Describing the intelectual elites that overthrew soviet puppet totalitarian government as a bunch of CIA agents that acted out of pure envy of Kundera's genius who just misstepped a bit when he was ok with soviet invasion haven't gave you a hint? Really?

No it didn’t. In fact I did not get the idea that Kundera was ok with the soviet invasion at all.

And, well, if the idea of CIA agents propping up pro-capitalism opposition figures is “pro-Russian”, then every Hollywood spy movie is pro-Russian. I have no idea how common “CIA meddles, all the way to the top” really is, or was, but it’s a common narrative across western culture so it didn’t strike me as super weird.

I’ll admit that the idea that Havel did little by himself to become the President, that it was all due to support by the CIA people, which wasn’t said so literally but certainly suggested, felt rather unrealistic.

> And, well, if the idea of CIA agents propping up pro-capitalism opposition figures is “pro-Russian”, then every Hollywood spy movie is pro-Russian.

And on top it also ignores stuff like Operation Gladio going on for decades in Europe during the Cold War.

>I have no idea how common “CIA meddles, all the way to the top” really is, or was

Very. E.g.:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Italy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

Is your argument based on Hollywood action movies and popular stereotypes based on them? Come on, pal. The only other guys who have always been obsessed with CIA agents in context of central and eastern Europe are Russian propagandists. And Petr Drulák is not a scriptwriter.

Did not say this article in particular, but its author. Other commenters posted links. But basically he is pushing the Russian whataboutist narrative.

Ah yeah I misunderstood, thanks. That said, I really couldn't find much of the Russian whataboutist narrative in the article.

It’s clear the author doesn’t love everything about western capitalism, but that, I think, is a widely held opinion across Europe. It does not imply, to me, a suggestion that Russian style kleptocratic capitalism is a better form by any means so if the author makes that argument elsewhere, I didn’t see it here.

I guess I’m trying to say that I enjoyed the article, and learning that I don’t share the author’s politics hasn’t changed that.

Fair enough.

Of course, that is a completely legit view that I also partly hold. However, this author is known for his looking up to a regime that is way worse (or 'not better form' as you say).

Yeah fair, and I appreciate the context.

If you have the political/historical context for Czechia, and the author it's a bit more clear. Drulák has a legitimate conflict of interest in his detailing of the history and the characters. It leaks out in his characterizations, editorialisations, and damning with faint praise. He's pitting two national figures against each other, and making each a metaphor for a different ideology. One of which is his own.

Little things describing Havel in this way, "Several intellectuals with establishment bona fides, including Kundera, tried to help Havel on his difficult path. But given his enormous ambitions and thirst for recognition, Havel must have felt a degree of envy toward them."

Havel is a Mandela-like figure in Czechia. He represents the new order after the fall of a totalitarian regime, and the embracing of various ideologically liberal/capitalist that came with it. Drulák is known to have opposed Havel's politics in this regard, specifically when he was a politician himself.

In this context ad hominems against Havel by Drulák serve to shore up his own agenda. He might even be telling mostly the truth, but his reasons for doing so, and the way he frames things, are distasteful at best.

While he skirts around saying anything concrete in the article. There's a little 1v1 where you get Kundera the communist reformer vs Havel the western apologist. The crux of it is here:

Their exchange reflected the fault line between democratic-socialist and liberal intellectuals: Kundera argued for a new model of society that would be free and fair, avoiding the vices of both Western capitalism and Eastern European authoritarianism; Havel defended Western capitalism as the only desirable model, needing fine tuning, but no major revision. These differences didn’t matter to the neo-Stalinist leaders who regained control after the 1968 revolt; the regime condemned both authors as anti-socialist and banned their work.

While that last sentence seems to imply that it was all meaningless since the neo-Stalinist took over after the Prague Spring. The actual implication is that Havel's Western apologism won over when he was president in the 90s. In that sense it's a type of rehetorical whataboutism. "what could have been if the reformers (represented by Kundera here) had won the ideological battle?".

It's more in the vein of left vs right; but Drulák's support for petitions apportioning blame to Ukraine for the current conflict, and other behaviour linked to in the comments close the circle.

In the modern dialectic-materialist-addled mindset of agitprop-spoonfed media consumers, "anti-American == pro-Russian", but a lot of the world isn't stuck in that dialectic and is capable of seeing another path: multi-polarity.