Hot on the heels of Christopher Hitchens, another member of what Terry Eagleton has termed the 'liberal literati' has died. As the tributes to Vaclav Havel multiply in the media, it is useful to remind ourselves of some home truths about the man. To this end, I direct the reader to Michael Parenti's revealing portrait of Havel, taken from Parenti's 1997 book Blackshirts and Reds. While the piece may rather overestimate Havel's personal involvement in some of the developments mentioned, it correctly identifies Havel's reactionary politics. As Parenti reminds us, Havel, like Hitchens, presented himself as a liberal and a 'humanitarian', but was anything but: he was a lifelong enemy of socialism, a proponent of capitalist 'reform' in the fledgling Czech Republic and a cheerleader for US imperial violence.
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