The Chinese Government were never going to welcome the news that Liu Xiaobo had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. No Government is likely to be enthusiastic about its own internal dissidents being honoured by the rest of the world. And those of us who live in so called liberal democracies should perhaps hesitate and look carefully at what we hold in our hands before hurling it at others. We may break our own glass house. I say "so called liberal democracies", because I doubt if our society is as liberal as we'd all like to think; and not everyone would say that what we have is in any strong sense, a democracy.
Nevertheless. I risk the surrounding glass houses as I hold in my hand at least one smooth rounded stone. (By the way amongst my favourite objects are stones which have been rounded by the lapidary patience of water – a metaphor for slow but transformative change?) That the award of a Peace prize should be described as obscene is one of those paradoxical statements which betray irreconcilable differences of perspective. But then to talk of irreconcilable differences also calls in question the point of a Peace prize if conflicting ideologies are incapable of understanding, and even revision of thought. The Chinese Government has an entirely consistent record of putting the interests of the Party before the rights of its people. Liu Xiaobo was an activist during the Tiannemann Square protests, and has been in and out of prison since – currently serving 11 years for writing ideas contrary to those approved by the Government.
The West has little assumed moral superiority left. We have our own embarrassments, our own crimes against other parts of the world, our own problems of seeking a more just and humane society. People in glass houses…. But whether here or China, I refuse to have good called evil without rejoinder, or to have just protest silenced without protesting, and I want to describe as nonsense, literally and rhetorically, the notion that the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to an imprisoned activist whose chief weapon was a pen or keyboard, is in any sense an obscene act. Rewarding peacemaking can never be anything other than transparently humane. That such an accusation could come from a Government which has the Tiannemann Square massacre in its recent history exposes the toxic political doublespeak that is the favoured discourse of those for whom human rights are cheaply negotiable. The statement is itself, an obscenity.
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