Not so long ago, in our part of Europe we lived in a political system that permitted no alternatives and therefore also no parliamentary opposition. We learned the bitter lesson that with no opposition, there is no freedom.
~ Vaclav Klaus, address before the European Parliament, Feb. 19
Although my memory of Czech leader Vaclav Klaus (president since 2003, re-elected 2008) goes back to his days as prime minister (1992-1997), and to the time of Czechoslovakia’s first president, the famous playwright and philosopher Vaclav Havel (1989-1992), I really didn’t start actively following the career of this free-market iconoclast until radio host Michael Savage would have him on his show from time to time. This made me think to myself – as much as Savage hates Marxism, liberalism and European-style socialism, for him to have President Klaus on his program for an extended interview meant that Klaus had to be a man of stalwart principles and transcendent intellect. Indeed he is.
On Jan. 1, Klaus was appointed president of the European Union. Although this position is largely ceremonial, the EU is a very important economic cooperative represented by 27 nations and over 470 million people. Since President Klaus has a well-known aversion to European-style socialism and statist controls over the free market, he is set on a collision course with the leaders of the socialist welfare states of Europe now under his authority.
Journalist Dan Bilefsky in a recent article on President Klaus wrote:
An economist by training and a free marketeer by ideology, Klaus has criticized the course set by the union’s departing leader, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France. The ambitious Sarkozy has used France’s European Union presidency to push an agenda that includes broader and more coordinated regulation by the largest economies to tame the worst of the market’s excesses.
Last Thursday in Brussels, at a major address before the European Parliament, Klaus told the assembly, “The European Union has turned into an undemocratic and elitist project comparable to the Communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe that forbade alternative thinking.” Wow! Why don’t we hear that kind of passion and clarity of thought here in America? If Klaus were an American politician, he would definitely be considered a Ronald Reagan conservative. As a matter of fact, Klaus’ European mentor is Lady Margaret Thatcher, the former prime minister of Great Britain, a great conservative and unfailing ally with President Reagan in their battles against the tyranny of Marxism and Soviet communism, which eventually lead to the end of the 40-year Cold War as well as the dissolution of the Soviet empire in 1989-90. (Aides even admit that Klaus has a photo of the former British prime minister in his office near his desk.)
President Vaclav Klaus is a man after my own heart and makes me and other conservatives here in America yearn for a politician to rise up and become a real statesman in the tradition of Burke, Churchill, Thatcher and Reagan. For example, although he’s president of the EU, a conspicuous socialist economic entity, Klaus refuses to sell out his principles and is a tireless advocate of laissez faire free-market capitalism in the tradition of his intellectual mentors, the Austrian-British economist Friedrich Hayek and the American economist and public philosopher Milton Friedman, whose free-market capitalist ideas Reagan used to build 20 years of sustained economic growth here in America.
The “Reagan Revolution” was seen to cause a political realignment both within and beyond the U.S. in furtherance of his political philosophy of American conservatism, lower taxes, smaller government and free markets. However, Klaus, unlike Reagan, has no Thatcher by his side and is literally waging a one-man crusade to continue the free-market economic and political reforms Reagan and Thatcher championed in the 1980s and 1990s.
Klaus once said, “If you lived under communism [and socialism], then you are very sensitive to forces that try to control or limit human liberty.” This is a sober warning to all of the Quislings, the Neville Chamberlains and Vichy governments amongst the leaders in Europe (and America) who foolishly think that you can fight a 40 year Cold War with one of the most brutal and merciless regimes like the Soviet Union only to repackage and champion their failed economic and political theories years later as something “new.”
There is nothing new about liberalism, egalitarianism, Marxism, communism or European-style socialism. All of those philosophies and economic theories were failures then and are failures now. Sir Winston Churchill understood the perils of socialism and once remarked about this diabolical political theory: “Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy; its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.” Unfortunately Churchill’s successors, like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, don’t seem to understand or appreciate their own recent economic and political history regarding the dangers of embracing Marxism and socialism.
Other European leaders also are not guiltless – Sarkozy of France, Merkel of Germany, Berlusconi of Italy, Balkenende of Holland, Reinfeldt of Sweden, Putin of Russia and every other country in Europe have seemingly failed to take heed to Churchill’s prescient words. These leaders are without excuse, for today we have history as the final judge of our deeds and she has spoken with clarity: Every society that’s tried socialism or state control of all aspects of government, business, education, private property, private industry and the means of production has lead to utter political, intellectual and economic catastrophe. The equitable “redistribution” of resources sought by these naïve utopians and petit bureaucrat has only led, in the words of Churchill, to “the equal sharing of misery.”
Czech President Vaclav Klaus is the only man I see in Europe today that has learned from recent history not to model his country after European-style Marxism. I admire him for his courageous stand against all of the Quislings and Neville Chamberlains he is forced to debate in the marketplace of ideas. His reward? Klaus’ numerous critics sputter and fret in mocking cacophony, calling him a “cynical populist,” a “hardheaded pragmatist,” a “rejected genius,” “a provocateur.” He is none of these epithets.
In my opinion, Klaus is a visionary leader and a statesman amongst small-minded little European socialists who have no memory of totalitarian leaders like Napoleon, Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco, Mao, Hirohito and Hitler. Therefore, in the words of the philosopher Santayana, these European leaders (and their citizens) will be condemned to repeat history and suffer yet again under these tyrannical political systems.
Thank God President Klaus refuses to compromise his established and moral principles; he refuses to be numbered with the legions of FDRs, LBJs, Jimmy Carters, Barack Obamas and those whom Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin called the ground troops of the socialist and communist revolution … “useful idiots.”
Godspeed, President Vaclav Klaus!
