2024-10-20 11:41:00
At the end of the Frankfurt Book Fair, Polish-American journalist <a href="http://www.time.news/kremlin-critic-awarded-german-booksellers-peace-prize-dw-06-25-2024/" title="Kremlin critic awarded German Booksellers Peace Prize – DW – 06/25/2024″>Anne Applebaum accepted the Peace Prize. In his speech he warned against false appeasements. The West must remain dangerous.
How to award a peace prize to a person who requests arms supplies to Ukraine? This question was formulated rhetorically by Karin Schmidt-Friderichs during the ceremony in the Paulskirche, and the head of the German Book Trade Association gathered all the critical voices that had been heard previously – more quietly than loudly. The reaction to the decision to award this year’s American Peace Prize of the German Book Trade to Polish historian Anne Applebaum.
The renowned prize has been awarded at the traditional conclusion of every Frankfurt Book Fair since 1950. Writers, historians, politicians and journalists: many different personalities have received the prize, and it has never been a pacifist prize. Already in 1983 Manès Sperber spoke about the war, the Cold War and the resulting lack of freedom for countries such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.
Irina Scherbakova, the Russian woman living in exile in Germany who rose to fame through her work for the human rights organization Memorial, delivered Applebaum’s eulogy. In it he recalled the West’s unfortunate tradition of refusing to accept the truth. The awareness that educational efforts fall on deaf ears or even hostility has accompanied the Memorial organization – which was dedicated to fighting Stalinist and Soviet crimes and is no longer allowed to operate in Putin’s Russia as of 2021 – from its founding until to its ban.
Anne Applebaum also did research at Memorial while working on her book about the Gulag, which later won the Pulitzer Prize, and as a result perhaps the best popular writing on the nature of state terror was created. Scherbakova praised all of Applebaum’s books and their clarity on the development of Russia under Putin: “Applebaum is a real ally for us, because in all his publications and speeches he tried not only to warn, but to convince people that the ‘The West must be ready to defend itself, in the true sense of the word.’
The network of dictatorships
In his acceptance speech, Applebaum recalled the system by which an authoritarian government is obtained and established: “The connection between autocracy and imperial wars of conquest has a method.” soberly: “Russian schools today train children to become soldiers. Russian television foments hatred towards Ukrainians and portrays them as subhuman. The Russian economy has been militarized: about 40% of government spending now goes on armaments. By purchasing missiles and ammunition, Russia does business with Iran and North Korea, two of the most brutal dictatorships in the world.”
Applebaum’s speech also cited Thomas Mann, George Orwell and Carl von Ossietzky, but overall he was more pragmatist than expert in the history of ideas and appealed to our common sense: “How should we react to the return of one form of government? that we thought had disappeared from this continent?” The crux of Applebaum’s sermon before the Paulskirche and the television audience was to the point that “the call for peace is not always a moral argument.” On the contrary, says Applebaum: “We have known for almost a century that the appeal to pacifism in the face of an aggressive dictatorship is often nothing more than pacification and acceptance of that dictatorship”.
And then Applebaum makes explicit reference to Manès Sperber, Peace Prize winner in 1983, and his argument against the false morality of the pacifists of his time: “Whoever believes and wants to make people believe that a disarmed, neutral and capitulating Europe is safe for in all futures there can be peace, he is wrong and leads others astray.” Applebaum with Sperber: Sometimes “unfortunately you have to become dangerous yourself to keep the peace.”
Applebaum concluded his acceptance speech with a call to supply arms to Ukraine. Because this is “the real lesson of German history: not that Germans will never be allowed to wage war again, but that they have a special responsibility to defend freedom and to take risks in doing so.”
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