Johan Norberg: The Left and Vargas Llosa
The award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to liberal writer Mario Vargas Llosa engendered much praise from libertarians and very little criticism that I’ve noticed. But I wasn’t reading the Swedish newspapers, where, according to Cato senior fellow Johan Norberg, lefties went ballistic at the awarding of the prize to a non-leftist:
In Sweden’s biggest newspaper, Aftonbladet, three writers ripped him to pieces on the first day after the announcement of the Nobel Prize. One wrote that the prize was a victory for the Swedish right; one said it was a victory for the Latin American authoritarian right; one accused him of being not just ‘neo-liberal’ but also ‘macho’ (what Vargas Llosa did not know is that it is only acceptable for female authors to write about sex nowadays; when men do it, apparently, it is chauvinist and distasteful).
Aftonbladet’s Martin Ezpeleta even claimed that the prize was a victory for racists, because Vargas Llosa once wrote an essay attacking the ideology of multiculturalism. That the same essay also called for a more open immigration policy meant nothing to Ezpeleta – until others called his bluff and he quietly omitted the charge of ‘racism’ from his article and pretended that it had never been there….
The attempts to portray Vargas Llosa as a supporter of the authoritarian, conservative right in Latin America are just embarrassing. The only piece of evidence in the Aftonbladetarticle was that he supported Sebastián Piñera in Chile’s last presidential election – which doesn’t make sense in any way since Piñera is a moderate, democratic politician who has attacked the authoritarian tradition of Chile’s right and voted against Pinochet in the referendum on his rule in 1988.
Vargas Llosa’s attempt to hold all rulers to the same standards is what makes the claim that he betrayed the left so revealing. A lot of intellectuals have condemned rightist dictatorships in Peru and Chile, and a lot of intellectuals have condemned leftist dictatorships in Cuba and Nicaragua, but few have, like Vargas Llosa, condemned them both….
Mario Vargas Llosa’s Nobel Prize
The news that Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize for literature has gratified me beyond words. The award is a huge boost for liberty in Latin America. Through his literary genius, prolific essays, and ceaseless activism, Vargas Llosa long established himself as perhaps Latin America’s most well-known public intellectual, and certainly its most well-known classical liberal. For decades, he has used his ability to reach a mass audience to promote the principles of the free society, becoming the region’s foremost advocate of democratic capitalism.
It was not always so. In the 1960s when his first novels appeared to wide acclaim, Vargas Llosa was representative of the Latin American intellectual establishment in his admiration of the Cuban revolution and his advocacy of radical leftist politics. Even then, however, anti-authoritarianism and a concern for the individual were prominent themes in his novels. In an example of independent thinking that characterizes Vargas Llosa’s commitment to the truth, he broke with the intellectual establishment in the early 1970s, strongly denouncing Fidel Castro’s revolution and turning away from statism in general. His increasingly forceful defense of individual liberty was strengthened by his discovery, by the 1970s, of the work of Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek, whom Vargas Llosa cites as one of the three biggest intellectual influences on his thinking (the others being Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin)
An extremely versatile communicator, Vargas Llosa has explored Latin America’s deepest social problems and has demystified the utopian vision of demagogic leaders so common in Latin American history. A major theme of his 1981 novel, The War of the End of the World, for example, was that collectivist promises of a better life, or happiness, can only end in fanaticism—especially if various brands of collectivism are pitted against each other—precisely because civilization depends on the primacy of the individual and a close regard to the real world as opposed to dogmatic reliance on abstract but erroneous ideas of how the world might work.
The Politics of Mario Vargas Llosa
Marie Arana, the Peruvian-born former editor of the Washington Post’s Book World, writes a thoughtful and moving analysis of Mario Vargas Llosa’s work that has just been awarded a Nobel Prize. She explores at some length Vargas Llosa’s political views and whether they might have prevented him from winning the prize much earlier. But there’s one word that curiously doesn’t appear in her article. Curious, because it’s a very common word, the word that describes his political philosophy, a word that he himself uses frequently. You may want to read the article and see if you can find the missing word before reading further here.
Arana writes:
When asked by an editor several years ago why the prize had eluded him, he replied with a wry smile that he was hardly the politically correct choice.…
According to the Nobel committee, he has won the award “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.”
For years, the gossip was that Stockholm would never recognize him because his politics were conservative, though many of his positions — on gay rights, for example — have been to the left of center.…
For all his bracing work decrying totalitarian strongmen, Vargas Llosa is no radical revolutionary. He has been described as an intransigent neoliberal, a man with unshakable convictions that his country and people need strict economic discipline, membership in the world market and tough austerity measures at home.
What’s the missing word? Give the article one more read.
Congratulations, Mario Vargas Llosa
On behalf of all of my colleagues at the Cato Institute, I warmly congratulate Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa for having won this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. Mario has distinguished himself not only as one of the world’s greatest novelists, but also as Latin America’s most well-known classical liberal—a champion of democratic capitalism who has never been afraid of speaking truth to power. His essays and tireless activism have educated millions of people in Latin America and inspired new generations to cherish and cultivate a culture of liberty. His vision of a modern Latin America has also informed Cato’s work in the region and beyond. We are honored and grateful that Mario has long been a generous friend of Cato’s and look forward to continuing that friendship in pursuit of advancing the liberal principles we share.
“We Don’t Want Venezuela to Become a Totalitarian Communist State”
“We don’t want Venezuela to become a totalitarian communist state,” declared Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa yesterday in Caracas at the opening of a major conference organized by the market-liberal think tank, CEDICE. I’m in Venezuela this week with my Cato colleagues Juan Carlos Hidalgo and Gabriela Calderon to participate in the event and to run a seminar for 60 students and young leaders from Venezuela, which took place earlier this week.
Vargas Llosa’s concern is not about some remote possibility. Nor is it the opinion of an isolated intellectual detached from reality. His comments received sustained applause from the over-flow crowd of the 600 people in attendance and he has been mobbed by the press since he arrived here yesterday. Venezuela is not yet a full fledged dictatorship, evidenced by the fact that we are meeting here with leading liberal intellectuals from the region. But the environment of intolerance, arbitrary rule, and state vilification of anybody who disagrees with Hugo Chavez’s march toward socialism has worsened at an alarming rate in recent months.
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