On the recordMarch 11, 2014
As the author of this resolution, I rise today to honor the life of a rather extraordinary man, Vaclav Havel. As we watch the crisis unfolding in Ukraine, I think it is important to reflect upon the life of the man who led the people of Czechoslovakia out from under the thumb of the totalitarian system he had grown up under, out from under the Soviet Union, and played a very key role in the founding of not one, but of two vibrant European democracies, one of them the Czech Republic and the other the Slovak Republic. I remember a young Croatian journalist, with tears in his eyes, saying, if only we had had someone, someone like Vaclav Havel, when it came to the divisions in the former Yugoslavia. Because, as he stated, the ideals that Vaclav Havel had enunciated, political pluralism, tolerance, and democratic capitalism, the way forward, the same way forward as was broadcast by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty-- broadcasts, by the way that were never heard in Yugoslavia; we never broadcast there. But he said those themes managed, without the loss of a single human life, for Vaclav Havel not only to bring independence for the Czechoslovakian people, but then to set up a separate Slovakia and a separate Czech Republic after the referendum. As a playwright, Vaclav Havel revealed the absurdity he lived under under communist ideology.…
