This weekend, three major figures from world affairs left us.

• Christopher Hitchens was an erudite and outspoken essayist/commentator on world affairs, peace/war, justice, and religion and all he felt was wrong with it (which was just about everything). But, like several of his ’60s radical-intellectual forebearers, he became seduced by the siren song of right-wing righteousness; specifically, the Bushies’ meme that there was one big “Islamofascist” conspiracy to overthrow Western society, and that the war in Iraq was a valiant counter-crusade rather than an imperial power-grab. But then, his chain-smoking and chain-drinking already proved there were limits to his wisdom.
• Vaclav Havel was one radical-intellectual who never changed his ways, even when it was might inconvenient not to do so. The herein-linked BBC obit lauds him as having brought “free markets” to what was still Czechoslovakia, following the collapse of the Soviet empire. But that wasn’t even among Havel’s chief priorities. He was foremost a thinker and writer. He began by writing satirical plays, which were promptly banned once Soviet forces crushed the “Prague Spring” of 1968. Arrested several times, he never gave up striving for freedom, democracy, and independent culture. When the Slovaks split off into their own nation, Havel oversaw an amicable civic divorce. May we all remember his life’s motto: “Truth and love will prevail over lies and hatred.”
• Kim Jong-Il, with his tinhorn self aggrandizement and his obsession for military ultra-precision in all public spectacles, was regularly depicted as a living joke—at least among those who didn’t have to live under North Korea’s abject poverty and repression. The best hope for the failed state he left behind is that his heirs sell it to the south, in exchange for a cushy Kim family compound in some equatorial land.