COLUMN LEFT / ALEXANDER COCKBURN : A Blowhard Behind the Hero’s Mask : Vaclav Havel ended up bowing to laws that revived the totalitarian spirit.

At least the inglorious tenure of Vaclav Havel as president of Czechoslovakia, now terminated by his resignation from that office, has put a dent in the notion that if only artists and poets were in command, the world would be a better place.

Whatever the undoubted bravery and resolve Havel displayed as an opponent of the Communist regime, his conduct as president was far from appetizing. Since he is now trying to shape a comeback as president of a “Czechia” shorn of its Slovak half, it’s worth a look at the record.

Havel started out well enough, sidling into office with many a modest disclaimer to the effect that his sojourn would be brief, ornamental rather than substantive, symbolic of the new era now dawning.

It didn’t take long for power to rush to his head. Soon, in the words of a devoted admirer (the British writer Timothy Garton Ash), he “adopted a ramrod-straight posture and a rather gruesome imperial stare.” Like another artist, the poet Lamartine, who became French foreign minister in the revolution of 1848, Havel became vain and impatient of criticism.

In Prague it became as imprudent to be irreverent about President Havel as it once was to criticize the British monarchy. One Czech television producer lost his job merely for airing a news clip showing Havel being booed in Slovakia.

It’s scarcely surprising that Havel developed a swollen head. Artists yearn for praise and Havel got it by the bucketful, particularly in the West. He came to America, addressed a joint session of Congress and told the assembled legislators: “Being precedes consciousness.” The chamber erupted in a tumult of applause, duly echoed in the press, which hailed Havel as an emblem of all that is best in the European intellectual tradition.

Artists are supposed to speak truth to power. Havel preferred the language of flattery, telling Congress that America had put morality ahead of politics in its role as “defender of freedom.” Greeting Margaret Thatcher in Prague, he apologized to the prime minister for his nation’s tardiness in privatizing. Later he lauded the British people for their wisdom in reelecting the Conservatives and John Major.

This unstatesmanlike groveling was a useful reminder that by background and intellectual propensity, Havel is conservative. His family is haute-bourgeois. The Havels are currently trying to repossess a cinema-restaurant-bar complex in downtown Prague, their claim being that the communists seized this property when they came to power in 1948. Though no one would dare say so publicly, there is considerable uncertainty about when the Havels’ property was confiscated--in 1948 or in 1945, when Nazi collaborators were on the receiving end of such reprisals.

In October, 1991, the Czech and Slovak National Assembly passed a “lustration” law, the word deriving from the Latin for “sacrificial purification.” It was aimed at former communist officials down to district level, against former secret police agents and their collaborators, against those belonging to the peoples’ militias and other groups run by the party. Members of listed groups are barred for five years from holding high-level posts in government, police, the news media, academia, state-owned enterprises, the judiciary.

The International Labor Organization, a Geneva-based U.N. affiliate that has denounced the law, estimates that at least 1 million people could be affected. The law places the burden of proof on those seeking high position, requiring of them a document from the ministry of the interior declaring them to be “clean” of membership in the listed organizations. The law thus makes an assumption of collective guilt, its only “proofs” the files of the communist secret police, which like all such files are unreliable and tendentious accumulations of raw data, rumor and often bogus assertion.

Havel, the foe of totalitarianism, dutifully signed into law this wretched lustration act, the very quintessence of the totalitarian spirit. He compounded the shamefulness of his deed by piously declaring that he would immediately try to amend it.

Casting aside pledges that presidential eminence was but a mere interlude in the life of the spirit, Havel is already campaigning to become president, with enlarged powers, of “Czechia.” He’ll probably be blocked by other ambitious “Czechians,” such as Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus. But let us in the interim reflect that if artists are, as Shelley once said, the “unacknowledged legislators of mankind,” Havel’s career shows us that it’s mostly for the best that they remain in this unofficial capacity.

Lest we journalists think we might do better as legislators, the record is poor. For example, in an earlier phase of his career, Benito Mussolini was a highly regarded member of our trade.