Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Federal Judiciary Blogs -> Bench Memos - National Review Online

Federal Judiciary

: Bench Memos - National Review Online

The good guys win one, &c.

Here on this blessed website, I've gone on a bit about the Nobel Peace Prize -- the award this year to Liu Xiaobo. And I will have a piece in the forthcoming National Review (available in digital form tomorrow, and available in the hoary paper form shortly thereafter). But I'd like to devote a chunk of today's column to the subject -- and give you some comments from a couple of Liu's fellow dissidents, with whom I've communicated.

Liu, as you know, is in prison. He has been in prisons, and a 'reeducation through labor' camp, off and on for more than 20 years, since Tiananmen Square took place. And he is the first Chinese dissident -- indeed, the first Chinese person -- to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Chinese Communism has been in power since 1949; many brave and heroic people have struggled against it. So this prize was a long time in coming.

#ad#Soviet Communism was in power for almost 75 years: 1917 to 1991. There were just two Nobel Peace Prizes for those who struggled against this power (and there were many, many such strugglers, plenty of whom sacrificed their lives). Andrei Sakharov won in 1975. And Lech Walesa -- a Pole, to be sure, but a contender with Soviet Communism all the same -- won in 1983. I talked to Walesa earlier this year, and reported that conversation in NR. To see that article, go here.

The Nobel Committee honored the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa three times: the first time in 1961, when the Nobel for 1960 went to Albert John Lutuli. (In the past, the committee often waited a year, before conferring the prize for a particular year.) The second time was in 1984, when Bishop Tutu won. The last time was in 1993, at the glorious, longed-for end of apartheid. Nelson Mandela and F. W. de Klerk won jointly.

Over the decades, Chinese dissidents, democracy activists, and political prisoners were frequently nominated. Often, they were 'frontrunners,' according to speculation in the press. But they never won. It got to be kind of a joke. The rumor would be that a Chinese dissident was in line for the prize. The Chinese government would warn Norway, 'You'd better not!' (The Nobel Committee is independent from the Norwegian government, though appointed by the parliament.) And somebody else would win -- a non-Chinese.

(Did I mention that the Nobel Committee is composed of five Norwegians? Did I mention that the peace committee is a Norwegian committee, whereas the other Nobel committees are Swedish? I guess not. Sorry about that.)

Wei Jingsheng, the dissident and hero now in exile in the United States, was often a frontrunner. And often an also-ran. Laureates, in their Nobel speeches, would have to hail him, the way Oscar winners, clutching their precious statuettes, hail their colleagues who lost out. In 1996, Bishop Belo of East Timor said, 'I think of China, and I pray for the well-being of Mr. Wei Jingsheng and his colleagues, and hope that they will soon be liberated from their jail cells.' His co-laureate, José Ramos-Horta, complimented Wei as 'one of China's best children.' Well, that was nice.

The next year, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, and its leader Jody Williams, won. A man named Rae McGrath spoke for the ICBL. (Williams spoke separately.) He said, 'We would . . . like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to a fellow nominee and champion of civil action, Wei Jingsheng, and wish him well . . .' That was nice, too.

To its credit, the Nobel Committee honored the Dalai Lama in 1989. Earlier that year, the Chinese government had slaughtered peaceful protesters at Tiananmen Square. The Nobel Committee chairman, in remarks to the press, said that the 1989 award should be taken not just as encouragement to the Dalai Lama and Tibet; it should also be taken as encouragement to the Chinese democracy movement. The Dalai Lama paid tribute to the Tiananmen dead in his Nobel lecture.

(And when Liu Xiaobo learned of his own Nobel prize, he said it 'goes first' to those Tiananmen dead.)

I asked Wei Jingsheng, via e-mail, what he thought of the 2010 prize. He said that it was of course good that the matter of Chinese human rights was brought into the international spotlight. But Liu was a 'moderate reformer': the kind willing to work with the government, hopeful of working with the government. The Nobel Committee could not stomach a different, less 'moderate' kind of dissident. And what did it tell us about the Chinese government, said Wei, that even a moderate reformer could get eleven years? That is the duration of Liu's current prison term: The clock started ticking only last December.

Wei recognizes that not everyone can win the Nobel Peace Prize. And it was good that a Chinese, any Chinese, won. But he named several others who might well have won, who deserve the honor, and glory, and help. (He excluded himself.) He named Gao Zhisheng, Chen Guangcheng, Huang Qi, Hu Jia, the group called Tiananmen Mothers, 'and so on.'

Let me return to the Dalai Lama for a moment: He could not have won the Nobel prize if he hadn't been a 'moderate' -- a moderate opponent of Beijing. Of that I feel quite sure. The Nobel chairman in 1989 stressed the laureate's 'willingness to compromise.' For example, the Dalai Lama did not favor Tibetan independence, merely autonomy. And yet, the Chinese government took the prize to him very badly. You know what a Chinese official in Oslo said, when the 1989 prize was announced? 'It is interference in China's internal affairs. It has hurt the Chinese people's feelings.'

As I say in my NR piece, maybe the government handed out Kleenex.

In 2003, the Nobel Committee gave the peace prize to a moderate reformer in Iran, Shirin Ebadi. She was indeed in Iran, not outside it. She was not an exile. And she was a long way from 'radical' dissidence. She insisted that democracy was compatible, not just with Islam, but also with an 'Islamic republic.' She wanted reform from within. She did not advocate the overthrow of the regime. And she said all the right things about the United States and Israel, the Great Satan and the Little Satan. At times, her rhetoric is barely distinguishable from that of the regime. Iranian dissidents in exile protested her Nobel prize on the streets of Oslo, as the ceremony was going on.

But: Ebadi had done, and has done, brave and important things. She has stuck her neck out. And, much to her sorrow, she is in exile now. Sometimes a totalitarian dictatorship doesn't give you much choice, you know?

#page#Let me tell you a little something about governmental reaction: In 1975, when Sakharov won, the Soviets were pretty ticked. They called him an 'anti-patriot,' an 'enemy of détente,' and a 'laboratory rat of the West.' They called him a 'Judas for whom the Nobel prize was thirty pieces of silver from the West.' Isn't it interesting that the Soviet authorities should have gone in for a Gospel reference?

This year, the Chinese government has said similar things: The award to Liu is an 'obscenity.' The Nobel Peace Prize in general 'has been reduced to a political tool of Western interests.' Etc., etc. All of these regimes spout in the same fashion.

#ad#In addition to Wei, I communicated, via e-mail, with Baiqiao Tang, another dissident in exile, a man who has recently completed a memoir, to be published soon. It's called My Two Chinas: The Memoir of a Chinese Counterrevolutionary. His words to me were much like Wei's: 'Regardless of which dissident gets the prize, we should be happy.' Now the world's attention is focused on the Chinese democracy movement. And that movement should take advantage of this 'rare opportunity.'

Tang said, 'We're facing a very powerful and crafty opponent,' in the Chinese government, 'and we have a long and difficult walk ahead of us. Think of this: We can't even rescue a Nobel Peace Prize winner from prison.' Given this fact, 'how can we talk about solving the June 4 problem, the Falun Gong problem, the Tibet problem, the Uighur problem, and many other human-rights problems?' (June 4 refers to Tiananmen Square.)

'So we are still very far from success. Only when all political prisoners, including Liu Xiaobo, Gao Zhisheng, Hu Jia, Chen Guangcheng, Tan Zuoren, Xie Changfa, Liu Xianbin, Guo Quan, Wang Bingzhang, Xu Wanping, and Falun Gong practitioners, Tibetan freedom fighters, Uighur freedom fighters, underground Christians, the ‘disappeared,' and many others are released -- only then can we say that human rights are being recognized in China.'

By the way, Sakharov, in his Nobel lecture -- read by his wife, Elena Bonner -- named the names of about 100 political prisoners in the Soviet Union. Nothing gives such men and women greater hope; nothing so discourages them as the thought, or the fact, that they are forgotten.

Tang added one more thing: 'Now is the time to ask the international community to condemn the Chinese government's human-rights abuses. Now is the time to request the release of all prisoners -- not only Liu Xiaobo -- and a stop to persecution. We should also use this chance to develop our democracy movement and get more people involved, until we win for our democratic ideal.'

I'm afraid I'm going to repeat what I've said on this site before, and what I say in my new magazine piece: In the long history of the Nobel Peace Prize -- since 1901 -- only four laureates have been unable to travel to Oslo to pick up the prize. That is, only four have been prevented for political reasons. The first was Carl von Ossietzky in 1936. (He was the laureate for 1935, named the following year.) He was a political prisoner of the Nazis. This is beautiful: Goering asked him to reject and renounce the prize. The prisoner told him to stuff it.

The second man prevented was Sakharov. The third was Walesa. And the fourth laureate was Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese democracy heroine, who won the prize in 1991. (She is under house arrest as we speak.)

So, will the prisoner Liu be the fifth laureate prevented from picking up the prize? It appears so. Will they let his wife go? She is under house arrest. Ossietzky had no one to speak for him. Sakharov had the great Bonner (who was out of the Soviet Union already, for medical treatment). Walesa had his wife, Danuta. Aung San Suu Kyi had her husband and two sons.

And I cherish what the 1975 Nobel chairman, Aase Lionaes, said at Sakharov's ceremony. She said, 'The Nobel Committee deeply deplores the fact that Andrei Sakharov has been prevented from being present here today in person to receive the peace prize. This is a fate he shares with the man who, forty years ago in 1935, was awarded the peace prize. His name was Carl von Ossietzky.'

She was a little off on a detail: Ossietzky's prize had come in 1936. But she hit them dead between the eyes: She linked the Soviets' behavior with the Nazis'. How about the current chairman, Thorbjorn Jagland? In December, at the ceremony for Liu, will he link Beijing's behavior with that of the Soviet Union and the Third Reich? That would be thrilling.

As you well know, Cuban Communism has been in power one decade less than Chinese Communism -- that brutal, murderous gang took over in 1959. The Cubans are still waiting for their first Nobel Peace Prize. Earlier this year, Armando Valladares, the writer who spent 22 years in the Cuban gulag, told me, 'We would have won two or three Nobel prizes already,' if the Cuban dictatorship were right-wing instead of left-wing. I'm afraid that is so.

You may wonder why I'm yakking about the prize. Well, I'm completing a book on the subject -- on the subject of the Nobel Peace Prize. It will be published by Encounter (quite a while from now). I hope you like it. (If you read it, I should say!) I find the subject terribly interesting. It gives us a survey of the 20th century. It gives us a parade of personalities. And it invites us to think about war and peace, freedom and oppression -- some of the vital topics.

I'll shut up now, and turn to something quite different.

#*#Joan Sutherland, the legendary Australian soprano, passed away over the weekend. I had a note about her at the end of my column on Tuesday. (That column is here.) Tuesday evening, I spoke with Marilyn Horne, the legendary American mezzo-soprano. She had just been live on Australian radio. She and Sutherland were great friends -- and frequent operatic partners. In fact, Sutherland is the soprano with whom Horne is most closely associated, along with Montserrat Caballé (the legendary Spaniard).

Sutherland had been sick for a long time; Horne had been in regular touch with her. And she told me that Dame Joan's spirits were always pretty good. She liked to laugh, she liked to live. She was always a 'strong and stoic' person, Horne said. And she was the type to stay true to her word.

For instance, when she became 'the toast of the world,' she had some recitals already booked in America -- just small gigs, for $2,000 a pop, something like that. Sutherland could have said (this is Horne talking), 'Gee, I can't come now, because I'm the toast of the world.' Instead, she did the right thing -- and kept her agreements.

'That's what my dad taught me to do, too,' Horne adds.

#page#When did she first hear Sutherland? It was over the radio, she recalls, when she -- Horne -- was in Germany. She was at the beginning of her career, Horne was. And German radio was playing some new Sutherland recording. 'A dear colleague and I were listening to it together, and we were just bowled over. We were completely out of our minds.' Sutherland was that unusual, that good. Two years later, Horne and Sutherland were singing together.

I ask the simple question, 'What was great about her?' 'The sound!' is Horne's immediate answer. 'That gorgeous, silvery sound. And it was huge. Yet even with that great big sound, she was able to do the most technically difficult things, and make them organically part of the music. You always felt it was effortless -- though, as a singer, I know that none of it is effortless.'

#ad#Here is something specific, and important: 'Joan had incredible breath support. But when you stood next to her, it was almost nonexistent. You never felt her working on her support. It was at one with her singing. But it was there, believe me.'

Sutherland was one of the great breathers of all time. So is Horne.

Once, Horne, Sutherland, and Luciano Pavarotti did a concert together, televised. They were interviewed. And, in the course of that interview, they all agreed that breath support was key. (I should add that Pavarotti was a third great breather.) When the interview was aired, that part was cut -- edited out. Horne wishes it had been left in, if only as an admonition to young singers.

She says something else about that rare Sutherland instrument: 'Her voice would come straight to my ear, in the hall' -- that is, when Horne was sitting in the audience. 'It was as if she was singing directly into my ear.'

I ask about their partnership, their clicking. 'There was never a cross word between us, ever,' says Horne. 'We both had the feeling that it was much better to aim for the sum of the parts, and not the parts individually' -- soprano and mezzo-soprano. 'We were aiming for oneness.'

Some say that sopranos can be friends with mezzos, but sopranos can't be friends with sopranos, and mezzos can't be friends with mezzos -- rivalry and all that. What does Horne say? 'It really depends on the people -- on the personalities involved. Flicka von Stade is one of my dearest friends.' (That would be Frederica von Stade, the famed mezzo from San Francisco, now retiring from the stage.)

Horne has a further observation about her relationship with Dame Joan: 'The atmosphere in the countries we came from' might have had something to do with it, something to do with that clicking. The American culture, the Australian culture: They are not so different. And they tend to be quite different from the European. The spirit of the 'Anglosphere' -- I use this word -- is, as Horne puts it, 'Give everybody a go, right?' Everybody gets a fair shake.

This is just a generalization, Horne cautions. There are various types in all countries. But I have no doubt she's on to something.

Speaking of partnerships -- and famed ones -- she comments on Sutherland's marriage to Richard Bonynge, the conductor and music scholar. 'They were really a pair, you know what I mean? They meant everything to each other. Everything he did was for her. He was thinking about her all the time, trying to help her, in every way.'

I go back to this matter of a 'silvery' voice -- and I recall a famous anecdote about Zinka Milanov, the mercurial, very diva-esque 'Yugoslavian' soprano, as we used to say. (She was born in Zagreb.) A fan goes backstage after a performance. 'Oh, Madame Milanov,' he says. 'Your voice, it was like silver.' She scolds him, 'It vas like golt.'

And it was like gold, Horne says. There are silvery voices, golden voices -- also brassy ones, she notes. And you know them when you hear them. Sutherland was a prime example of a silver singer. Who was gold? I ask for another example, besides Milanov. Horne thinks for a second, then says, 'Eileen Farrell?' Good one.

We are all unique, of course -- but some may be uniquer than others. Has there ever been another singer like Joan Sutherland, someone in that genre? 'No,' says Horne, 'she was unique. And she will never be forgotten.'

Neither will Jackie. (That is Horne's nickname. Soprano and mezzo were 'Joan 'n' Jackie.') You want to see them singing 'Mira, o Norma' together? Try this. It's just a truncated version, but, oh, it's good. The cabaletta starts at 4:54 -- you know you want it. You want to hear Sutherland messing around with Dinah Shore and Ella Fitzgerald? Go here. And here.

For my 'Horne-a-palooza' of December 2008, go here.

#*#Let me close with a film -- a short called Lake Stacey, here. It's by a young man I know, and adore: my cousin Pasquale Greco, whom I sometimes call 'Pasqui,' and whom others call ''squale.' In due course, we will all be calling him 'sir,' I have a feeling. He is a movie director, a moviemaker, a movie craftsman -- always has been, since he was a squirt.

You know how we all have enthusiasms when we're young -- enthusiasms that pass, sooner or later? We want to be an astronomer. So we ask our parents for a telescope. We get one for Christmas, play with it for about two weeks -- then go on to the next enthusiasm.

Pasquale always wanted to be a filmmaker, and always made films. I remember one he made when he was in junior high: It was impressive. Wacked and scary, and also impressive. Pasquale never lost his enthusiasm: He just marched right on, and is in the business today.

He and his gang made Lake Stacey in 2008, when he was 21 or 22. That summer, it screened in Cannes. Pasquale was kind of an apprentice at the elite film festival, part of a special program for up-and-comers. He has worked on some feature films: Adventureland. And Unstoppable, a Denzel Washington flick that's coming out soon. And I Am Number Four, also coming out soon. Right now, he's in New York working on Men in Black 3D.

It was only the other week that Lake Stacey popped up on the Internet -- giving me a chance to ballyhoo it, and brag a little. I would not waste your time. And I can't wait to see Pasquale Greco's next movies, many of them, as the years roll on. I admit a bias, but I don't think the whiz from Wheeling, W.V., can miss.


#JAYBOOK#

Full post as published by Bench Memos - National Review Online on October 14, 2010 (boomark / email).