“Peace” is such “a slippery word and concept.” I have quoted from the subtitle of an essay I wrote, long ago. The essay was adapted from a book of mine, Peace, They Say, a history of the Nobel Peace Prize. I very much appreciated what John Bolton said, in his review for The Weekly Standard: The book was not only a history but also a “philosophical reflection on the nature of ‘peace’ in modern times.”
This year, two great organizations and one great man have won the Nobel Peace Prize. The man is Ales Bialiatski, a Belarusian political prisoner. I first wrote about him, and other Belarusian freedom advocates, in 2011 (here). One of the organizations is Memorial, the Russian human-rights group that was outlawed by the Kremlin last year. I wrote about Memorial shortly after (here).
The second organization? The Center for Civil Liberties, in Ukraine. Its director is Oleksandra Matviichuk, a Ukrainian human-rights lawyer. I interviewed her last Monday, when she came to New York for a session of the Oslo Freedom Forum. On Friday, the prize for her center — and Memorial and Bialiatski — was announced.
On the homepage, I have excerpts from our interview (here). And I would like to highlight one answer. I asked Ms. Matviichuk, “How important to Ukraine is the support of the United States?” She answered,
I am trying to find the word in English. I know it in Ukrainian. It’s extremely important, tremendously important. I am a human-rights lawyer who knows pretty well the U.N. system, the EU system, the Council of Europe system, etc. I have had a lot of experience in different international legal systems. And there is no mechanism, no legal instrument, that can liberate even one person from Russian captivity. The Russians kill us, and the United States provides us weapons. Maybe all this is weird to hear from a human-rights lawyer, but I want our people to survive, and that’s why we are grateful for the United States, and why we ask for long-range weapons in sufficient amounts, because now we have a window of opportunity to liberate more Ukrainian territories, as we have been doing since September of this year.
Are those the words of a peace laureate? Or of the director of an organization that is a peace laureate? Those are the words, certainly, of a realist — and of someone who desires the kind of peace worth having.
This is a big, big subject, wrestled with by mankind since the beginning. Allow me to quote a little from the above-mentioned essay, about peace, or “peace,” and its slipperiness:
There are people who think that nothing is worse than war, that war is the worst thing in all the world. Said Benjamin Franklin, “There was never a good war or a bad peace.” In 1938, Clive Bell, the Bloomsbury figure, said, “A Nazi Europe would be, to my mind, heaven on earth compared with Europe at war.” As a rule, peace is better than war, sure. But it can get a little tricky: Which is worse, genocide in Sudan (or elsewhere) or some war whose purpose is to put an end to it? But then you might say, a condition of genocide is not a condition of peace in the first place.
You are familiar with the slogan, “War is not the answer.” But it is the answer to some questions, of course — as when it put paid to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Emerson said, “Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.” A fine sentiment, but unfortunately not true — or not strictly true.
A little more:
During the Cold War, those words, peace and freedom, were used a lot — more than in most eras. Soviet officials were very, very big on “peace.” If Western countries called themselves “freedom-loving nations,” the Soviets referred to themselves and their bloc as “peace-loving nations.” Touché! The World Peace Council was one of the most prominent Communist fronts. The Soviets named their space station “Mir,” meaning Peace (and also World). What the Americans had was Space Station Freedom — which after the collapse of the Soviet Union evolved into the International Space Station, in which Russia collaborated.
Maybe a speck more:
Margaret Thatcher said, “We speak of peace, yes, but whose peace? Poland’s? Bulgaria’s? The peace of the grave?” And I give you a leader from a much earlier period, Hungary’s Kossuth: “I am a man of peace — God knows how I love peace. But I hope I shall never be such a coward as to mistake oppression for peace.”
There is scarcely a more important subject than peace and freedom, war and peace, war and peace and freedom . . . The heading of my interview with Oleksandra Matviichuk is “Freedom Fighter.” She is. But where does peace enter into it? Since 2014, she has interviewed hundreds of people, hundreds of Ukrainians, who have been trapped in territories occupied by Russian forces. She has heard the horrors they have been through. She has seen their maimed bodies. (One woman had her eyes gouged out with a spoon.) Ms. Matviichuk has one aim in mind: the peace that will come only when the invader, and would-be destroyer, is repelled.
She says,
. . . we are fighting for freedom in all senses: the freedom to be an independent state, not a colony of Russia; the freedom to be Ukrainians, to have our own language and culture, as other nations of the world do; the freedom to have a democratic choice — a chance to build a country where the judiciary is independent, human rights are protected, the government is accountable, and the police serve the people.
Such an interesting woman — and such an interesting prize, the Nobel Peace Prize. You could write any number of books on it.