The work of Tomas Transtromer is not always easy, but the effort is worth it. Congratulations to Sweden’s treasure for winning this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature.
Fang Li-Zhi, a Chinese dissident, reminds us that China’s growing economy means little for its commitment — actually, lack of commitment — to democracy and human rights. Using the occasion of Liu Xiaobo’s winning of the Nobel Peace Prize, Li-Zhi commends the Nobel committee for
challeng(ing) the West to re-examine a dangerous notion that has become prevalent since the 1989 Tiananmen massacre: that economic development will inevitably lead to democracy in China.
Increasingly, throughout the late 1990s and into the new century, this argument gained sway. Some no doubt believed it; others perhaps found it convenient for their business interests. Many trusted the top Chinese policymakers who sought to persuade the outside world that if they continued pouring in their investments without an embarrassing “linkage” to human rights principles, all would get better at China’s own pace.
More than 20 years have passed since Tiananmen. China has officially become the world’s second-largest economy. Yet the hardly radical Liu Xiaobo and thousands of others rot in jail for merely demanding basic rights enshrined by the U.N. and taken for granted by all Western investors in their own countries. Apparently, human rights have not “inevitably” improved despite a soaring economy.
This seemed obvious to those of us critical of mindless globalization (a globalization that eschewed an imposition of international rules). Maybe Xiaobo’s peace prize will wake everyone else up to the idea.
Congratulations to the great Mario Vargas Llosa, this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Barack Obama is more like George W. Bush than any of his supporters has been willing to admit. The 44th president, like his predecessor, has shown a willingness to break disagreements down into simple, binary equations, especially when it comes to his defense of empire.
“Evil does exist in the world,” he said during his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday, echoing his predecessor, radically simplifying the world around us. Evil, he says, justifies our use of extreme force — which is what war is — rather than a smaller-scale attempt to bring the perpetrators of 9/11 to justice. The president has opted to reinvigorate the 9/11 meme to justify a wider-scale effort to remake the so-called Afpak border area, even if this war of his (and it is now his war) has nothing to do with 9/11.
The troubling aspect of this — beyond the Afghan escalation — is that he used his Nobel acceptance to hawk his own hawkishness, to defend his own indefensible decision to ratchet up the war. Obama, of course, is not a pacifist and has never claimed to be one. He has, from the beginning, viewed Afghanistan as a war of necessity in the very same way that Bush viewed Iraq.
And like Bush, who purposely conflated Saddam Hussein with Hitler, Obama has done the same with Al Qaeda.
A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.
Al Qaeda is not Hitler and terrorism is not the same as Nazism. Terrorism is a tool — like a gun or a tank — generally used by the relatively powerless to level the playing field against more powerful nations. It’s use is a symptom that our system is sick, that we have allowed some level of injustice to fester, to create an atmosphere in which violent reaction is viewed as necessary.There is no real difference between Timothy McVeigh and a Middle Eastern suicide bomber, no difference between the America militia movement and Al Qaeda. The extremisms they spout might come from different places, but the violence they unleash ultimately is the same, based on the same mix of grievance and moral certitude.
The president, however, for whatever reason, chooses to ignore this, to conflate the big ideological movements with a small regenerating band of extremists who pose a physical threat to individual security but in no way pose an existential threat to the United States.
He further argued during his speech that “it was not simply international institutions — not just treaties and declarations — that brought stability to a post-World War II world,” as if a world that witnessed dozens of political assassinations and violent uprisings, wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Algeria, the Middle East, a massive arms race and a calamitous international chess game between heavily armed nuclear powers can be called stable.
Obama is just a year older than I am, so I have to imagine he remembers crouching beneath his desk during air raid drills and hearing newscasters reporting on body counts and violence in American streets.
Let’s be clear: There was much to like in his speech — such as his acknowledgement that economic and social justice can prevent the slide into despair that creates the conditions in which violent extremism flourishes and his commitment to working within an international framework of established rules and in cooperation with other nations. But, in the end, his insistence that “the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace” left me wondering just how much has changed during the last 11 months.
The folks at the Nobel Prize committee really outdid themselves this year. Not only did they award a literature prize to what appears to be a minor Eastern European writer, they’ve given the Peace prize to President Barack Obama on the grounds that he has remade the international community.
President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” a stunning honor that came less than nine months after he made United States history by becoming the country’s first African-American president.
The award, announced in Oslo by the Nobel Committee while much of official
Washington — including the president — was still asleep, cited in particular the
president’s efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons.“He has created a new international climate,” the committee said.
He has? Look, I think he is a drastic improvement over the arrogant fool who sat in the Oval Office for the last eight years, but I can’t help but wonder whether the Nobel committee has allowed the previous administration’s failures to distort its view of the current president.
The fact remains that he has been office a little less than nine months and has accomplished little on the world stage. He may be committed to nuclear abolition, but so far all we have to show for that is some harsh words for Iran, some general goals and some talking.
On a separate but related point, I find it difficult to accept the awarding of a peace prize to a president who is still considering a troop buildup in Afghanistan.
Hank Kalet 