New York Times reporter Alison Smale confided to her readers today that the purpose of an interview she conducted with Vaclav Havel was for a piece on the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, in which the famous dissident playwright helped overthrow the puppet government of the Soviets in Prague. But, she writes, before he would speak about that or the current state of affairs in Europe, Havel had a question for her: “Was it true that President Obama had refused to meet the Dalai Lama in Washington?”

The Obama administration has placed concern for human rights on the back burner as it pursues engagement with antidemocratic regimes around the globe. But as a man who spent time in prison for speaking out against tyranny in his own country before becoming the first president of a free post–Cold War Czech Republic, Havel does not see human rights as a minor concern. Indeed, as Smale notes, the Dalai Lama was among the first visitors to Prague Castle (the site of the government) after Havel took office; in fact, he has a picture of the Tibetan exile in his current office.

Smale says that she told Havel, who claims to have been a fan of the American president, that Obama has announced that he would meet the Dalai Lama after a visit to China next month. But Havel was not impressed. “It is only a minor compromise. But exactly with these minor compromises start the big and dangerous ones, the real problems.”

Indeed, Havel said he resented the non-reception of the Tibetan even more than Obama’s betrayal of our Czech and Polish allies by bowing to the Russians’ demands and backing off on installing missile-defense systems there. Perhaps this keen observer of both the human condition and the realities of power politics seems to understand that such actions show that beneath Obama’s pose of moral superiority lies merely a shallow desire for applause, as well as a lack of resolve and principle.

As Havel rightly supposes, there is something profoundly troubling about a leader who is willing to slight moral heroes such as the Dalai Lama as well as staunch allies such as the Czechs and the Israelis while kowtowing to autocrats in Moscow and Beijing. At a moment in time when flattery of Barack Obama’s colossal vanity seems to be the height of fashion in Europe, Vaclav Havel’s contrarian instincts have served him well in pointing out our current idol’s feet of clay.

del.icio.us

Google

Facebook

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 15th, 2009 at 11:34 AM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.