An Olive Branch in Oslo

Through sheer good luck (and lack of something better to do than turn on the "idiot box") I caught the tail end of Barack Obama's speech in receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize. The following is my impressionistic, which is to say probably inaccurate, summing up of the event:

To deal with the inessentials first, the setting of the Oslo City Hall was bright and spacious, rather like that of a federal legislative assembly. In the stage area the floral arrangements were in my opinion underwhelming, especially the wrinkly anthuriums (or similar flowers; at any rate they're the ubiquitous spade-shaped specimens of living plastic for which the crass but useful term "butt-ugly" might have been invented) in an unappealing shade of green, set in cushions of an apricot-tinged blossom.

The sea of people in their chairs was looking bored/antagonistic — though Michelle Obama was attentive as in duty bound though probably suffering from jet lag and evidently at pains to keep her eyes propped open, and Will Smith with family was relatively alive — as was warranted by the length of the ceremony. I remember that the year where the Muhammad Yunus won, a cheerful Bangladeshi dance troupe performed, and the audience could not have possibly looked more humourless, inanimate, and pasty-faced; this year it seemed marginally better. As is usual with televised audiences, the camera zoomed in on faces with desperate attempts at topicality (a fellow in a white kippah was a frequent victim, and when China and the Cultural Revolution were mentioned, possibly Chinese people were singled out, whereupon one of them looked puzzled) and the owners of those faces strove to shutter them as well as they could. Four persons presumably all of the Norwegian royal family were stranded front and centre in an isolated row of chairs which made them very conspicuous, but they bore it stoically and one white-clad lady in an admirable cloche hat and immaculate blonde coiffure even fished up a smile from time to time. Another member of that row was a gentleman with a finely trimmed beard framing his visage, which fascinated me through its paradoxical expression of uncommunicative mental alertness. At the end Lang Lang (in a white coat, suggestive of a wedding cake and adorned with doves at the sleeves) performed the Liebestraum (No. 3?) by Liszt with much enthusiasm.

As for the speech, it was a characteristically Obamian, fluent and uncomplicated mixture of refreshing common sense, rhetorical flourishes, (since it was directed at an international audience) first-year world history lesson, and sincerity. Obama referred to Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and John F. Kennedy. He argued that peace cannot be just or lasting if it is only the absence of conflict and not also the prevalence of human rights; he name-checked the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which impressed me because it is likely either gibberish or anathema to the majority of Americans, but which makes sense given his field of legal expertise; besides he argued that human rights are not a western construct but truly universal (which was of course music to this ex-Amnesty International-er's ears). He emphasized that mass abuses of power cannot be ignored, and that if the international community were willing to stand as a united front and be willing to enforce heavy sanctions, etc., then hopefully one wouldn't be faced with the dilemma of military action vs. passive complicity in crime. But condemnation of such abuses will not achieve anything on its own; one must still be ready to engage in dialogue, and to offer the responsible government a friendlier avenue of policy. Then he argued forcefully in favour of pursuing ideals that seem unreachable, even if they are in fact not fully reachable, rather than settling for an unsatisfactory status quo in the name of "realism." To illustrate this argument he again mentioned Gandhi and King, whose proposals may not always have been 100% practical but whose guiding principles are extremely valuable.

So far so good. What was really problematic was his defense of the war in Afghanistan, though he had the decency to look unhappy about it. He tied it back directly to September 11th, apparently forgetting that 15(?) of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, that the Afghan population had nothing at all to do with the matter (I'm inclined to believe that the attacks were really the initiative of those who carried it out and not to be tied back in any except a tenuous way to the former mujahideen in Afghanistan), and so on and so forth. I shouldn't become too self-righteous about it, because I haven't opposed the war in Afghanistan much. But if one defends that war one has to be aware that one is defending the deaths of entire innocent families and even, if some reports are accurate, of entire innocent villages through aerial raids — this does mean people of all ages being burned alive and torn to pieces and disabled. It means defending the deaths of hundreds of American, British, Canadian, and other soldiers, at times through "friendly fire." It also means defending the destruction of opium poppy fields which, however undesirable the health effects on the consumers and however undesirable the funnelling of money for weapons to violent parties may be, deprives terribly poor people of their income. It also means defending an egregious breach of a country's sovereignty (thereby setting a bad precedent, one might add), and the installation of a corrupt president who apparently has no means to ensure any modicum of security, prosperity, or civil liberties outside the confines of the capital city. It also means defending what I think is a totally inept excuse for rebuilding a country that was so miserably indigent anyway that it should have been impossible not to significantly improve the infrastructure (education, health care, electricity, etc.) through even a modest injection of foreign aid.

But, to return to Obama's speech, what especially got my goat is when he talked about achieving peace through war, or displayed glimpses of Shrub-like smugness; one of my alternate-universe nightmares is of Bush and Blair winning the Nobel Peace Prize for the invasion of Iraq — for which they were genuinely nominated back in the day by persons evidently underequipped with brains — and at times in the speech their spirit peeked forth. I also didn't think the speech was an appropriate platform to nag at the designated villains of Iran, North Korea, and Burma again; of course their governments are not beacons of civil liberties, but mentioning them would only not have been overly political if he had criticized American allies (Belarus, for instance) or examined the proverbial beam in his(/the American government's) own eye as well. For instance when he said that the US had never waged war against a democracy, it may be literally true, but the CIA-supported coup against Salvador Allende immediately (and the one against Mohammad Mossadegh, later) leapt to mind. Altogether it will require a whole lot more time, incense, atonement, and holy water before the demon of the Bush Administration is exorcised once and for all.

Besides I think that an enormous obstacle facing human rights today is that the European Union and the US discarded them so easily once a pretext for doing so arose with Sept. 11th, despite the fact that we are far richer, more stable, and better furnished with (e.g. law enforcement) resources than most or all of the countries whose governments we consider morally depraved. What I thought was good about the Clinton Administration was that it proved through its actions that financial growth, international political might and humanitarian ideals were not incompatible; besides, at least as far as good intentions went, it was very serious about genocide and other mass human rights abuses. (On the other hand I never liked Madeleine Albright's — and apparently Hillary Clinton's — dogmatic conflation of her perception of America's interests as well as America's incumbent government's philosophy, with the overarching moral imperative in foreign policy.) In a nutshell, I wish that Obama had said something about the importance of proving the practicability of one's precepts and setting a good example.