Slavoj Žižek
Donald Trump should not
receive the Nobel Peace prize. But will he? The French have a beautiful
expression, "voyons voir," which can be roughly translated as
"let's wait and see what happens."
Four US presidents have
already been awarded with the Nobel Peace Prize: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow
Wilson, Jimmy Carter (after leaving office), and Barack Obama in 2009 for his
"extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and
cooperation between people." Now, this explanation was complete fakery,
and it merely expressed the hope that Obama would act like that going forward.
As unbelievable as the
proposal for Trump to get the Nobel Peace Prize is, we should nevertheless
react to it in three ways.
First, we should bear in mind
that the great compromise which enabled the breakthrough towards a peaceful
resolution of the Korean crisis was made not by Trump but by Kim Jong-un. It
was Kim who made the key concession, which means any prize should be directed
to the pair jointly. And the weakness of this idea is obvious – it would invite
ridicule to hand the Nobel Peace Prize to the head of arguably the most
oppressive regime in the world.
Second, remember how, a little
while ago, Trump was competing with Kim about the buttons to trigger nuclear
missiles that they have at their disposal, with the American claiming his
button is bigger than that of his counterpart in Pyongyang.
As such, the extreme
oscillations in the public perception of the Korean crisis are significant. One
week, we are told we are on a brink of nuclear war; then there is a week of
respite, then the war threat explodes again.
Different vibes
When I visited Seoul in August
2017, my friends there told me there is no serious threat of a war because the
North Korean regime knows it cannot survive it. Yet, the South Korean
authorities have often prepared their population for a nuclear war.
And, lately, our media has
reported on the more and more ridiculous exchange of insults between Kim
Jong-un and Donald Trump. But the irony of the situation is that, when we get
(what appears to be) two immature men letting go of their rage and hurling
insults at each other, our only hope is that there is some anonymous and
invisible institutional constraint preventing their rage to explode into a
full-on war.
Usually, we tend to complain
that in today's alienated and bureaucratized politics, institutional pressures
and constraints prevent politicians from expressing their personal visions.
But, in this case, we hope such constraints will prevent the expression of all
too crazy personal visions.
Thus, should Donald and Kim
really be rewarded just for performing a sudden U-turn and not acting as crazy
as we feared?
Third, the unpleasant truth
(for leftist liberals) is that, far from being just the bellicose crazy US
leader, Trump hasn't turned out so bad in comparison with Hillary Clinton.
Indeed, asked by The Guardian
whether she truly believes Clinton would be more dangerous than Trump, the
actress Susan Sarandon responded: "I did think she was very, very
dangerous. We would still be fracking, we would be at war [if she were
president]. It wouldn't be much smoother.
"Look what happened under
Obama that we didn't notice. She would've done it the way Obama did it, which
was sneakily. He deported more people than have been deported now. How he got
the Nobel Peace Prize, I don't know," she added.
Indeed, we should thus always
bear in mind that, at his worst, Trump is mostly just continuing the politics
of his predecessors.
Close shave
Who, then, really deserves the
Nobel Peace Prize? Probably, those who, for sure, will never get it. Try to
recall a frightening detail from the Cuban missile crisis: only later did we
learn how close to nuclear war we were during a naval skirmish between an
American destroyer and a Soviet B-59 submarine off Cuba on October 27, 1962.
The destroyer dropped depth
charges near the submarine to try to force it to surface, not knowing it had a
nuclear-tipped torpedo. Vadim Orlov, a member of the submarine crew, told the
conference in Havana that the submarine was authorized to fire if three
officers agreed. The officers began a fierce shouting debate over whether to
sink the ship. Two of them said Yes and the other said No.
"A guy named Arkhipov
saved the world," was a bitter comment of a historian on this accident.
Do we not all silently count
on something similar in the heated exchange between the US and others – that,
at a decisive moment, a single individual will find strength to cut short the
mad circle of nuclear threats and counter-threats?
A similar act, much less
known, was also committed in the Soviet Union in an even darker time. Sophia
Karpai was the head of the cardiographic unit of the Kremlin Hospital in the
late 1940s. Her (accidental) misfortune was that it was her job to take twice
the electrocardiogram of Andrei Zhdanov, on July 25 1948 and on July 31, days
before Zhdanov's death, due to heart failure.
The first ECG, taken after
Zhdanov displayed some heart problems, was inconclusive (a heart attack could
be neither confirmed nor excluded), while the second one surprisingly showed a
much better picture (the intraventricular blockage disappeared, a clear
indication that there was no heart attack).
Doctor's plot
In 1951, she was arrested on
charges that alleged, in a conspiracy with other doctors treating Zhdanov, she
falsified the data, erasing the clear indications that a heart attack did
occur, thereby depriving Zhdanov of the special care needed by a victim of
cardiac arrest. After harsh treatment, including a brutal beating, all the
other accused doctors confessed. "Sophia Karpai, whom her boss doctor
Vinogradov had described as nothing more than 'a typical person of the street
with the morals of the petty bourgeoisie,' was kept in a refrigerated cell
without sleep to compel a confession. However, she did not confess."
(Jonathan Brent and Vladimir P. Naumov, Stalin's Last Crime, New York:
HarperCollins 2003, p. 307) And the impact and significance of her perseverance
cannot be overestimated: her signature would have dotted the 'i' on the
prosecutor's case on the "doctor's plot," immediately setting in
motion the mechanism that, once rolling, would lead to the death of hundreds of
thousands, maybe even to a new European war (according to Stalin's plan, the
"doctor's plot" should have demonstrated that the Western
intelligence agencies tried to murder the top Soviet leaders, and thus served
as an excuse to attack Western Europe).
She persisted just long enough
for Stalin to enter his final coma, after which the entire case was immediately
dismissed. And her simple heroism was crucial in the series of details which,
"like grains of sand in the gears of the huge machine that had been set in
motion, prevented another catastrophe in Soviet society and politics generally,
and saved the lives of thousands, if not millions, of innocent people."
(Op.cit., p. 297)
This simple persistence
against all odds is ultimately the stuff true heroes are made of. We learn
about such cases only sometimes and only years later. So, if there is to be a
minimal justice in who gets the Nobel Peace Prize, it should be given neither
to active politicians for their present acts (i.e., for just no being as brutal
as one expected them to be) nor to politicians for their future expected acts;
the prize should be given retroactively, to nameless heroes like Arkhipov and
Karpai.
No comments:
Post a Comment