Konstantin PENZEV (Russia)
If someone had asked me a month ago, “Who Is Liu Xiaobo?” I would have answered: “I don’t know, but judging by the name, he’s probably Chinese.” And if someone had asked me a month ago, “What is the Nobel Peace Prize awarded for?” I’d have said: “That’s a world-famous and very honorable prize awarded for peacemaking. Like it says in the Bible—‘Blessed are the peacemakers!’” For example, in 1994 the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin “for his efforts to achieve peace in the Middle East.” Sadly, a month later Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated by his fellow countryman Yigal Amir, who was motivated by a desire to protect the people of Israel against the Oslo Accords. That incident clearly demonstrates the calling of peacemaker is not only honorable, but dangerous as well.
Mikhail Gorbachev was a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, too. Although he wasn’t killed by grateful countrymen, he took a hard blow to the head during a 1996 election campaign. Gorbachev received the award “for his leading role in the peace process which today characterizes important parts of the international community.”
Other Nobel Peace Prize recipients include Barack Obama for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” Jimmy Carter, Mother Teresa and Menachem Begin—not for the massacre at Deir Yassin, as you might expect, but for preparing and concluding groundbreaking agreements between Israel and Egypt.
So, if someone were to ask me today, “Who is Liu Xiaobo?” I’d answer: “He’s a Chinese citizen who was awarded the Nobel Prize “for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China.” Others who have received prizes for their human rights struggle include Lech Wałęsa, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and Aung San Suu Kyi, who was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by the US Congress in 2008.
What do we know about Liu Xiaobo?
He’s 54 years old. In 1989, he took part in the acclaimed anti-government riots in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Evidently, this new Nobel Prize winner hasn’t since lost his revolutionary fervor because in June 2009 the Xinhua News agency reported that Liu Xiaobo had been arrested on charges of organizing subversive activities intended to undermine state power and overthrow socialism. In December 2009, he was sentenced to 11 years imprisonment for sedition. That decision by China’s judicial system incurred the displeasure of the European Union, the United States and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. One of the people who nominated Liu Xiaobo for the Nobel Prize was the 14th Dalai Lama, who is known both for his religious activism and his struggle to free Tibet from China. After the anti-Chinese uprising in 1959, the Dalai Lama fled to India, where he has lived ever since.
We should first of all mention that we (or at least we Russians) know very little about Liu Xiaobo and his activities. We know so little that we have to wonder why such powerful states as the United States and the European Union are concerned about such a little-known Chinese troublemaker. Could the evil Chinese Communists be planning military action against Western countries and preparing to parachute a million Chinese cut-throats on top of Obama’s head? Perhaps Liu somehow managed to damage those parachutes and sent the Chinese Communists into a tizzy? Everyone knows that Communists are very bad people who want to conquer the entire world, especially America. If so, it seems quite reasonable to award a Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo.
Second, every country in the world punishes anti-government activities, specifically the sort that Liu was engaged in; and the United States and the European Union are no exception. If Liu had been living in the United States and actually struggling to establish a Communist regime in that country, he would be unlikely to escape with only 11 years in prison. He probably would have been sent straight to the electric chair, as has happened in American history; or outraged American citizens would simply have killed him without thinking twice about it. Think back to the Palmer raids and Senator McCarthy’s activities. Still, we should acknowledge that not every anti-government activity is punished by all countries. Anti-Chinese activities obviously aren’t the same as anti-American ones; therefore, we shouldn’t expect the US State Department to treat them the same way. If you’re aiming to destroy the United States, that’s bad. If you plan to destroy China, then you probably don’t need to go to prison at all. Obviously, the positions of the United States and its vassal, the European Union, are the same.
Did Liu intend to destroy China?
Oh yes, that’s exactly what he intended, and the new Nobel laureate may still want to. How can I be sure of that? The fact is that the Tiananmen Square events of 1989 in that Liu took part in weren’t tragic random occurrences. In fact, the things that happened across the world in 1989 weren’t random at all. That was the year Communist regimes throughout the world began to crumble one after the other, and that was the period in history that Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote about in his article, “The International Consequences of 1989.”
However, is there much truth to the idea that the departure of the Chinese Communist Party from the political scene would lead to the collapse of China and civil war? Alas, there is. China has quite a few separatist organizations, the best known of which are the Tibetan and Uighur movements, which would like to rip China apart. Ultimately, the fall of the Communist regime in the USSR caused its collapse in 1991. Why should China be any different?
But what if the Chinese Communist Party violates human rights?
First of all, the CCP today isn’t the same organization it was during Mao’s time and during the Cultural Revolution. The CCP today doesn’t want to cause a world revolution, and it strongly supports private business. It has undergone a tremendous evolution, but not enough of one to win the US State Department’s approval. On the other hand, the activities of the State Department haven’t always met with the approval of the Chinese themselves or the Indians. But life being what it is, sometimes we all have to put up with our neighbors’ shortcomings. Do we reproach Great Britain because it hasn’t yet got around to acquiring a Constitution? That makes the term “constitutional monarchy” look like a joke when applied to Britain.
Second, even if the CCP does violate the rights of the Chinese in China, that doesn’t give anyone the right to interfere in China’s internal affairs. Are we going to lecture Obama because his country doesn’t have direct presidential elections, like Russia does? We won’t be funding the Communist Party of the United States of America any more, despite the fact that sometimes we would very much like to.
So. What does the awarding of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo mean? Does it mean that in a year’s time the CPP will fall into a Communist hell and China will collapse? Don’t forget, Liu’s human rights colleague, Mikhail Gorbachev, received the prize in 1990, and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
No, the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu doesn’t signal the end of the CPP and the collapse of China in 2011. The award is an open declaration by the West of its intention to destroy the CPP and cause China’s collapse in the near future. That’s all there is to it. We can only guess about specific dates. I don’t know whether the US State Department will get the Pope on its side, but I don’t doubt for a minute that there will be another “crusade.”
Is it true that the only thing behind the “statement of intent” is a problem about the denial of rights to Chinese in China? Of course not. Nobody but a dozen freaks in the West (meaning the United States and its vassal the EU) are truly interested in the rights of our yellow-faced neighbors. But what are the motives of the United States on the issue? The answer is ridiculously simple. The problem primarily lies with the internal affairs of the United States itself. The country is currently facing economic problems that can’t be called “temporary difficulties.” The fact is that the curve depicting the total US national debt has now gone exponential. To those for whom the term “exponential curve” means nothing, I’ll say that the Americans owe a great deal of money to foreign creditors, and strange as it may seem, China tops the list. The Americans don’t just owe China a lot of money; they owe it an obscene amount of money. The United States is a bankrupt nation, and if tomorrow you were to somehow force Americans to consume only what they produce, they’d call it a “violation of human rights” and start a revolution and a civil war. Alas, the prospect that it could happen is very real. Some spiteful critics on the web are already drawing maps showing Texas as part of Mexico.
What better way of keeping your standard of living up than to eliminate your main creditor? I agree, that sounds crass and cynical, but could the question be as absurd as it appears at first glance?
Consider opium…
What could be more profitable than a heroin market with a couple of million customers? Before its collapse, there was no heroin addiction as such in the USSR. After 1991, drug abuse became a national disaster. And who controls the world’s opium production now? The answer to that question isn’t hard to find. Consider that Afghanistan in 2007 produced 93% of the world’s raw opium, and Afghanistan is currently under American occupation.
So. The Chinese Communist Party has only one option right now: to try and drive the United States into its grave before the United States drives the CPP and China as a whole into its grave. I don’t know whether the Chinese will succeed in accomplishing that lovely outcome, but it could happen. As I said earlier, the United States is a bankrupt country, and China is the main producer of its consumer goods. The challenge is to redirect China’s flow of goods from the foreign market to its domestic market. The solvency of the United States is becoming more and more illusory every day unless the supplies of heroin in exchange for Chinese-made pants and shoes are factored in.
A second promising approach for the CPP is to deepen economic ties with Russia. The point here isn’t that Russia is the homeland of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin. It’s something different. Russia is the only country in the world now capable of single-handedly standing up against the entire military might of the West. And that despite the incredibly pacifist policies of the current Russian government. As we know, a government can change its composition or its views on the world, but there is no reason for claiming that the Russian people will ever change their nature.
Konstantin Penzev – Russian historian and writer.
Source: New Eastern Outlook
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