Vaclav Havel's Fairy Tale - NYTimes.com Against the backdrop of today's petty politics, the stories of great political leaders like Mohandas K. Gandhi or Nelson Mandela look like fairy tales. Let us recount the adventures of another of these giants, Vaclav Havel, the Czech dissident and politician, on the second anniversary of his death. The story does have its fairy-tale elements. Once upon a time, there was a great and ancient city with a great and ancient castle, and in that castle there lived a great philosopher-king. This ruler succeeded where philosophers since Plato had failed - that is, in building a state. His country's affluence matched that of the industrious nations to the West, the only such country among the otherwise impoverished Slavic lands. This land, created in 1918, was Czechoslovakia, the city was Prague and its philosopher-king was named Tomas Masaryk. His country was among the very few not to fall under the spell of authoritarianism in the 1930s. His grateful people called him Daddy. Many years later, this wonderful land would become the subject of yet another fairy tale. After defeating the dark forces of Communism, a humble sage, Vaclav Havel, found himself its leader, ensconced in Hradcany Castle, in 1990. He described his trajectory from criminal to four-term president in his memoirs, comparing it to the stories of Honza, a character common in many Czech fairy tales: "Little Honza - although everyone tells him it's hopeless - beats his head against the wall for so long that the wall eventually collapses and he becomes king and rules and rules and rules for 13 long years." Though usually very modest, Havel understood what his example meant for others: "Why shouldn't such a story with such a happy ending be exalted? Might it not be a source of hope for others who have not yet experienced the fall of their wall? Those watching today's news will immediately think of the brave Ukrainians in Kiev's Euromaidan, or of Russian political activists. The biographies of dissidents offer invaluable solace to current and future nonconformists, who, without much hope of success, follow the path outlined by their convictions. It is different with dissidents" manifestoes, which, once the fight is over, quickly reach their expiration date and are buried in the historical archive. Havel remains one of the very few exceptions. As Adam Michnik, the Polish anti-Communist activist, recently admitted, "I think that for my dissident friends - and for me, too - the dissident philosophy of life was enough. It was not enough for Havel. Former dissidents entered the new era with the naïveté of children on their first trip to the toy store; out of everything that was Western, the invisible hand of the market proved most alluring. But Havel was different, because he did not simply look at Communism or capitalism from the perspective of the other. He considered both systems to be two versions of the same crisis of civilization. In what is perhaps the most important manifesto of anti-Communist dissent, his 1978 "Power of the Powerless," Havel expresses this very clearly. Modern democratic societies offered "no fundamental opposition to the automatism of technological civilization and the industrial-consumer society, for they, too, are being dragged helplessly along by it." These are not the views of a naïve idealist who came to terms with "reality" as soon as he assumed the presidency, something confirmed by Havel's 2006 autobiography, "Briefly, Please." He chose the title as a sign of opposition to the stupidity of the commercialized media, which convert everything into mindless platitudes for rapid transmission. The book's American publisher inadvertently proved his point by changing its title to something more marketable and banal, while also confirming the fairy-tale nature of his story: "To the Castle and Back."