But anyway, 461,343 people have died since sunday.

"Rulers and leaders were once personalities in their own right, with particular human faces, still in some sense personally responsible for their deeds, good and ill, whether they had been installed by dynastic tradition, by the will of the people, by a victorious battle, or by intrigue. But they have been replaced in modern times by the manager, the bureaucrat, the apparatchik-a professional ruler, manipulator, and expert in the techniques of management, manipulation, and obfuscation, filling a depersonalized intersection of functional relations, a cog in the machinery of state caught up in a predetermined role. This professional ruler is an "innocent" tool of an "innocent" anonymous power, legitimized by science, cybernetics, ideology, law, abstraction, and objectivitythat is, by everything except personal responsibility to human beings as persons and neighbors. A modern politician is transparent: behind hisjudicious mask and affected diction there is not a trace of a human being rooted in the order of the natural world by his loves, passions, interests, personal opinions, hatred, courage, or cruelty."

Vaclav Havel, "Politics and Conscience"

Quantitatively speaking, corporate media appear obsessed with Kim Jong Il’s death (Google aggregates 17,877 articles on this topic) compared to their treatment of former Czech Republic president Vaclav Havel’s death (2,895 related articles). This has nothing to do with the inflated historical or cultural significance of one, and everything to do with the political methodologies of both. By publicizing this ostensible “blow” to the DPRK, American media show the instability and human fragility of the whole “Communist” project itself (or, the bastardized articulations of it.)

Initiating a dialectic on the people’s own tears, without parsing the psycho-social dynamics of losing a communal “father,” bypasses an occasion for empathy: we present their “crying hysterically” as an instance of anthropological curiosity. We make them less human by making them bizarre. This is but one more way through which the imminent war on North Korea will be made more intelligible, more palatable, to “THE AVERAGE AMERICAN.”  

Commercial ink-slingers teleport us back to a McCarthyist collective mind—and now, with a relevant avatar of “communism” contained by death, hermetically-sealed off from the progression of global theatrics—politicians can grab his biography by the throat and use it as a pawn in their discourse. Last year: war. This week: food aid. Now, we can talk “reform.” There exists a possibility that Jong Un will prove a “reformist.” The country’s future is “uncertain.” Those in power say this, so we know that the opposite is true. The United States forever casts itself as the reactionary agent; the substrate upon which all other global powers act.

Full disclosure: I do not write from the perspective of an actual communist. At best, I am an anarchist; at worst, an absurdist. 

I'm just writing as one who's aware of how governments essentialize political ideologies via their (sometimes incidental) figureheads, in order to demonize a greater Idea. We can regard the language of communism as being one that U.N.-sanctioned, murderous despots are fluent in—it isn’t necessarily the validity of the contemporary coverage that matters, so much as the volume.

By contrast, Havel was a breathing demonstration that large-scale dissent and revolt were possible. He was an architect of Charter 77, first drafted in 1976, which criticized the then-Czechoslovakian communist government for its failure to codify human rights. He helped dismantle the Warsaw Pact. He wrote plays which furthered the Orwellian perspective and wrote essays (see above) which critiqued the sad, misplaced arrogance of bureaucracy. He was an inspired literary artist.

One might assume that the United States would be lauding Havel’s achievements against communism—they seem an obvious complement to our own engrained Red Fear. But the truer—and more primal—fear of those who run our media outlets and our political circuses is that dissent can be realized as means to a populace’s desired ends. Their fear relates to the revolutionary spirit itself, irrespective of what that revolution attempts to overthrow.