Re:Why Kundera Never Went Home
by ycombinete on Thursday August 03, 2023 @07:23AM
(#36984243)
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.
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.