Thread: Peace Porridge ~ Obama's premature Nobel Peace Prize

President Barack Obama's premature Nobel Peace Prize

Peace Porridge

By Claudia Rosett Thursday, October 15, 2009
Forbes

President Barack Obama’s premature Nobel Peace Prize has catalyzed a useful debate, in which the real question is less the timing of the award than what, exactly, he has won. How are we to reconcile the Nobel’s erratic list of laureates, ranging from corrupt terrorist Yasser Arafat to Soviet dissident and human rights champion Andrei Sakharov?

The explanation goes deeper than the tilt of the left-leaning Norwegian Nobel Committee’s five members, who pick the winners. The prize itself was devised and endowed by Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, a wizard with explosives and a deft hand at marketing. But, like a number of big-time philanthropists today—George Soros and Ted Turner come to mind—Nobel was a man of fundamentally muddled thinking about geopolitics and the real foundations of peace.

Born in Sweden in 1833, Nobel spent his formative years in St. Petersburg, then the capital of Czarist Russia, where his father ran a factory that turned out war materiel, such as land mines. Trained primarily as a chemist, Nobel developed a strong interest in the explosive power of nitroglycerin, which led to his invention of dynamite. In some ways, this cost him dearly; an explosion in 1864 at the Nobel factory in Stockholm killed his brother, Emil. But Nobel marketed his inventions with great success, amassing the fortune that enabled him to endow the Nobel prizes, dripping with money and pomp.

Nobel laid out the criteria for his prizes in his will, signed at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris in 1895, the year before he died. For the peace prize, the basics are spelled out in three clauses. However well intended, they make no mention whatsoever of such staples of peace as freedom and human dignity. Nobel directed that the peace prize would go “to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.â€

[quote]He can line up with the Nobel Committee’s long list of pacifist, multilateralist loser laureates. Or he can stand with the Nobel’s much shorter list of true winners, whose distinction has not been the achievement of a flimsy “peaceâ€