Most folks in the U.S. (okay, the whole world, for that matter) concede that the Nobel Peace Prize is a farce much if not most of the time since it is far more political than by way of recognizing people who have contributed significantly to the cause of effecting world peace, as if there ever could be such a thing. This year is no different except for the strange twist that it has gone to a U.S. citizen for the third time in the last seven years. The far stranger twist is that the three Americans to whom the prize has been awarded have done nothing toward effecting peace of any kind.
In 2002, the prize was awarded to former president Jimmy Carter, whose only contribution to the notion of peace was his arranging of the meeting of Sadat and Begin at Camp David in 1978. Sadat, however, had already been to Jerusalem in 1977 and negotiating had been an ongoing thing right into 1978. There would have been an agreement between Israel and Egypt with or without Camp David, especially since Sadat knew that Egypt could never overcome Israel and that he wanted the Sinai back in Egyptian hands. The Israelis had taken it in the Yom Kippur dustup in 1973 and, indeed, were poised to invade Egypt when the U.S.(Nixon) made it plain that such would not happen. Also, Israel wanted use of the Suez Canal.
Perhaps the weirdest award in Nobel history was made in 2007 to former U.S. vice president Al Gore and the UN agency IPCC (climate control). The climate (or global warming) was certainly a subject for the scientific community, not people like Gore, who had no scientific background and whose film An Inconvenient Truth had been so discredited that school teachers in Great Britain could not show it to their students without explaining its many errors. The IPCC was an alarmist gaggle of supposed experts who made such dire predictions (beaches and islands going underwater, for instance) that people were scared to death.
Since the Gore/IPCC award was made, the credible scientific community has doggedly taken apart the claim of global-warming as a manmade thing as well as the now-discredited consequent climate-change as a result of it. Indeed, this community of climatologists and scientists has proven conclusively that the earth has been cooling since at least 2003 and that the warming that has taken place since roughly 1980 has been due to changes in the earth-sun relationship, not to any greenhouse-gas impact. Actually, for purposes of agriculture there is more need for carbon dioxide, not less.
The 2007 award was a slap in the face to the U.S., not a signer of the Kyoto Treaty for the justifiable reasons that climate is a non issue and, more importantly for the U.S. economy, that neither China, the greatest polluter, nor India, not far behind, is required to do anything. The U.S., on the other hand, as well as other industrialized nations, is required under the treaty to make enormous, costly sacrifices. The award was so illogical as to make the Nobel Committee look like an opportunistic, vengeful, sophomoric gaggle of either people with an anti-American agenda or just plain dunderheads.
In both the Carter and Gore years, the award was contrived to use duped Americans to dupe the U.S., though the U.S populace, in the main, is not too dumb to recognize the obvious. The U.S. House, on the other hand, without reading the some 1300 pages of it, passed a stupid cap-and-trade bill some weeks ago. It will never fly in the Senate, especially since the science has been proven to be screwy.
So...the latest Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to an American president who has gone out of his way to speak or imply ill of the previous administration and has made it a point both at home and abroad to apologize, seemingly, for the very existence of this country. He has spoken about internationalism to the expense of nationalism, something that tickles the ears of the Europeans, at least the ones in Norway, where the winners are decided. He has no record of any accomplishments that have made for peace, and if the award is supposed to cover his accomplishments of 2008, he has been rewarded for winning a political contest, nothing more.
The Nobel prizes in the fields of the sciences continue to be valid because the accomplishments are quantifiable. In the fields of literature and peace, the prizes are awarded on a purely subjective basis, so there can be weird surprises in those areas. The peace prize is often, if not most often, based on the political agenda of the judges. The U.S. is not liked in Europe, with Britain as a possible exception, so when an American gets that prize he/she gets it for political reasons only, making the judges look unbelievably foolish. Disgusting!
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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