'Havel’s father was a wealthy real estate tycoon, who developed a number of Prague properties.

'One was the Lucerna Palace, “a pleasure palace…of arcades, theatres, cinemas, night-clubs, restaurants, and ballrooms,” according to Frommer’s. It became “a popular spot for the city’s nouveau riche to congregate,” including a young Havel, who, raised in the lap of luxury by a governess and chauffeured around town, “spent his earliest years on the Lucerna’s polished marble floors.”

Then, tragedy struck – at least, from Havel’s point of view. The Reds expropriated Lucerna and the family’s other holdings, and put them to use for the common good, rather than for the purpose of providing the young Havel with more servants.

'Four decades later, Havel, as president –celebrated throughout the West as a champion of intellectual freedom — presided over a mass return of nationalized property, including Lucerna and his family’s other holdings. As a business investment, Havel’s anti-communism proved to be quite profitable.'

Brutal totalitarian Communist regimes killed over one hundred million of their own citizens in the 20th Century.

The playwright/president Vaclav Havel is to be saluted and remembered for bringing truth and clarity about these sordid facts to the world. While others sat in complacency and blind obedience, he acted to change the world. We are all in his debt.

Statism Kills! I would like to call your attention to a virtually unknown little book, The Lost Literature of Socialism, by George Watson, Fellow in English at St. John's College, Cambridge and editor of the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature.

As the publishers explain on the back of this book: "In this hard-hitting and controversial new book, the author examines the foundation texts of socialism to find out what they really say… and the result is blasphemy against its canon of saints. This study, the first review of socialist literature since 1945, reveals how closely socialism was linked to conservative, racist, and genocidal ideas. As a literary critic the author's concern is to pay a due respect to the works of the founding fathers of socialism, to attend to what they say rather than to what their modern disciples wish they had said. The book forces the reader to abandon long-standing assumptions in political thought, enabling a genuine debate to be revived."

In this brilliant work examining the foundation texts of socialism, Watson provides a powerful indictment of their reactionary, racist and genocidal ideas. There is a direct line from Marx and Engels to Hitler and the Holocaust; to Lenin and Stalin and the liquidation of the Kulaks and the extermination of the Ukrainians; to Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald and Auschwitz, and to Kolyma, Vorkuta and Karaganda.

Freeman: You put these comments inverted commas: where did you extract them?

"The Reds expropriated Lucerna and the family’s other holdings, and put them to use for the common good."

Really? Did they? Whose common good? I seem to remember Havel was elected in a free poll, which no Communist govt in history ever was.

And, as someone above says, what's wrong with being wealthy? I am. Fairly.

Nothing wrong with being wealthy.
When the Revoltion comes, we'll all have servants.
The trouble with eulogies is that they always go over the top. Same with Havel. Its just that he happenened to be in the right place at the right time.
Czechoslovakia should never have broken up, Havels 2nd term as President was not as good as his first. The trouble is heros of the Republic never know when to give up; the outstay their welcome.
But its good to have a Scholar Statesman from time to time instead of the career politicuan straight from school we seem to be getting these days.

We know it's pretty trite but it seems to be a fact of life:
Havel's mum thought he had married beneath him.
Admittedly Havel's mater came from the upper strata of Austro-Hungarian society -an aristocrat - the ones all those waltzes were composed for - but she did marry a property-developer. A wealthy one for all that, but not a blue-blood.
Some Slovakian expat colleagues we worked with did not have a good word to say about Havel when he became president. According to them he turned his presidential guard into a Ruritanian laughing-stock and imported Western Rock Gods instead of re-invigorating the music of Stauss, father and son. And those 'gypsy' violins? Hungarian?
One even had a photo of a bumptious teen Havel sporting a bow tie. This portrait appears to have surfaced in Wikipedia.
Unless one is Mickey Rooney - this was probably early fifties - one should not wear this type of accessory. Makes it easy for the secret police.
By the by, Havel's first wife did well by him. One story which appears to have legs - Havel was prosecuted for anti-communist behaviour and was given some sort of community punishment.
Havel apparently ended up in a furnace-room with several other career furnace-stokers. It's claimed that these other workers shovelled away, allowing the intellectual dissident to concentrate on his writing. There's gratitude for you.

The Hostess with the Mostest

Isn't Freeman an odd name for someone who promotes totalitarianism?