End the Nobel Peace Prize
The Trump nomination shows that peace had its chance, and blew it.
SEPTEMBER 11, 2020
Graeme Wood
Staff writer at The Atlantic
GETTY / THE ATLANTIC
Trolls are a Scandinavian invention, straight from the frigid sagas of Norse mythology, but Christian Tybring-Gjedde, a Norwegian parliamentarian, swears that he is not one. Observers of his antics this week could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. On Wednesday, he announced that he had nominated Donald J. Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. Can you name a person who has done more for peace than President Trump? Tybring-Gjedde asked me, insisting that the question was a serious one. Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, agreed. This is a hard-earned and well-deserved honor for the president, she said. Tybring-Gjedde defended his nomination on Fox News remotely, and to me in person at a café in Oslo. Do we give the prize to Greta Thunberg, for screaming about the environment? he asked. The agreement he made between Israel and the United Arab Emirates could mean peace between Israel and the Arab world. That is like the [Berlin] Wall falling down. Today the White House reportedly will announce that Bahrain, another Gulf monarchy, will recognize Israel.
If Trump wins the prize, it will be the fourth Nobel awarded for peace between Israel and its neighbors. (The announcement will come on October 9.) That will make Arab-Israeli peace mediators more successful at charming the Nobel Committee than the International Committee of the Red Cross, which has won three times in the prizes 120-year history, but still less successful than my favorite, which is no one at all. The committee has declined to award a peace prize 19 times, most recently in 1972. (The next year, in a decision so trollish it might have come out of the Prose Edda, they awarded the prize to Henry Kissinger.) 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 nominationone of hundreds, including this second from a Swedehelps show why.
Tybring-Gjedde is from Norways Progress Party, a right-wing populist answer to the established parties of the right and left. (National parliamentarians are entitled to nominate candidates for the prize. So are professors, past laureates, and various other bigwigs from international organizations.) His nomination of Trump strikes me as preposterous. Other politicians dont pick up the phone to talk, Tybring-Gjedde said. He has the ability to be down-to-earth and talk to people at all levels. Tybring-Gjedde notes that Alfred Nobel listed as one of the criteria for the winners that they encourage peace congressesand what is a peace congress but a conversation between people who are not at peace? In my view the deal between the Emirates and Israel is good for the region, but a deal between Israel and the absolute monarchs of a small Gulf state is not a deal between Israel and the people of the Emirates, let alone between Israelis and Palestinians. Trumps main diplomatic maneuver is to adopt a lickspittle posture toward authoritarians, promising them decades in power in return for a smile and a condo development. Peace does not mean a web of personal agreements between rich psychopaths.
But if the opening of dialogue, no matter how demeaning or ineffectual, and signing of deals, no matter how undemocratic, are a condition of the prize, then Tybring-Gjeddes case has merit. All the Nobel Committee really needs to know it could have learned in kindergarten. Isnt it strange, Tybring-Gjedde asked, that in school you learn that to talk to people is the best thing? And now we are told talking to the wrong people is a bad thing. Maybe [if you talk] you will notice that [the other guy] is not as bad as you think.
More:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/end-nobel-peace-prize/616300/
polmaven
(9,463 posts)they should only end the Noble Prize!
MFM008
(19,827 posts)If maggot ended WW2.
Hes hated by everyone who isnt a walking dead extra
Or right wing kook.
I hope they find someone he really hates to give it to.
hlthe2b
(102,491 posts)to someone as undeserving as Trump, the relatively rare exception being the undeserved awarding to Kissinger. GWBiush* was nominated multiple times as I recall, but certainly not awarded. I find it intensely insulting to the entire history of Nobel. Arrogance, they name is American.
Igel
(35,383 posts)1. It's a fairly privately funding activity. If it's not important, it goes on. The importance it has is the importance we give it--it should be for something done, but lately it's been for posturing and preaching. As such, it's proclaimed its lack of importance. Except as preachers. (I left my church long ago and have little use for the incessant preaching that many engage in these days. "Be pure and righteous--like me!" Bullcrap secular Puritanism.)
2. Nominations are cheap. All kinds of folk are eligible to nominate somebody. It's like having a KKKer sign a petition for Biden to appear on the ballot as a joke--or seriously. The signature doesn't invalidate the process, the petition doesn't invalidate the process.
Which brings us back the aforementioned Puritanism.