Impromptus

Righteous Nobelists, &c.

By
Narges Mohammadi, Iranian political prisoner and 2023 Nobel peace laureate, in an undated photo (Mohammadi family archive / Handout via Reuters)
On some new laureates; American presidents and the ‘blood’ of the nation; a ceaselessly hounded baker; and more

Every now and then, the Norwegian Nobel Committee gives its prize — the Nobel Peace Prize — to a political prisoner. They did it in the mid-’30s, giving the prize to Carl von Ossietzky, a prisoner of the Nazis. They did it in 2010, giving the prize to Liu Xiaobo, a prisoner of the Chinese Communists. They did it just last year: One of the three laureates was Ales Bialiatski, a prisoner in Belarus.

This year, they have done it once more. The 2023 laureate is Narges Mohammadi, who is in Evin Prison, in Tehran, one of the most “notorious,” one of the most hellish, places on earth.

All her life, Mohammadi has campaigned for freedom, democracy, and human rights. Since 1998, she has been in and out of prison (mostly in, as she is now). Her health is very bad. But she is an indomitable type, apparently.

She has always refused to leave Iran, reasoning that, if change is to come, it will come from within. Her husband and their children — twins, age 16 — live in France.

One of the twins, Ali, found out about the Nobel committee’s decision when he was in school. He checked his phone under his desk. “I couldn’t shout in class,” he said later, “but I was so happy. We are afraid for my mom every day. The Nobel prize is a sign for her to continue straight on and not abandon the fight.”

(To read about Ali, and his mother, consult this article from the New York Times.)

I hope that the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize improves conditions for Narges Mohammadi. And for Iran.

Exactly 20 years ago, the committee gave its prize to another Iranian woman, Shirin Ebadi. (Ebadi has been a mentor to Mohammadi, as I understand it.) Did that prize make a dent? Different people will give you different answers. In any case, it was a righteous thrust.

(Those interested in the Nobel Peace Prize may consult my history, Peace, They Say, here.)

• Winning this year’s prize for physiology or medicine were Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, two Americans. (The former is Hungarian-born.) In the words of the relevant committee, they won “for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.”

Thus has Nobel’s will been fulfilled. I mean, Alfred Nobel’s literal will — his last will and testament, signed in 1895. Nobel wanted his prizes to go to “those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind.”

Has the “preceding year” requirement been fulfilled? Well, close enough.

By the way, Katalin Karikó has a daughter, Susan Francia, who has won two Olympic gold medals, in rowing. A family of achievement.

• Three people were awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics. One of them is Ferenc Krausz, a Hungarian-born Austrian. Last year, he founded an organization in support of Ukraine: Science4People. He is donating his Nobel earnings to his charitable organization.

Mensch.

• The cover of The Economist is interesting: “Are Free Markets History? The rise of homeland economics.” You have to keep at it, always. When Milton Friedman (speaking of Nobelists) died in 2006, there was a lot of triumphalism. “He won! We won! Socialism is vanquished!” No, never. You always have to keep at it. The socialists, the collectivists — of all hues — never rest. Neither must the advocates of a free economy, and of freedom generally.

(To see The Economist’s cover — striking — go here.)

• Let me recommend a piece by Scott Calvert in the Wall Street Journal: “Violent Crime Is Surging in D.C. This Year: ‘We Just Stood There and Screamed.’” That article is here. Its subheading reads, “A 38% spike in homicides is upending life for residents and businesses.”

“Law and order” is a cliché. It has been much abused, by bad people — thugs, authoritarians, illiberals. But law and order is critically important. It is the sine qua non. Without it, you can have no society — no society worth having. The phrase “ordered liberty” has two words in it. The noun is important, and so is the adjective.

So important, both.

• Donald Trump was talking about the problem of illegal immigration. (Big problem.) “It’s poisoning the blood of our country,” he said.

The ex-president, and possible future president, does no favors to the cause of border enforcement and immigration reform when he talks that way.

I got to thinking about presidents and blood. I immediately thought of Reagan, who said the following, in an address to the United Nations in 1985:

America is committed to the world because so much of the world is inside America. After all, only a few miles from this very room is our Statue of Liberty, past which life began anew for millions, where the peoples from nearly every country in this hall joined to build these United States.

The blood of each nation courses through the American vein and feeds the spirit that compels us to involve ourselves in the fate of this good earth. It is the same spirit that warms our heart in concern to help ease the desperate hunger that grips proud people on the African continent. It is the internationalist spirit that came together last month when our neighbor Mexico was struck suddenly by an earthquake.

And so on.

Richard Brookhiser — author of, among other books, Founders’ Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln — pointed me to a speech that Lincoln delivered in 1858. He was speaking in Chicago.

Immigrants, said Lincoln, are “our equals in all things.” They have no connection to the Founders “by blood,” but

when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh, of the men who wrote that declaration — and so they are.

Three Republicans, three presidents, talking about “blood.” I like Lincoln and Reagan. A lot.

• Something from Scott Lincicome, of the Cato Institute:

The store in question is in Raleigh, N.C. In recent years, the concept of “America First” has been revived. But remember: America has always been world-embracing. (To a large degree, the world has been America-embracing.) It is one of our wonders, and glories.

• From NBC News: “Colorado high court to hear case against Christian baker who refused to make trans-themed cake.” (Article here.) It’s the same guy, the same baker, Jack Phillips. He has been harassed for years. I wish Ahab would find another whale. I also think of a term from football: “piling on.”

For heaven’s sake.

• “Charles Feeney, Who Made a Fortune and Then Gave It Away, Dies at 92.” That obit is here. What a life. I don’t think I’ve heard of another like it.

• Could you use some levity? Combined with some excellent social commentary, or social portraiture? I give you the brilliant — I mean, brilliant — Alexis Gay:

• Time for music — at least in the form of concert reviews. For a review of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Carnegie Hall, on the opening night of that hall’s season, go here. For a review of the CSO in the same hall on the next night, go here. For a review of the New York Philharmonic, go here.

It has been a season for orchestras (like all of them, really).

• For my fellow Michiganders — my fellow natives of the Wolverine State — some good news: A wolverine has been spotted. A real, live wolverine, out in the wild. The bad news? It’s in Idaho:

• Speaking of Michiganders: “Ellsworth Johnson, Last Survivor of a Secret Army Unit, Dies at 100.” (For the obit, go here.) That unit became the Green Berets. “Al” Johnson graduated from Central High in Grand Rapids and died in Zeeland.

Without such men, we would be lost.

Thanks for joining me, dear readers, and catch you soon.

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