AWARDING A PRIZE FOR ABSURDITY
SO WHAT’S MORE ABSURD? THE PEACE PRIZE FOR THE COMMANDERIN-CHIEF OR THE LITERATURE PRIZE FOR THE WRITER WHO DEFENDS CENSORSHIP?’
I always thought the Nobel Prize hit peak absurdity on Oct. 9, 2009, when U.S. President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples.” On the same day, Reuters reported that the commander-in-chief of the planet’s most powerful army was convening a war counsel to weigh whether to send thousands more troops to Afghanistan, one of the world’s poorest nations.
Two months later, Obama went to Oslo to accept the prize and charmed the audience with a speech composed mostly for the American domestic audience, justifying war and defending the “indispensable” North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Obama’s speech was also full of such gems as “I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed” and “America cannot insist that others follow the rules of the road if we refuse to follow them ourselves.”
Three years later, the prison in Guantanamo Bay is still open and the Nobel Peace Prize winner is dispatching armed drones — killer flying robots, in case “armed drones” sounds too bureaucratic — to Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, where people are shot at from the sky because, as the Washington Post put it, “targeted killing is now so routine that the Obama administration has spent much of the past year codifying and streamlining the processes that sustain it.”
Is that peak absurdity? The “war is peace” prize?
While one could hand the five-person Norwegian Nobel Committee responsible for the Nobel Peace Prize their due, the 18-member Swedish Academy responsible for the Nobel Prize in literature made a good effort to surpass their colleagues this year by handing the 2012 prize to Chinese writer Mo Yan, who this week spoke out in favour of censorship.
When Guan Moye, whose pen name, Mo Yan, translates to “don’t speak,” was announced as the winner in October, artist Ai Weiwei told the Independent newspaper that “giving the award to a writer like this is an insult to humanity and to literature.”
He later added that Mo Yan “has been very clearly pursuing the party’s line, and in several cases, he has shown no respect for the independence of intellectuals.”
The 2009 Nobel literature winner, Herta Muller, a German-Romanian novelist and poet who spent her adult years under the Ceausescu regime in Romania and then in exile in Berlin, told the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter that Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize was a “catastrophe” and “a slap in the face for all those working for democracy and human rights.”
She added that Mo “celebrates censorship.“
Does Mo Yan celebrate censorship? Apparently so. Last Thursday, at a news conference in Stockholm, Mo told journalists that censorship was as necessary as airport security.
“When I was taking my flight, going through the customs ... they also wanted to check me, even taking off my belt and shoes,” he said. “But I think these checks are necessary.”
“Without censorship, then any person could on television or online vilify others,” he added. “This should not be allowed in any country. As long as it is not contrary to the true facts, it should not be censored. Any disinformation, vilification, rumours or insults should be censored.”
What about the Chinese government’s censorship of literary critic Liu Xiaobo, the jailed 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner? Liu was one of the authors responsible for Charter 08, a democracy and human rights manifesto initially signed by over 350 Chinese intellectuals and human rights activists.
Liu was arrested two days before Charter O8 was released, and was later charged with “inciting subversion of state power” and sentenced to 11 years imprisonment while his wife was placed under house arrest. Shortly after winning the Nobel literature prize, Mo Yan told reporters, “I hope (Liu) can achieve his freedom as soon as possible,” but since then, he has declined to make further statements, choosing instead a statement such as “any disinformation, vilification, rumours or insults should be censored” when asked about his compatriot.
So what’s more absurd? The Peace Prize for the commander-in-chief or the literature prize for the writer who defends censorship? Maybe next year, the chemistry prize will go to an alchemist to break the tie.