OSLO — Imprisoned in China and with close family members forbidden to leave the country, the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, an empty chair representing his absence at the prize ceremony here.
For the first time in 75 years, no representative of the winner was allowed to make the trip to receive the peace medal, a diploma and the $1.5 million check that comes with it.
You would think the prior Nobel Peace Prize winner would make a moral statement by attending the ceremony in person in a show of solidarity.
Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo will be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. But instead of traveling to Oslo to receive the award Liu will spend the day in jail, where he is serving eleven years on charges of “inciting subversion of state power” for his part in the writing of Charter ’08, a document that called for greater freedom of expression, human rights and free elections in China.
. Beijing boasted Tuesday that most countries would stay away from attending the ceremony. In fact, only the 65 countries with embassies in Norway were invited, and 44 of those had accepted, according to the Nobel Prize Committee.
In the natural sciences, the Nobel Prize committees have been awarded to people who have done meaningful work that changed the study of science; however, in literature and the “peace” categories, they have shown themselves totally irrelevant.
As Mr. Vargas Llosa wrote in his 2001 essay about literature, “Nothing better protects a human being against the stupidity of prejudice, racism, religious or political sectarianism, and exclusivist nationalism than this truth that invariably appears in great literature: that men and women of all nations and places are essentially equal.”
This year’s citation for Vargas Llosa says that he got the prize for “his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.” This points to a focus on individual rights which is central both to simple humanitarianism and also — though European Leftists would disagree — market-led neoliberalism.
In making this choice, for this reason, the Academy seems to have done just what is expected of it, which is not to go by rumours and prejudices, but to look at the work itself. And as an example of why Vargas Llosa is fascinating, there is not just all his considerable body of work over the years, but also his most recent book, published this year, which has not been translated from Spanish, but whose subject matter signals its exceptional interest.
The selection of Liu Xiabo for Peace Prize is even more striking: China is furious, making this onerous statement,
In recent years, relations between China and Norway have maintained favorable development, which is in the basic interests of the two countries and their people. The Nobel committee’s award to Liu Xiaobo is completely contrary to the objective of the Nobel Peace Prize, and will bring harm to the China-Norway relationship.
Text-messaging on mobile phones is not immune from censors, either. A Shanghai-based netizen, @littley, tweeted his unfortunate experience: “My SIM card just got de-activated, turning my iPhone to an iPod touch after I texted my dad about Liu Xiaobo winning the Nobel Peace Prize.”
From an email by the Independent Institute, where Alvaro Vargas Llosa is senior fellow,
Alvaro Vargas Llosa, Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Prosperity, who has authored such notable works as Liberty for Latin America, which obtained the Sir Anthony Fisher International Memorial Award for its contribution to the cause of freedom in 2006, expressed the following sentiments:
The Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to my father, Mario VargasLLosa, is great news for those of us who value freedom. His workexplores theoppressive structures of power and the plight of the individual whorebels against them, [and} their impact hasgiven some comfort, for decades, to those who struggle againstauthoritarian regimes. Among the moving messages he and the familyhave received since the announcement are hundreds of letters of hopefrom Cubans and Venezuelans who see in him a symbol of what they standfor. The cause of liberty in the Western Hemisphere has good reason torejoice.
The Independent Institute and its staff would like to join Alvaro in his praise, and extend their sincere appreciation to Mario for his tremendous contributions to the advancement of freedom in Latin America and across the world.
Liu Xiaobo, an impassioned literary critic, political essayist and democracy advocate repeatedly jailed by the Chinese government for his activism, has won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of “his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China.”
Mr. Liu, 54, perhaps China’s best known dissident, is serving an 11-year term on subversion charges, in a cell 300 miles from Beijing.
He is one of three people to have received the prize while incarcerated by their own governments, after the Burmese opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, in 1991, and the German pacifist, Carl von Ossietzky, in 1935.
By awarding the prize to Mr. Liu, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has provided an unmistakable rebuke to Beijing’s authoritarian leaders at a time of growing intolerance for domestic dissent and a spreading unease internationally over the muscular diplomacy that has accompanied China’s economic rise.
I applaud the Peace Committee’s decision; let’s hope they continue on this track.
The Nobel Literature Committee has awarded the Prize to the best living Spanish-language writer, and one of the best writers in the history of literature: Mario Vargas Llosa Wins Nobel Literature Prize
Vargas Llosa is not only a white male, he’s also a free-market libertarian who believes in democracy. His books have been bestsellers for decades.
He’s currently teaching at Princeton, and will be giving a public lecture at Princeton U next Monday – I expect it’ll be mobbed.
Vargas Llosa is one of those rare literary creatures who has not only helped to define the aesthetic stylistic innovation of his period but directly influence its events.
The author of over 30 books – and very nearly the president of Peru – Vargas Llosa is one of the preeminent public intellectuals of the post-war era and one of the great libertarian heroes of the age at least since his highly public criticism of the Castro regime starting in the early 1970s. An outspoken critic of authoritarian regimes on the right and the left, who else but Vargas Llosa would have called for the legalization of drugs while addressing the American Enterprise Institute’s annual dinner a few years back? He has been a consistent voice against repression wherever he finds it and an eloquent champion of freedom in all its manifestations. His insistence that all aspects of liberty – political, economic, and cultural – are inextricably linked is as powerful as it is rare among writers of his stature.
American Richard Heck and Japanese researchers Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki won the 2010 Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for developing a chemical method that has allowed scientists to make medicines and better electronics.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the award honors their development of palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic systems. The academy called that one of the most sophisticated tools available to chemists today, and one that is used by researchers world-wide and in commercial production of pharmaceuticals and molecules used to make electronics.
A friend tells me that the types of reactions they initially described are taught in
organic/organometallic chemistry as coupling reactions, and are named
reactions (Heck coupling, Negishi and Suzuki reaction).
Congratulations to the winners, and to the Nobel Prize committee for awarding it to people who actually did something.
a “Save the Children” benefit concert, where organizers replaced him with an Obama cardboard cutout. Obama also won’t be around for Friday’s Nobel Concert.
According to a poll published by the daily tabloid VG, 44% of Norwegians believe it was rude of Obama to cancel his scheduled lunch with King Harald, with only 34% saying they believe it was acceptable.
“Of all the things he is cancelling, I think the worst is cancelling the lunch with the king,” said Siv Jensen, the leader of the largest party in opposition, the populist Progress party. “This is a central part of our government system. He should respect the monarchy,” she told VG.
I like that: a progressive populist defending the monarch.
Anyhoo, like the fox with healthy self-esteem who said “Jumping after those grapes was a great workout even when I couldn’t reach any,”
The Norwegian Nobel committee, which awards the peace prize, dismissed the criticism. “We always knew that there were too many events in the programme. Obama has to govern the US and we were told early on that he could not commit to all of them,” said Geir Lundestad, secretary of the committee.
Rest assured the committee members know that Obama respects them in the morning.
The question they should be asking is not will he, but how; according to the article, Obama
Declined an invitation to lunch with King Harald V
Will not attend the Peace Center exhibit in his honor, even when Prize winners traditionally open the exhibitions about their work that accompany the Nobel festivities.
won’t attend concert in his honor in Oslo on Friday
That’s right, Obama’s not showing up to lunch with the king, to inaugurate an exhibit, a concert, all events about himself. Must be modesty that prevents him?
That may have something to do with Obama’s uncharacteristic shunning of the press. Whereas other prize winners have viewed the standard Nobel Peace Prize CNN interview as an opportunity to address the world for a full hour, Obama seems unwilling to answer any questions at all. There will be no press conference, just a statement from the president.
“But I also know that this prize reflects the kind of world that those men and women, and all Americans, want to build — a world that gives life to the promise of our founding documents. And I know that throughout history, the Nobel Peace Prize has not just been used to honor specific achievement; it’s also been used as a means to give momentum to a set of causes. And that is why I will accept this award as a call to action — a call for all nations to confront the common challenges of the 21st century.”
This was the most important and shrewdest thing he said, because it is where he acknowledges an uncomfortable fact that everyone knows to be true. Of course the award can’t be in recognition of projects he has already achieved and completed, because there aren’t that many of them. In these third and fourth paragraphs, Obama acknowledges that point — but adds the news-analyst’s argument that often the Nobel committee awards these prizes as encouragements, signals, or what it hopes will be momentum-changers. If other people are going to say that, Obama does well to signal his understanding of the point himself. And from there he’s off to the rest of the (fairly brief) statement, enumerating the sorts of common challenges he has in mind.
On second thought, let’s hope Obama never really earns it, considering the others who have:
2005
MOHAMED ELBARADEI (joint winner). He’s done such a nice job with Iran.
2004
WANGARI MAATHAI. The Kenyan ecologist peacefully teaches that the AIDS virus is a biological agent deliberately created by the Man.
2002
JIMMY CARTER JR., former President of the United States of America. A true cosmopolitan, he has undermined the foreign policy of his own country and vouched for the bona fides of tyrants and murderers all over the world.
2001
UNITED NATIONS, New York, NY, USA.
KOFI ANNAN, United Nations Secretary General. Among other things, they have respectively served as the vehicle for, and presided over, one of the biggest scams in history.
1994
YASSER ARAFAT (joint winner), Chairman of the Executive Committee of the PLO, President of the Palestinian National Authority. He was a cold-blooded murderer both before and after receiving the award.
1992
RIGOBERTA MENCHU TUM, Guatemala. She is the notorious Guatemalan faker and author, sort of, of I, Rigoberta Menchu.
1988
THE UNITED NATIONS PEACE-KEEPING FORCES New York, NY, U.S.A. Notwithstanding rapes and sex abuse committed by the team in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea and the Congo, still doing fine work all over the world.
