Peace Prize's Subversive Potential

By Khmer Democrat, Phnom Penh
Expanding our Mind Series

Take heart, Cambodian democrats! Oppression and dictatorial leadership, they too shall pass - in the Soviet Union, in Eastern Europe as they will in China and here in our beloved Cambodia. But it requires active engagement on everyone's part.


Let us shout NO! to oppression! NO! to government abuse! NO! to censorship! NO! to injustice!

Let us shout even louder YES! to freedom! YES! to justice! YES! to life! YES! to education! YES! to free speech! YES! to democracy! YES! to the Cambodian people!

The Peace Prize's Subversive Potential

The Soviet Union faced pressure after Andrei Sakharov won the Nobel in 1975. Now it's China's turn.
By Gal Beckerman
The Wall Street Journal Opinion, 13 Oct. 2010

Since the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded last week to Liu Xiaobo, a man jailed in China for advocating democracy and human rights, the Chinese government has reacted with disdain and denial. Mr. Liu is a "criminal" whose award is "a blasphemy against the peace prize," said one government spokesman. "Every Chinese can sense a deliberate maliciousness" in the prize, declared an editorial in a state-run newspaper. [Dictators are wimps!]

This response recalls the 1975 Peace Prize, which went to Andrei Sakharov, the nuclear physicist who had helped develop the Soviet hydrogen bomb before becoming the Soviet regime's most vociferous critic.

Like Mr. Liu today, Sakharov professed democratic values that his Communist rulers dismissed as Western mores being forced on the rest of the world. One of Sakharov's most famous writings was the 1968 essay "Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom," which circulated widely in samizdat form and was considered an existential threat by Soviet leaders. Mr. Liu, for his part, is currently imprisoned for signing Charter 08, a manifesto demanding political reform and civil liberties.

Mr. Liu's prize has brought attention to those in China who refuse to accept its anti-democratic status quo. Similarly, the 1975 award elevated Sakharov as a symbol of another Russia—a reminder that the Communists might have trampled on human and civil rights, but some brave activists still insisted on them.

After Sakharov won the prize, the government-controlled newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta denounced the Nobel committee for acting "blasphemously"—the same language used by the Chinese 35 years later. [Dictators are so uncreative!] The newspaper also accused Sakharov of supporting Nazi and fascist causes, and it compared him to a laboratory rat manipulated by anti-Soviet forces in the West. A trade union newspaper, Trud, called the award "political pornography" and Sakharov a "Judas" whose prize was his "30 pieces of silver."

The Soviets had to resort to minimizing a man that the rest of the world was celebrating—the only tactic available to a threatened totalitarian regime worried about perpetuating its own power.

Even behind closed doors, the Soviets treated demands for human rights as nuisances to be ignored. In his recently published White House diaries, Jimmy Carter describes a 1977 meeting with Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister, in which they discussed Anatoly Sharansky. Mr. Sharansky was a colleague of Sakharov's in the democracy movement. He was also a Jew who had been denied the right to emigrate and persecuted for attempting to do so.

At the time of the Carter-Gromyko meeting, Mr. Sharansky had been imprisoned for over six months, accused of being an American spy. He was becoming an internationally known activist, yet Mr. Carter reports that Gromyko dismissed him as "a microscopic dot who was of no consequence to anyone."

The Soviet response to the democracy movement reflected the fundamental insecurity at the heart of every totalitarian state. It was the reaction of a government that understood just how compelling liberal ideas could be if a large segment of the population were ever exposed to them.

And so it is in China today. Chinese authorities have blocked Chinese Internet users from being able to search Mr. Liu's name. In its frenzy to maintain control over what ideas their citizens can access, the government in Beijing has exposed its own vulnerability.

There is another parallel between the two Peace Prizes. Sakharov was given the award during a period of détente between the United States and the Soviet Union. By 1975 the U.S.-Soviet relationship had for a few years been characterized by a realpolitik focus on arms control and trade, while moral issues—like intellectual freedom and the right to emigrate—were downplayed. The Peace Prize forced those issues onto center stage.

Mr. Liu's award offers hope that, after years of a U.S.-Chinese relationship that has concentrated on economic partnership and overlooked issues of human rights, China might now have to recognize that universal values can't be so easily ignored.


Mr. Beckerman is the author of "When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010).