A Charter for the 99%

In the mail today arrived the current issue of Dissent, which contains a very short piece by Todd Gitlin, whose provocative assessments of Occupy I've mentioned here before. Unfortunately, Dissent has imposed a firewall for most of the essays in their print edition. Fortunately, Gitlin has posted this slightly less elaborated version of the essay at the magazine's blog. The thrust of his argument is the same. As you'll see, he draws a link between Occupy and one possible future it might assume and the Chartists of early 19th C England. This is fortuitous from my perspective not just because in a good portion of the thesis (oh those many years ago) I was preoccupied with Chartism, but also because there are other historical precedents. One is Charter 77, initiated by Václav Havel, in response to the persecution of the Plastic People of the Universe by Communist authorities in Czechoslovakia. I drew a parallel between that episode and the response to OWS on the part of progressives in the US here some time ago. A second precedent is Charter '08 which was circulated in China demanding democratic political reforms and which I mentioned here several times. His efforts at circulating Charter '08 are among the 'offenses' that brought Liu Xiaobo the ire of the Chinese authorities and praise from those who bestow the Nobel Peace Prize. That is ample political precedent. There surely are other relevant episodes. You should read Gitlin's essay.

My two cents? Any such campaign should include a demand that the right to vote be written in to the Constitution and that the now nearly moribund first amendment right to free assembly be rehabilitated.

Photographs of Silenced Critics

In The New York Times you can find this Op-Ed and this one on the political travails that have descended on Chinese novelist Mo Yan who has just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The essays warn against a too easy moralism - especially when exercised from a distance - in judging Mo Yan. And it must be said that upon winning the prize Mo Yan spoke out clearly on behalf of imprisoned Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo.

On the eve of the Prize announcement last week, Reporters Without Borders released this video clip of Liu Xia, wife of Liu Xiaobo, who herself has been under house arrest for the past two years. Liu Xia is a writer and photographer. Her detention and nearly total isolation is a case of extrajudicial harassment, likely aimed, according to this report from the BBC, at inducing her husband to agree to accepting exile. As you will discover, the clip - from which the silhouette above was excised - is silent, except for the chirping crickets.

Death and Taxes or, The Evolution of Show Trials

It is interesting to witness the evolution of show trials - back in the Stalinist days, Soviet officials were compelled to admit to various counterrevolutionary deviations. And then they were exiled to rot in the frozen waste or simply executed. If we are to judge from the recent experience of Ai Weiwei the Chinese seem to have refined the process in a contemporary way: no executions, just forced detention, a "confession," enforced silence, and then . . . a visit from the Tax Collectors. Of course, there is still the persecution of Liu Xiaobo and many other critics. So, perhaps the regime has not gotten more refined after all.

Nobel politics and Liu Xiaobo

Liu Xiaobo. Photograph: Liu Xia.

I have posted here several time about Liu Xiaobo, currently imprisoned by the Chinese regime for his political activities. Today he has won the Nobel Peace Prize. You can find reports here and here. I think this is a very worthy choice.

There has been a relatively high visibility campaign on Liu's behalf over the past year. Most notably, a group of prominent political figures circulated this statement, with another group following with this letter, publicly urging the Nobel committee to award the prize to Liu. The campaign has itself reportedly prompted an extremely negative response from the Chinese government. And it generated conflict among Chinese dissidents, with some endorsing the candidacy with others opposing it. With all due respect, I think the opponents are shortsighted. What is at issue here is not Liu's personality - whether he is flawless, a saint rather than a political actor - but the extension of democratic principles in the face not just of authoritarian politics but of market forces as well. On this point I recommend this essay by Chinese novelist Ma Jian. And disagreement is just what those principles countenance. In a sense the Nobel committee has created some political space. To the extent that the Chinese people are able to get the news it, of course, offers them encouragement. But the prize can and should be seen not just as holding the Chinese government to account but also, and importantly, as placing pressure on "our" democratic governments to endorse their own principles by speaking out on the prize. It will be interesting to see if any intrepid Western leaders take advantage of the opportunity the committee has afforded them! Any leader who speaks out would not just potentially jeopardize relations with an important trading partner, but open whomever speaks out to scrutiny of their own political practices. I am not holding my breath. Are you?

Their Criminals, and Ours

"China has no 'dissidents' . . . There is only the difference
between criminals and those who are not criminals."
~ Ma Zhaoxu, Spokesman Chinese foreign Ministry

This is a remark, reported here at The Guardian, by a Chinese government official commenting on the imprisonment of Liu Xiaobo. It might seem comical to hear regime mouthpieces, with a straight face, parsing words in hopes of rationalizing their oppressive actions. But, as I have noted here repeatedly, it makes a difference. It makes a difference to individuals like Liu Xiaobo. It has consequences for the debasement of language and thereby of politics. And it does not, of course, happen only in those despicable far away authoritarian places like China. After all, just this week David Margolis, an official at the U.S. Justice Department, engaged in the very same practice. He announced that when John Yoo and Jay Bybee flouted - systematically and knowingly - domestic and international law in their quest to rationalize the torture of people being held in U.S. custody under suspicion of partaking in terrorist activity they simply exercised 'poor judgment' instead of professional misconduct. The distinction Margolis draws basically is between being morally obtuse and being legally culpable. The news reports are here and here. We don't have war criminals in the United States, we just have eager, if slightly flawed, public servants operating under circumstances of extreme stress.*

Just to be clear about the political consequences of all this - Margolis not only lets the Bush minions off the hook here, he gives cover to the 'let's ignore the past and hope for the future' strategy that Obama is pursuing on this matter. And, not to be overlooked, he allows countries like China to continue thumbing their noses at sanctimonious rhetoric from Americans.
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* But of course, as subsequent news reports make clear, we have dramatically incomplete record for making that assessment because large numbers of official emails to and from Mr. Yoo during the relevant time period mysteriously are missing and unrecoverable.

P.S.: And if you want to see that this language game is being played not just in the halls of justice but in the mainstream media, see this post and this follow-up by Glen Greenwald at Salon.com . . . We don't have Terrorists in the U.S., we just have deranged 'tax protesters.' (Meaning, presumably, that we cannot torture the latter if they are captured?) Just ask the folks at Newsweek. Pretty remarkable!

Liu Xiaobo - Update

Well, the Chinese authorities have said "No, We really mean it!." According to this report in The New York Times an appeals court has upheld the guilty verdict and prison sentence recently imposed on Liu Xiaobo. While this would be troubling if Liu had simply been exercising his individual right to free speech, it is to my way of thinking especially problematic insofar as his "subversive" acts involved composing the list joint demands that have appeared under the title Charter '08. In short Liu and the other signatories top the Charter are not just demanding democracy in some future China, but acting democratically in the actually existing China. The report in The Times makes plain how difficult and necessary such prefigurative action remains - it notes two other cases, those of Huang Qi and Tan Zuoren, who independently have been convicted and imprisoned for speaking out critically about the government.

Liu Xiaobo

Liu Xiaobo with his wife, Liu Xia, in 2002.
(Agence France Press/Getty Images).

Following a travesty of a "trial" the Chinese Government has imprisoned Liu Xiaobo to 11 years in prison for subversion. You can read reports from The New York Times here and from The Guardian here. For more background and relevant links see this earlier post.

Liu Xioabo & Democracy in China

"I would like once more to point out our experience, one that our Chinese
friends should adopt in one way or another, the experience that one may
never reckon with success, one may never reckon with the situation
changing tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, or in ten years. Perhaps it
will not. If that is what you are reckoning with, you will not get very far.

However, in our experience, not reckoning with that did pay in the end,
we found that it was possible to change the situation after all, and those
who were mocked as being Don Quixotes, whose efforts were never going
to come to anything, may in the end and to general astonishment get their
way. I think that is important. In a peculiar way, there is both despair and
hope in this. On the one hand we do not know how things will end, and on
the other, we know they may in fact end well." - Václav Havel (March 2009).

Liu Xiabo © Private (via Human Rights Watch).

One year ago I posted on the appearance of Charter 08 a document demanding basic political reforms that, in the event, 10,000 individuals managed to sign despite the government's effort to suppress it. You can read the Charter and some some subsequent documents here at the NYRB. Both The New York Times and The Guardian are reporting (here and here) that the authorities have indicted and now are are poised to imprison Liu Xiabo, one of the central organizers of the petition. Although some other signatories initially were detained and subsequently have been harassed, Liu Xiabo is the only one under indictment. Charter 08 was modeled after Charter 77 which served as a focal point for coordinating dissent and opposition to Communist regimes in Czechoslovakia and throughout Eastern Europe. Among the signatories to Charter 77 was Václav Havel, whose words of encouragement for the Chinese opposition I lifted above.

Charter '08 ~ Chinese Dissidents

"We are approaching the twentieth anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre of pro-democracy student protesters. The Chinese people, who have endured human rights disasters and uncountable struggles across these same years, now include many who see clearly that freedom, equality, and human rights are universal values of humankind and that democracy and constitutional government are the fundamental framework for protecting these values."

Charter '08, a public statement signed by hundreds of Chinese citizens, starts with this statement and goes on to advocate these seventeen reforms - amounting essentially to a demand for constitutional democracy - that, if implemented, would fundamentally alter the Chinese regime:

1. A New Constitution.
2. Separation of powers.
3. Legislative democracy.
4. An Independent Judiciary.
5. Public Control of Public Servants.
6. Guarantee of Human Rights.
7. Election of Public Officials.
8. Rural–Urban Equality.
9. Freedom to Form Groups.
10. Freedom to Assemble.
11. Freedom of Expression.
12. Freedom of Religion.
13. Civic Education.
14. Protection of Private Property.
15. Financial and Tax Reform.
16. Social Security.
17. Protection of the Environment.
18. A Federated Republic.
19. Truth in Reconciliation.

The document as been translated and will be published in the NYRB next month. You can find a pre-publication version on the web here.