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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Have a little respect

Have a little respect

by DougJ|  October 11, 20092:20 pm| 26 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads

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What really bothers me about the Hiatt/Sully Nobel for Neda campaign, beyond the fact that Nobel prizes cannot be awarded posthumously, is that it seems disrespectful of Neda’s humanity. This courageous young Iranian woman was a human being, who can no longer speak for herself. Sully and Hiatt don’t know anything about Neda, and they certainly don’t know exactly what she would say, what she would she advocate for, if she were still alive. To use her dead body as a symbol for their own political beliefs is deeply wrong.

I’ve always had the same problem with Christianity. You would like to think that if you spent your life preaching a message of peace and tolerance and were eventually executed for doing so, that people wouldn’t spend the next 2000 years waging wars and torturing people in your name.

I understand the impulse to use the dead bodies of people who died for their beliefs as tools to advance your own agenda. But it’s a temptation that should be resisted, out of respect. It’s one thing to be inspired, it’s quite another to put words in the mouths of the dead.

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26Comments

  1. 1.

    Angela

    October 11, 2009 at 2:23 pm

    Not to mention that it is both excessively disrespectful and arrogant. Maybe they should make their own Peace prize but until that time, they ought to respect the choice of the committee that actually does the work. Even if they disagree with it.

  2. 2.

    Fledermaus

    October 11, 2009 at 2:28 pm

    Don’t worry next week they’ll be back to saying the we gotta bomb Iran for it’s own good

  3. 3.

    kuvasz

    October 11, 2009 at 2:32 pm

    Its likely not the worst thing Sullivan and Hiatt have done to a corpse. Both of those dead-eyed assholes give me the creeps.

  4. 4.

    Napoleon

    October 11, 2009 at 2:32 pm

    Doug, Doug, Doug

    You need to look on the bright side. Usually Fred H., and earlier in the 90’s Sully, advocate policies that create dead bodies instead of just using the dead bodies themselves to push their point of view.

  5. 5.

    Midnight Marauder

    October 11, 2009 at 2:32 pm

    You would like to think that if you spent your life preaching a message of peace and tolerance and were eventually executed for doing so, that people wouldn’t spend the next 2000 years waging wars and torturing people in your name.

    And especially then go on to execute even more innocent people, with a disturbing knack for suppressing exculpatory evidence.

  6. 6.

    R.Mutt

    October 11, 2009 at 2:33 pm

    Sullivan also suggests Mousavi, even though the man has a terrible record of purges and violence and torture when he was Ayatollah Khomeini’s Prime Minister in the eighties (Mousavi campaigned on a “return” to the teachings of Khomeini).

  7. 7.

    Shell

    October 11, 2009 at 2:36 pm

    Maybe they should make their own Peace prize but until that time, the

    Acckkk, don’t give them any ideas! The far right put up Conservapedia when they feared Wikipedia was sullying the interwebs with it’s liberal bias. If they can threaten to re-write the Bible they’re surely capable of creating an award. One that all ‘real’ Americans can get behind.

  8. 8.

    4tehlulz

    October 11, 2009 at 2:37 pm

    Sully has nothing on Time/Yahoo, though:

    Why the Nobel Peace Prize Should Go to Nuclear Weapons

    They’re not kidding, either.

  9. 9.

    Joey Maloney

    October 11, 2009 at 2:40 pm

    You’re quite right. Martin Luther King Jr. would be crapping himself with outrage!

  10. 10.

    beltane

    October 11, 2009 at 2:49 pm

    It is very possible that Neda supported the destruction of Israel, which would make her eminently bombable in Fred Hiatt’s mind . We really don’t know. However, the fact that she is known only for her death, and not for her activism, means that her thoughts and opinions, whatever they were, are now irrelevant. She was silenced not only by the government that killed her, but by foreigners who have tried to exploit her death for their own purposes.

    Milan Kundera wrote that a love of kitsch is the hallmark of an authoritarian mindset. The fixation on Neda’s corpse certainly lies within the realm of kitsch.

  11. 11.

    Emma

    October 11, 2009 at 2:54 pm

    OK, see, I usually avoid the Sully posts, because I will never forgive the bastard for his “fifth columnist” bullshit. But it’s nice to know there’s confirmation of what a jackass he was!

  12. 12.

    The Other Steve

    October 11, 2009 at 2:56 pm

    This is the problem I’ve always had with Sully.

  13. 13.

    The Grand Panjandrum

    October 11, 2009 at 2:57 pm

    From the reports I read Neda was not a participant in the protests. She was with her music teacher and on her way home from a lesson. When the car they were traveling in could no longer no negotiate the traffic they got out to see what was going on. IIRC they were observers and not participants.

    With all due respect to Neda and her loved ones even if she was a participant in the protests, why single her out from among the many who died at the hands of these brutal and vicious animals? I can see an argument for a blanket award for all the victims, or the opposition, or something along those lines but hardly seems appropriate to single out one victim because she was unfortunate enough to have died on camera. It would cheapen her death and the deaths of all the brave souls on the streets of the cities of Iran.

  14. 14.

    HumboldtBlue

    October 11, 2009 at 3:02 pm

    So you’re shocked that a disingenuous twit like Sully is using someone else’s death to advocate for a position he supports? You don’t say. These fucking freedom fighters do an awful of typing and not much freedom fighting.

  15. 15.

    Anonymous visitor from Sadly, No!

    October 11, 2009 at 3:06 pm

    Ventriloquising the dead, as Hitchens called it, is only a bad thing when used in anti-war causes by the likes of Cindy Sherman. Do you not read enough right-wing blogs?

  16. 16.

    Warren Terra

    October 11, 2009 at 3:23 pm

    It’s also very unfair to ignore 2003 Nobel Peace Prize recipient Shirin Ebadi, a LIVING Iranian woman and rights activist, in voluntary exile since the election and publically denouncing Ahmedinejad.

  17. 17.

    Will

    October 11, 2009 at 5:04 pm

    it reminds me of when Gov. George Pataki read the Gettysburg Address at the 1st anniversary of 9/11. Talking about the victims’ sacrifice for their country on behalf of a greater cause. Its like, dude, they were going to work that day! They weren’t planning on getting a frigging airplane flown into them! Doesn’t “sacrifice” entail some sort of, you know, personal decision to actually sacrifice? Talk about disrespectful.

    As Jimmy Breslin put it, Pataki read the Address that day because “like Lincoln, he was a Republican. And tall.”

  18. 18.

    Anne Laurie

    October 11, 2009 at 6:29 pm

    @beltane:

    She was silenced not only by the government that killed her, but by foreigners who have tried to exploit her death for their own purposes.
    …
    Milan Kundera wrote that a love of kitsch is the hallmark of an authoritarian mindset. The fixation on Neda’s corpse certainly lies within the realm of kitsch.

    Quoted For Truth. Unborn babies and dead women — the Precious Moment figurines of the angry “activist” authoritarians. Us untermenschen are so loveable, once we’re no longer capable of making a nuisance of ourselves to our betters!

  19. 19.

    matoko_chan

    October 11, 2009 at 7:55 pm

    Usually I dig sully, but I find this just astonishingly cognitively dissadent.
    he links Saletan–

    In this way, the artificial hymen serves as a useful test of religious idiocy. If a $30 item that leaks fake blood violates your faith so profoundly that you must ban it, then what you have isn’t really a faith. It’s a fetish. And your fetish won’t survive globalization.

    and then he links Juan Cole–

    The Muslim Boom–
    If current demographic trends continue, moreover, the world could level off at about 9 billion persons in 2050, and nearly 1/3 of those could well be Muslim.

    Which is it? Is globalization going to extinct teh muslim, or are muslims headed for global domination?

  20. 20.

    matoko_chan

    October 11, 2009 at 7:56 pm

    Also, too.
    Sully is a WATB on this.
    The most riddickulous thing is that when the noms went out February 11….Neda wasn’t dead, and Mousavi and Karroubi hadn’t lost the election.
    Its like Sully thinks those old swede guys should have a time machine.

    The collective IQ of conservatism is tanking. Must be all those years of selective breeding for creationists.

  21. 21.

    Deborah

    October 11, 2009 at 8:50 pm

    The Sully post was particularly galling in that right there on the page was a link to James Fallows taking the WaPo to task for suggesting the prize go to a dead person when Nobels explicitly never go to dead people. I thought of writing and then said “Nah, dozens of people have already no doubt pointed this out and it will be corrected.” Because Andrew is pretty good about admitting he was wrong. But hours later it was still there.

    You might as well talk about who should get the Nobel Prize for Video Game Design, if you’re going to completely ignore the criteria.

    And fetishizing Neda is–it’s just disturbing. We can criticize Moussavi because he has an actual record to criticize; Neda’s beliefs are largely unknown. She is one of hundreds, thousands killed in the uprising. For the Iranians to make her the face of their cause, okay. But for Sully and WaPo to turn her into a symbol of peace in the world without actually knowing if she would have favored bombing both of them–it’s weird and offputting.

  22. 22.

    El Cid

    October 11, 2009 at 10:01 pm

    Hiatt is a complete right wing shitbag who would dance on the graves of any Latin Americans his death squad friends slaughtered, if he could be bothered to take the time.

    Sully is a navel-gazing ass who’s doing this not because of “Neda”, but his need to feel that he’s somehow an honorary Iranian revolutionary because he did a bunch of blog posts and wrote impassioned shit during Iranian protests.

    Maybe she did “deserve” the Nobel prize more than Obama, but neither of these shitbags have anything to say about it.

  23. 23.

    Billy

    October 12, 2009 at 1:20 pm

    I absolutely, 100% agree with your distaste for this, and I 100% agree that the fetishization of Neda is all about kitsch:

    http://images.google.com/images?q=neda%20poster&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi

Comments are closed.

Trackbacks

  1. From Pine View Farm » QOTD says:
    October 12, 2009 at 6:54 am

    […] at Balloon Juice on Christians: You would like to think that if you spent your life preaching a message of peace and tolerance and w…   […]

  2. Quote of the Day | Heretical Ideas Blog says:
    October 12, 2009 at 3:18 pm

    […] wouldn’t spend the next 2000 years waging wars and torturing people in your name.” – DougJ, on […]

  3. Below The Beltway » Blog Archive » Quote Of The Day says:
    October 13, 2009 at 1:46 pm

    […] – DougJ @ Balloon Juice […]

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