Liu Xiaobo, the angry Nobel Peace laureate

NO ENEMIES, NO HATRED 
Selected Essays and Poems of Liu Xiaobo,
ed. Perry Link, Tienchi Martin-Liao and Liu Xia, with foreword by Vaclav Havel 
Belknap Harvard Press, 355pp. 

Nobel Peace Prize laureates can be angry people.  Nobel himself spent a lifetime making explosives and selling armaments, then funded an annual prize for "the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."

Laureates have had warlike histories: Menachim Begin, Yasser Arafat, and Henry Kissinger among a good few others. Most have had nothing to do with armies or peace congresses, but contributed to “fraternity between nations” by demonstrating moral confrontation against political power. Jose Ramos Horta, Aung San Suu Kyi, Lech Walesa and the Dalai Lama come to mind.

In 2010 the Peace Prize Committee infuriated the Chinese government by selecting Liu Xiaobo, then as now in a Chinese prison, charged with “incitement to subvert state power”. His “crimes” were purely literary, but enough to enrage the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.

This book selects essays and commentaries published by Liu, at personal risk, in magazines and online from around the time of the 1989 Tian An Men incident through to Liu's final statement at his Beijing trial in December 2009.

Liu asserted then that he has “No enemies, no hatred”, but he spares nobody with his trenchant criticism of contemporary China. The Communist Party is his main target, but he also attacks less-radical Chinese intellectuals, dissidents, and those foreign fellow-travellers who make excuses for the Communist Party's refusal to grant fundamental human rights. You can't speak out like this without creating powerful enemies, and you won't persist with it unless you bear substantial reserves of anger. The line between anger and hatred is hard to define.

 The Chinese scholar-hero who dares to speak truth to power is an ancient tradition. But Liu writes off Confucius as a failure at politics who was only endorsed as a sage by later generations of dictators and emperors because he insisted on obedience to authority. Liu blames this for the “slave mentality” of modern Chinese toward their government.

Mostly, he argues for the establishment of individual rights within China. The Charter 08 document, drafted with other liberal intellectuals, attracted more than 12,000 signatories and embarrassed China's leadership in the year of the Beijing Olympics.  This provoked Liu's arrest and imprisonment for sedition.

Liu remind us what rights are currently denied to citizens of China. The separation of powers between constitution, government and judiciary, and the protection of private property including title to land, are things we have come to take for granted.

Charter 08 also calls for China to devolve its centralized system into a  “federation of democratic communities of China”. This would have sent China's right-wing neo-nationalists hopping mad, as well as the Communist Party centralists.

Liu despises the self-glorifying rhetoric that infects popular Chinese culture, the mythologizing of Chinese achievement far beyond reality, and the “bellicose and thuggish” attitudes to China's place in the world as it grows in economic strength. He angrily dismisses those Western commentators who over-praise and over-estimate China's past, its progress and its future, accusing them of naivety, patronizing fantasy, or self-serving attempts to ingratiate themselves with masters of the China growth gravy-train.

There's a lot of anger, for someone who professes to have "no hatred, no enemies".  He provokes reflections on Western society as well as on China's.

Richard Thwaites witnessed China's first modern movement for human rights in the Democracy Wall movement in Beijing in 1979, while Liu Xiaobo was a student.

Read my full review

Is political hatred the product or the tool?

THE NEW HATE:
A history of fear and loathing on the populist right.  

By Arthur Goldwag, Scribe, 368pp.

It's disturbing to watch the American democratic process so suffused with rage and hatred, from both left and right.  Free speech and open debate is to be cherished, but the cynical peddling of lies and conspiracies to influence frightened voters is the great weakness of democracy.

Plato warned about it in ancient Athens - at some point the Greek republic had laws that exiled demagogues from the city.  In modern western democracies, the challenge is to retain fundamental freedom of speech without turning over democracy to those with the greatest power to lie most loudly.

Thinking people of all persuasions share a broad discomfort about the political mobilisation of hatred . Some blame whichever party or interest group they don’t support, and many blame our news media for fostering political violence (real or synthetic) for the sake of cheap ratings points or journalistic one-upmanship.

Arthur Goldwag’s The New Hate looks at a wide range of current Obama-haters, from Tea Party to rabid broadcasters to Islamophobes and bizarre conspiracy-cult websites. He places them in a context of hate-farming that traces right back to the earliest Puritan colonists.  It seems there never was a time when American politics was not infected with conspiracy theories about unseen, powerful groups bent on subverting the Bible, the Constitution, or the apotheosis of the white race in American Exceptionalism.

Religious identity has often been the target, echoing the politico-religious purges that drove Puritans and many other waves of immigrants to America from their European homes.  Freemasons, Roman Catholics, Jews, freethinkers, Communists, homosexuals, witches and innumerable real or imagined secret societies have been the object of hate campaigns embraced by high-level politicians as well as rabble-rousers and entrepreneurs.  Goldwag is a declared liberal Democrat, but provides balanced accounts of many hate-merchants and their innocent or questionable targets across the centuries.

So why are human societies so susceptible to falsehood, prejudice, and paranoid fantasy?  Goldwag suggests that the common visceral element is a human yearning for a secure identity.  Any perceived threat to that identity, whether religious, cultural, race, or economic, induces a natural fear that is easily fanned into rage and hate.  The more that a relatively successful society has fostered a sense of entitlement and “rights” among its citizens, the easier it is to promote outrage and hatred whenever such entitlements may seem challenged.

Charitably, Goldwag accepts that some hate-peddlers at least believe what they are saying.  He concludes that the majority of those who claim to believe Obama is a foreign Muslim are less concerned about Obama’s identity than about America’s identity not being what it used to be, at home or abroad.

Read the full review

Richard Thwaites, when a broadcast current affairs producer and editorial executive, has struggled to balance coverage of punch-ups with coverage of policy.