafter every development in military technique has favoured the State as against the individual, and the industrialised country as against the backward one. There are fewer and fewer foci of power. Already, in 1939, there were only five states capable of waging war on the grand scale, and now there are only three — ultimately, perhaps, only two. This trend has been obvious for years, and was pointed out by a few observers even before 1914. The one thing that might reverse it is the discovery of a weapon — or, to put it more broadly, of a method of fighting — not dependent on huge concentrations of industrial plant.

From various symptoms one can infer that the Russians do not yet possess the secret of making the atomic bomb; on the other hand, the consensus of opinion seems to be that they will possess it within a few years. So we have before us the prospect of two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the world between them. It has been rather hastily assumed that this means bigger and bloodier wars, and perhaps an actual end to the machine civilisation. But suppose — and really this the likeliest development — that the surviving great nations make a tacit agreement never to use the atomic bomb against one another? Suppose they only use it, or the threat of it, against people who are unable to retaliate? In that case we are back where we were before, the only difference being that power is concentrated in still fewer hands and that the outlook for subject peoples and oppressed classes is still more hopeless.

When James Burnham wrote The Managerial Revolution it seemed probable to many Americans that the Germans would win the European end of the war, and it was therefore natural to assume that Germany and not Russia would dominate the Eurasian land mass, while Japan would remain master of East Asia. This was a miscalculation, but it does not affect the main argument. For Burnham’s geographical picture of the new world has turned out to be correct. More and more obviously the surface of the earth is being parceled off into three great empires, each self-contained and cut off from contact with the outer world, and each ruled, under one disguise or another, by a self-elected oligarchy. The haggling as to where the frontiers are to be drawn is still going on, and will continue for some years, and the third of the three super-states — East Asia, dominated by China — is still potential rather than actual. But the general drift is unmistakable, and every scientific discovery of recent years has accelerated it.

We were once told that the aeroplane had ‘abolished frontiers’; actually it is only since the aeroplane became a serious weapon that frontiers have become definitely impassable. The radio was once expected to promote international understanding and co-operation; it has turned out to be a means of insulating one nation from another. The atomic bomb may complete the process by robbing the exploited classes and peoples of all power to revolt, and at the same time putting the possessors of the bomb on a basis of military equality. Unable to conquer one another, they are likely to continue ruling the world between them, and it is difficult to see how the balance can be upset except by slow and unpredictable demographic changes.

For forty or fifty years past, Mr. H. G. Wells and others have been warning us that man is in danger of destroying himself with his own weapons, leaving the ants or some other gregarious species to take over. Anyone who has seen the ruined cities of Germany will find this notion at least thinkable. Nevertheless, looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham’s theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications — that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once UNCONQUERABLE and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbors.

Had the atomic bomb turned out to be something as cheap and easily manufactured as a bicycle or an alarm clock, it might well have plunged us back into barbarism, but it might, on the other hand, have meant the end of national sovereignty and of the highly-centralised police state. If, as seems to be the case, it is a rare and costly object as difficult to produce as a battleship, it is likelier to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a ‘peace that is no peace’.

Winter in Prague

"The original and most important sphere of activity, one that predetermines all the others, is simply an attempt to create and support the independent life of society as an articulated expression of living within the truth. In other words, serving truth consistently, purposefully, and articulately, and organizing this service. This is only natural, after all: if living within the truth is an elementary starting point for every attempt made by people to oppose the alienating pressure of the system, if it is the only meaningful basis of any independent act of political import, and if, ultimately, it is also the most intrinsic existential source of the "dissident" attitude, then it is difficult to imagine that even manifest "dissent" could have any other basis than the service of truth, the truthful life, and the attempt to make room for the genuine aims of life."

Václav Havel, "Power of the Powerless"


The coincidence of the death of Václav Havel and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il could not have been more pleasing, despite his being dead, to Havel, who resisted totalitarianism for two-thirds of his life.

Before the so-called Arab Spring there was the Prague Spring in 1968. I remember watching on television as Russian tanks rolled into Prague on 21 August 1968. I was unaware, at the age of ten, of its wider implications, but I was very aware of its terrible aspect, which Walter Cronkite, or whomever it was I was watching that day, reinforced. On 8 December I wrote that the world during the Cold War "was a world in which the sun never shone, a spiritual ice age, a low intensity nightmare". Of course, it wasn't anything like that for me, living safely in the West.

For the people of Eastern Europe, however, it was that and much worse. For the people who resisted, like Václav Havel, it was either a time of imprisonment or the threat of imprisonment, since he refused to cooperate and play his part in the charade of a "people's republic". He was a celebrated playwright, for five years, before the tanks squashed the Prague Spring and the subsequent regime became, because of Czechoslovakia's brief flirtation with "communism with a human face" one of the most repressive in Eastern Europe. He practiced non-violence, which got him comparisons to Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

But it also got him imprisoned until, in 1989, with the reforms in the Soviet Union loosening its hold on the Warsaw Pact nations, a non-violent, Velvet, revolution swept Havel into power. He eventually became the first president of a free Czechoslovakia. Three years later, when his country split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, he became the first president of the Czech Republic.

He was embarrassed by all the ceremony of office. He wasn't even comfortable wearing a suit. He was the son of privilege, who saw the injustice of that privilege and revolted against it. But he never forgot the feeling he first encountered as a child that he was an outsider. "I longed for equality with others," he wrote, "not because I was some kind of infant social revolutionary, but because I felt separate and excluded ... alone, inferior, ridiculed."

In 1990, he was invited to address the United States Congress. The speech (mostly in Czech) betrayed his genius with the written - and spoken - word:

"We playwrights, who have to cram a whole human life or an entire historical era in a two-hour play, can scarcely understand this rapidity ourselves. And if it gives us trouble, think of the trouble it must give to political scientists who spend their whole life studying the realm of the probable and have less experience with the realm of the improbable than us, the playwrights.

"Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our being as humans, and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed –be it ecological, social, demographic or a general breakdown of civilization –will be unavoidable. If we are no longer threatened by world war or by the danger that the absurd mountains of accumulated nuclear weapons might blow up the world, this does not mean that we have definitively won. We are, in fact, far from the final victory.

"We are still a long way from that "family of man." In fact, we seem to be receding from the ideal rather than growing closer to it. Interests of all kinds–personal, selfish, state, nation, group, and, if you like, company interests–still considerably outweigh genuinely common and global interests. We are still under the sway of the destructive and vain belief that man is the pinnacle of creation and not just a part of it and that therefore everything is permitted.

"There are still many who say they are concerned not for themselves but for the cause, while they are demonstrably out for themselves and not for the cause at all. We are still destroying the planet that was entrusted to us and its environment. We still close our eyes to the growing social, ethnic and cultural conflicts in the world. From time to time, we say that the anonymous mega-machinery we have created for ourselves no longer serves us but rather has enslaved us, yet we still fail to do anything about it.

"In other words, we still don't know how to put morality ahead of politics, science and economics. We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of all our actions, if they are to be moral, is responsibility.

"Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my company, my success–responsibility to the order of being where all our actions are indelibly recorded and where and only where they will be properly judged.

"The interpreter or mediator between us and this higher authority is what is traditionally referred to as human conscience.

[speaking English]: "When Thomas Jefferson wrote that 'governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,' it was a simple and important act of the human spirit. What gave meaning to that act, however, was the fact that the author backed it up with his life. It was not just his words; it was his deeds as well."


It still amazes me that Czechs thought so highly of this great writer that they elected him president of their nation. But he was, as everything he said and did attests, a great man of conscience.

Chic Radical

There are very few political writers worth taking seriously who have been able to put their faces in front of their words. That was one of Christopher Hitchens' achievements. I can't think of one American political thinker who was capable of going toe to toe with him without looking ridiculous. He was used sparingly, almost charitably, on American TV. And since debates over here are far more polite than they are in Britain, he was regarded as much too brutal and unfair, especially when he won.

He was a radical leftist for a long time and claimed to remain one in his last interviews. He was outspoken in his support of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. And he was "unapologetic" when it became clear that the justification for the invasion had been at worst a concoction and at best a terrible mistake. In this, there was rueful irony in the coincidence of the American military presence in Iraq officially coming to an end the day before Hitchens died, at 62, in a Houston hospital. (I wonder if he pronounced it "Hooston" to the last?)

Somehow, the quaint word dashing summed up his looks - until chemotherapy deprived him of his bountiful hair - and fearless summed up his writing, especially when it came to standing up for a cause, the more unpopular, the better. Despite his mellifluous British accent, which he seemed to cultivate after his move to the U.S. in the '80s and which greatly intimidated his stupider American opponents, he grew to love America. He was passionate about what matters: truth, justice, life.

One of his lifelong heroes was George Orwell. In fact, Hitchens was born nine months before Orwell died of his own terminal illness. Perhaps it would be unfair to compare them, but Eric Blair was by no mean s a saint. They both wrote voluminously, obsessively. "I am a writer. It's what I am, not what I do." Though written by Hitchens, Orwell could as well have said so. Hitchens admired Orwell because he was the most engaged with his own age.

I think that Hitchens' move to America and his eventual backing of Bush and the Iraq War were due to his fear of becoming marginal or irrelevant. Perhaps he saw socialism as Orwell saw it near the end of his own life at the age of 46 - as a Utopian ideal with, at best, remote prospects of ever being realized anywhere in the world.

More charitable Christians probably prayed that he be converted in his last moments. Of course they would. But Hitchens, I am confident, came to the same conclusion that Primo Levi came to when he was in Auschwitz. Hitchens said that, in a Christian universe, "we are born sick but must make ourselves well." Levi describes a crucial moment in the Lager:

I too entered the Lager as a non-believer, and as a non-believer I was liberated
and have lived to this day; actually, the experience of the Lager with its
frightful iniquity has confirmed me in my laity. It has prevented me, and still
prevents me, from conceiving of any form of providence or transcendent justice .
. . I must nevertheless admit that I experienced (and again only once) the
temptation to yield, to seek refuge in prayer. This happened in the October of
1944, in the one moment in which I lucidly perceived the imminence of death.
Naked and compressed among my naked companions with my index card in hand, I was waiting to file past the "commission" that with one glance would decide whether I should immediately go into the gas chamber or was instead strong enough to go on working. For one instant I felt the need to ask for help and asylum; then, despite my anguish, equanimity prevailed: you do not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, nor when you are losing. A prayer under these conditions would have been not only absurd (what rights could I claim? and from whom?) but blasphemous, obscene, laden with the greatest impiety of which a non-believer is capable. I rejected the temptation: I knew that otherwise were I to survive, I would have to be ashamed of it. (The Drowned and the Saved)


Always seeming to look the part, not even a makeover for Vanity Fair could diminish his stature as one of his generation's best debaters and polemical writers. What a beautiful expression "He passed away" is, even if it is only a euphemism.

One Below

On the centenary - 14 December - of Roald Amundsen's conquest of the South Pole, I recommend a brilliant book by an unconventional historian, Scott and Amundsen by Roland Huntford. The book first came to my attention by way of the 1985 television series The Last Place on Earth, which was itself a remarkable achievement.

Huntford was highly critical of Amundsen's competitor in the race for the pole, Robert Scott, who reached the pole on 17 January 1912. On finding that Amundsen had already been there more than a month before, Scott and his four companions died on their way back. The discovery of their bodies eight months later confirmed Scott, at least in the minds of Britons, as the real hero of the race for the pole. In a "Message to the Public" found with his remains, Scott wrote:

Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale, but surely, surely, a great rich country like ours will see that those who are dependent on us are properly provided for.

Amundsen, a true hero and certainly the more able explorer, never lived it down. In that strange age of exploration, in which people were more important for their courage than for their abilities, Scott was indeed a hero. Huntford's book, by presenting the facts of his expedition, revealed how egoistic and foolhardy Scott was. In an interview with The Guardian, Huntford asserted that

"In as much as I had an agenda, it wasn't to run down Scott; rather, it was to rehabilitate Amundsen, who I felt had never been given the credit he deserved outside Norway. No previous English-language biographer had even worked from the original Norwegian sources. It was only when I started reading both Scott and Amundsen's diaries that I became aware of the discrepancies. I found Scott almost incomprehensible, while Amundsen spoke a language to which I could relate. But then I've long felt an affinity with the Scandinavian psyche."

Yesterday, the Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, whose country has had a very tough year, said in a ceremony you can watch here, "We are here today to honour these five brave men. We are here today to celebrate one of the most outstanding achievements of mankind and we are here to highlight the importance of this cold continent for the warming of the globe."