Ed Vulliamy: A Nobel prize that dishonours the victims of genocide // George Orwell: Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali (1944)
NB: Holocaust denial is alive and well in the modern world. The Nobel Prize is now as valuable as poison gas. DS Truth is endangered these days. Untrue “facts” are easily manufactured and spread. Politicians blur and manipulate the difference between truth and lies. Handke’s equation of Srebrenica with lesser outrages by the Bosnian army is like Donald Trump blaming “all sides” for Charlottesville and finding “very fine people” among the neo-Nazis. In fact, the current political zeitgeist of refusal to live with “the other” can be seen to have roots in the post-Yugoslav carnage.
So, the highest award in literature goes to a writer who denies the existence of concentration camps that it was my accursed honour to find in Bosnia in 1992, who lauded Slobodan Milošević, mastermind of the hurricane of violence of which they were part, and contests the massacre at Srebrenica in 1995. Peter Handke is an apologist for genocide within living memory, at the heart of Europe. He says one thing, while earth across the Balkans gives up its mass graves. While Handke proffers his views, the bones are facts.
Does this matter? Literature must exist independent of politics; the Nobel prize could be awarded regardless of morals or ideology. But that’s not what the prize sets out to be or do. It is awarded, according to the will of Alfred Nobel, for outstanding work “en idealisk riktning” – in an ideal direction or direction of an ideal. The prize does have moral, as well as literary, pretensions: Seamus Heaney won it in 1995 for work of “lyrical beauty and ethical depth”. Ezra Pound was among the greatest poets of the past century, but never won the prize, possibly because of his fascism and hideous antisemitism.
Handke was not just expressing his opinion in his book A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia and his homily at Milošević’s funeral – he went out of his way to give credence to mass murder and, in this context, as importantly, to lies. He offered to testify for Milošević at The Hague; had he done so, we might have met – on opposite sides. The thing about our reporting in Bosnia is that, as another controversial Nobel laureate (for peace, in 1973) Henry Kissinger said: “It has the added virtue of being true.”
see also
The Bob Dylan of Genocide Apologists
The Apologist: Many of the finest writers of the last century, men such as George Orwell and Primo Levi, were concerned about the degradation of language through political manipulation. But they always believed that language should act, in Heinrich Böll’s memorable words, as “the bulwark of freedom.” Not so Handke
George Orwell: Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali: The point is that you have here a direct, unmistakable assault on sanity and decency; and even - since some of Dali's pictures would tend to poison the imagination like a porno-graphic postcard - on life itself. What Dali has done and what he has imagined is debatable, but in his outlook, his character, the bedrock decency of a human being does not exist. He is as anti-social as a flea. Clearly, such people are undesirable, and a society in which they can flourish has something wrong with it...
Not, of course, that Dali's autobiography, or his pictures, ought to be suppressed. Short of the dirty postcards that used to be sold in Mediterranean seaport towns, it is doubtful policy to suppress anything, and Dali's fantasies probably cast useful light on the decay of capitalist civilisation. But what he clearly needs is diagnosis. The question is not so much what he is as why he is like that. It ought not to be in doubt that his is a diseased intelligence, probably not much altered by his alleged conversion, since genuine penitents, or people who have returned to sanity, do not flaunt their past vices in that complacent way. He is a symptom of the world's illness.
The important thing is not to denounce him as a cad who ought to be horsewhipped, or to defend him as a genius who ought not to be questioned, but to find out why he exhibits that particular set of aberrations
http://www.orwell.ru/library/reviews/dali/english/e_dali
So, the highest award in literature goes to a writer who denies the existence of concentration camps that it was my accursed honour to find in Bosnia in 1992, who lauded Slobodan Milošević, mastermind of the hurricane of violence of which they were part, and contests the massacre at Srebrenica in 1995. Peter Handke is an apologist for genocide within living memory, at the heart of Europe. He says one thing, while earth across the Balkans gives up its mass graves. While Handke proffers his views, the bones are facts.
Does this matter? Literature must exist independent of politics; the Nobel prize could be awarded regardless of morals or ideology. But that’s not what the prize sets out to be or do. It is awarded, according to the will of Alfred Nobel, for outstanding work “en idealisk riktning” – in an ideal direction or direction of an ideal. The prize does have moral, as well as literary, pretensions: Seamus Heaney won it in 1995 for work of “lyrical beauty and ethical depth”. Ezra Pound was among the greatest poets of the past century, but never won the prize, possibly because of his fascism and hideous antisemitism.
Handke was not just expressing his opinion in his book A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia and his homily at Milošević’s funeral – he went out of his way to give credence to mass murder and, in this context, as importantly, to lies. He offered to testify for Milošević at The Hague; had he done so, we might have met – on opposite sides. The thing about our reporting in Bosnia is that, as another controversial Nobel laureate (for peace, in 1973) Henry Kissinger said: “It has the added virtue of being true.”
Truth is endangered
these days. Untrue “facts” are easily manufactured and spread. Politicians blur
and manipulate the difference between truth and lies. Handke’s equation of
Srebrenica with lesser outrages by the Bosnian army is like Donald Trump blaming
“all sides” for Charlottesville and finding “very fine people” among the
neo-Nazis. In fact, the current political zeitgeist of refusal to live with
“the other” can be seen to have roots in the post-Yugoslav carnage.
There’s something
weird about Bosnia: why doesn’t it matter to a public figure’s life that they
endorsed or denied the slaughter? Harold
Pinter won the Nobel in 2005 having joined the “Free
Milošević” campaign. Noam Chomsky is revered, for all his swerving and
equivocating over the camps and Srebrenica. I wonder whether these people, like
Handke, consider their searing impact on survivors and bereaved. When I
asked Dr Idriz Merdžanić, who tried to tend to tortured men and violated
women in Trnopolje camp about the deniers, he said: “It’s hard enough to find
words to describe the camps and what happened to us, but I have no words to
describe what these people do.”
Anyone concerned with
preserving some narrative in accordance with what happened in Bosnia can only
react to this award with bitter exhaustion, a sense that those efforts were in
vain. For what it’s worth,
my understanding of journalism is that you walk a straight line and report
what’s true. This turns out to be not especially lucrative and harder than it
should be. Literature operates to other standards – as it should – yet this
outrage from the ivory tower proceeds from obfuscation to rewriting history.
They won, we lost; lies won, truth lost.
So what’s the point?
Why bother? Against Handke, I’ll pitch the writer whose place on the podium in
Stockholm in 1957 he stains: Albert Camus. Camus’s
magnificent acceptance speech was about how the duty of a writer is to
do more than write, but also testify to truth. Ten years earlier, Camus
published his masterpiece La peste, whose hero, Dr Rieux,
adheres to a complex notion of pointless endeavour: one fights to save the life
of an infected child although it is doomed – fight the plague, because that’s
the right thing to do. Although, in this
value-free present, to cite Handke’s predecessor of 2016, Bob
Dylan: “At times I think there are no words/ But these to say what’s true./
And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden.” Ed Vulliamy reported
on the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s
see also
The Bob Dylan of Genocide Apologists
The Apologist: Many of the finest writers of the last century, men such as George Orwell and Primo Levi, were concerned about the degradation of language through political manipulation. But they always believed that language should act, in Heinrich Böll’s memorable words, as “the bulwark of freedom.” Not so Handke
George Orwell: Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali: The point is that you have here a direct, unmistakable assault on sanity and decency; and even - since some of Dali's pictures would tend to poison the imagination like a porno-graphic postcard - on life itself. What Dali has done and what he has imagined is debatable, but in his outlook, his character, the bedrock decency of a human being does not exist. He is as anti-social as a flea. Clearly, such people are undesirable, and a society in which they can flourish has something wrong with it...
Not, of course, that Dali's autobiography, or his pictures, ought to be suppressed. Short of the dirty postcards that used to be sold in Mediterranean seaport towns, it is doubtful policy to suppress anything, and Dali's fantasies probably cast useful light on the decay of capitalist civilisation. But what he clearly needs is diagnosis. The question is not so much what he is as why he is like that. It ought not to be in doubt that his is a diseased intelligence, probably not much altered by his alleged conversion, since genuine penitents, or people who have returned to sanity, do not flaunt their past vices in that complacent way. He is a symptom of the world's illness.
The important thing is not to denounce him as a cad who ought to be horsewhipped, or to defend him as a genius who ought not to be questioned, but to find out why he exhibits that particular set of aberrations
