|
Contributors
Sally C. Pipes - Contributor
[Courtesty of Pacific Research Institute]
Sally
C. Pipes is President and CEO, Pacific
Research Institute [go to Pipes index]
 No
Belle Prize, Continued
Politics of the elite...
[Sally C. Pipes] 10/27/04
From
the far north, the heirs of the inventor of dynamite provide
the latest evidence that women are still prime candidates for
tokenism and blatant political exploitation. I refer to Elfriede
Jelinek, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize for Literature.
For
those of you who don't read her every day, Ms. Jelinek was
born in 1946 in the Austrian town of Muerzzuschlag. Only 10
women have won the Novel Prize for literature in the 103 years
since it was first awarded. The most recent was Wislawa Szymborska
of Poland in 1996.
“They
assured me that I received the prize because they value my
work, not because I am a woman,” Jelinek told reporters. There
may be some truth to that.
Ms.
Jelinek is surprise a militant left-wing feminist openly
hostile to the Bush administration. Her new play, Babel, deals with the treatment of inmates by American guards
at the Abu Ghraib prison.
It
fell to the sprightly Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of
the Nobel committee, to deny that the selection of Ms. Jelinek
amounted to political commentary. Yet it is clear that the
committee overlooked some rather startling politics on the
part of Ms. Jelinek.
In
1974, she joined the Austrian Communist Party, something nobody
committed to democracy, freedom of the press, and freedom of
speech could possibly do. She remained a member until 1991,
coincidentally the same year USSR ceased to exist. It takes
a special kind of person to show such staying power when Eastern
Europeans were fleeing at the first available opportunity.
None
of the journalists writing about her Nobel Prize were willing
to ask Jelinek about her views of the emigration policies of
East Germany, the suppression of Solidarity, and the general
persecution of writers and artists under communist regimes.
If she has any regrets, she has certainly done a good job keeping
them to herself. Jelinek still maintains that she is on the
side of the weak, not the powerful.
Oddly
enough, the subject of communism also came up with the 2004
Nobel Peace Prize. This year’s winner is another woman, Dr.
Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan environmentalist and beneficiary
of the Nobel committee's decision to expand the prize to include
environmental advocacy. Maathai is 64, a member of Kenya's
parliament, and the deputy ministry for the environment.
The
first African woman to win the prize, Maathai heads the Green
Belt movement that has planted about 30 million trees in Africa.
Dr. Maathai is also on record as saying that AIDS is a biological
weapon developed as part of an evil conspiracy to destroy black
people. She cannot, however, name those responsible for the
plot.
Lech
Walesa, a former Nobel winner, was surprised that this year’s
peace prize went to an environmentalist. He added that since
there is no more apartheid and no more communism, maybe that
was the right thing to do.
Unfortunately,
there still is communism, which rules the most populous nation
on earth, China, which has occupied the nation of Tibet since
1959. One wonders what Elfriede Jelinek thinks about that.
Perhaps next year’s winners will have a plan for China to peacefully
disengage from Tibet and stop threatening Taiwan.
Then
there is North Korea, a Stalinist prison camp with nuclear
weapons, the means to deliver them, and a loathing for America.
That regime is headed Kim Jong-Il, a certifiable megalomaniac,
and that makes perfect sense.
As
F.A. Hayek pointed out, socialism facilitates the rise of the
ruthless. Women would be better off reading Hayek’s The
Road to Serfdom than Ms. Jelinek’s opus on Abu Ghraib. For their part,
the Nobel committee should write a book or an oped piece instead
of exploiting women to make cheap political points. tRO
copyright
2004 Pacific Research Institute
§
|
