09/12/2020
Trump has been brokering peace deals both in Kosovo and in the Middle East, and he has been much less likely to start wars than any predecessor since Ronald Reagan, so two separate people have nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize.
This has led Graeme Wood, right, in the Atlantic to call for cancelling peace forever, as it’s tainted by Trump. Wood [Tweet him] writes
Giving the peace prize to no one at all is a tradition the Nobel Committee should revive, perhaps on a permanent basis. The record of achievement of the peace laureates is so spotty, and the rationales for their awards so eclectic, that the committee should take a long break to consider whether peace is a category coherent enough to be worth recognizing. Peace had its chance, and blew it. The Trump nomination — one of hundreds, including this second from a Swede — helps show why.
"The record of achievement of the peace laureates is so spotty, and the rationales for their awards so eclectic, that the committee should take a long break to consider whether peace is a category coherent enough to be worth recognizing," @gcaw writes: https://t.co/kMGZGzTaki
— The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) September 11, 2020
Now the first thing you need to know about nominations for the Nobel Prize is that they're literally meaningless. The Prize allows nominations to come from, among other categories, any social science professor, which is how Death Row cop-killer Stanley "Tookie" Williams got nominated for some post-conviction apparent repentance and activism. (He leant his name to a lot of children’s books saying "don’t join gangs" but was executed anyway.)
But Wood is right that the Nobel Peace Prize is generally worthless. A typical Leftist, he hates it that Kissinger got the Nobel in for ending the Vietnam War. He doesn’t mention that Kissinger shared it with Le Duc Tho, who was the one who violated the Peace Accords by invading and occupying South Vietnam.
Years ago when John Derbyshire pointed out that the science, literature, and economics Nobel winners were an "Ice People Club" i.e., whites and Asians, with no black winners at all, I wrote that even before the age of diversity (which gave Barack Obama an Affirmative Action Nobel on his election) the Nobel Peace Prize has always been the Special Olympics of the Nobel World. You don’t have to achieve peace, you just have to mean well.
Here’s my list:
Both prizes awarded for, basically, preventing the First World War, which went ahead and happened anyhow.
All those prizes were for actions tending to prevent the Second World War, which went ahead and happened anyhow.
Closer to our own time, we read that
Shared a prize for making peace in Vietnam. Two years later, North Vietnam, deploying Soviet arms and Democratic congressmen, invaded and conquered South Vietnam.
Shared a prize for bringing peace to Northern Ireland, which peace was brought again in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, (basically a surrender). After some more violence, George Bush brought peace to Northern Ireland once more in 2007, and in 2009, when I wrote this Hillary Clinton was in Belfast, bringing it yet again. As of 2020, the Guardian had a headline saying "Ireland accuses Boris Johnson of trying to sabotage peace process" just yesterday.
Shared a prize for bringing peace to South Africa — which is not notably peaceful.
Solved the problems of the Middle East. No comment.
One I left out at the time: Martin Luther King, Jr. He got the Nobel in 1964 to celebrate his attempts to bring racial peace and justice to the US. Look out your window — if it’s not boarded up — and see if that worked.
So, I said in 2009, if Obama doesn’t deserve the Nobel, and he doesn’t, he’s not the first. And in 2011, when Michael Moore demanded Obama give back the Nobel Prize because of his Prize for making war on Libya, I wrote "I don’t see why he should, nobody else ever does."
So here’s my suggestion: Trump should thank the people who nominated him, but tell the Nobel Peace Prize people he doesn’t want their prize. He doesn’t need the money, and he can tell them he doesn’t want the approval of the kind of people who vote for, or get these prizes.
For added effect, he could also say he doesn’t want to be associated with failure, and mention Obama by name.
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