History’s lessons - Two very different leaders die

ANYONE with an interest in European history will be appalled and fascinated by 1930s Germany when Hitler consolidated his power and prepared to launch World War II.

Today most of us are usually baffled by the idea that someone so palpably insane, so obviously evil, could assume power in a civilised and cultured society. It is almost beyond comprehension that the society that gave the world Bach and Beethoven wept tears of joy when Hitler and his satanic Nazis took absolute power.

It is difficult to watch, even six decades later, the Nazi propaganda films with weeping, hysterical crowds cheering Hitler’s ravings without seeing, in the mind’s eye, the atrocities committed by Germany and its allies.

The Nazis’ ascent may be a mystery but so too is the answer to the obvious question . . . what could have been done to stop them? None of us know how we might behave if we were in a society where a Hitler, a Franco, a Stalin or a Mao Tse-Tung seized power dismissing all norms of a civilised, democratic society.

That question has a renewed relevance today for the people of North Korea after the death of dictator for life Kim Jong Il. It is very difficult to take any consolation from the life of Hitler, but at least his terror ended with his death and Europe was spared a dynasty of Hitlerian tyrants, yet that is what faces North Korea.

That country’s heir apparent Kim Jong Un follows in his grandfather’s and his father’s footsteps and, though he may not wield absolute power, he is a frightening enigma. His immaturity does not augur well for a country where paranoia and famine, an autocratic military, denial of the most basic human rights, the absence of the rule of law as we know it, and hardships unknown in a technologically advanced society, are the order of the day.

Kim Jong Un’s father presided over a famine that could have been averted if international help was not rejected. The country’s isolationism makes it impossible to know how many died, but estimates are never less than a million and often as high as two million. Kim Jong Un may be a figurehead with nuclear capabilities, but the fact that power could be passed on so seamlessly by Stalinist puppet-masters must be a cause for concern.

Just as Kim Jong Il’s death highlights the worst of humanity, another national leader’s death reassures us about what can be achieved through courage, integrity and tungsten-hard determination.

Václav Havel, the defiant writer who led the Czechoslovakian velvet revolution against the Soviet Union, was one of the fathers of east European democracy and pivotal in the fall of the Berlin wall. He died, aged 75, within hours of the Asian tyrant.

Kim Jong Il’s life might be defined by the absence of morality, but Havel’s was the epitome of living morally to confront oppression and injustice. One sought to control people, their thoughts and ambitions. The other tried to liberate them and to help them realise all they could dream of.

As Europe finds itself at another crossroads, it might be wise to reflect on what making the wrong choices could lead to. As ever, nothing points to the future better than the past.