The announcement of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, set for October 11, is sure to make big news. The prize remains the most prestigious in the world. But the award has fallen into an evasive pattern, ignoring the USA’s continuous "war on terror" and even giving it tacit support.
In his 1895 will, the dynamite inventor and ammunition magnate Alfred Nobel specified that Norway’s parliament should elect a five-member committee for awarding the prize to "champions of peace." Yet the list of recent Nobel peace laureates is notably short on such champions. Instead, the erstwhile politicians on the Norwegian Nobel Committee have largely bypassed the original purpose of the prize.
Despite all its claims of independence, the Oslo-based Nobel Committee is enmeshed in Norwegian politics. The global prestige of the Nobel Peace Prize has obscured the reality that its selection committee is chosen by leaders of Norway’s main political parties – and, as a member of NATO, Norway is deeply entangled in the military alliance.
When the Nobel Peace Prize went to President Obama in 2009, he was in the midst of drastically escalating the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, in tandem with the rest of NATO. The same prize went to the European Union in 2012, a year after many of its member states intervened with military force in Libya. On both occasions, in effect, the Nobel Committee bestowed a "good war-making seal of approval."
Since 2001, the Nobel Peace Prize has been on a prolonged detour around the US government’s far-flung warfare, declining to honor anyone who had challenged any of it anywhere in the world. But the Nobel Committee has done more than just ignore peace activism seeking to stop U.S.-led war efforts. By giving the Peace Prize to Obama and the E.U., the committee has implicitly endorsed those military efforts as part of a rhetorical process that conflates war-making with peace-making. Orwell’s 1984 specter of "War Is Peace" looms uncomfortably large.
At times, the Peace Prize has earned goodwill in NGO circles by honoring humanitarian work that is laudable but not directly related to peace. And so far in this century, when the Nobel Committee has focused the prize on human rights, it has danced around Uncle Sam’s global shadow. The Peace Prize has gone only to dissidents in countries where governments are in conflict with Washington – such as Shirin Ebadi of Iran in 2003 and Liu Xiaobo of China in 2010 – while failing to honor any of the profuse activism against severe abuses by U.S.-backed governments.
It was not always this way. During previous decades, the annual announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize might alternately please or enrage the top leaders in the capital of a world power. In 1983, the awarding of the prize to Poland’s Solidarity leader Lech Walesa infuriated the Kremlin. When the 1992 prize went to Rigoberta Menchu, an indigenous foe of U.S.-supported tyrants killing Guatemalan civilians in large numbers, it was a much-needed rebuke to Washington.
Yes, some Peace Prize choices were dubious or worse. After an Orwellian one, the caustic songwriter Tom Lehrer commented: "Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize." In an exercise of absurd equivalency, the Nobel Committee had given the 1973 prize to Kissinger and North Vietnam’s negotiator Le Duc Tho.
The 1980s brought the Peace Prize to brave activists like Adolfo Perez Esquivel of Argentina and Desmond Tutu of South Africa, as well as International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. In 1996, longtime opponents of Indonesia’s U.S.-backed genocidal occupation of East Timor had reason to cheer when the Nobel Peace Prize went to East Timorese heroes Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo and Jose Ramos-Horta. The next year also brought good news when the prize went to Jody Williams and the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.
But in the "war on terror" world of this century, the Nobel Committee – far from an independent, evenhanded course – has steered the Peace Prize away from terrain where the US government and its allies might appear to be anything other than noble peace-seekers. Relying on such a broken moral compass, the mission to assist "champions of peace" with the Nobel Peace Prize has lost its way.
Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books includeWar Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. Information on the documentary based on the book is at www.WarMadeEasyTheMovie.org.
I nominate Vladimir Putin, but I doubt he will get it.
I'd be surprised if Putin accepted it anyway.
If he rejected it, it would at least show that he has more class than BHO.
Giving Putin a peace prize is like giving Ehud Barack Obama, George Warmonger Bush and the bushmen and other current and former world leaders that don't deserve it. Putin has caused wars in Chechnya and other former Islamic Republics of the USSR. just as many NATO countries have caused wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya and are thinking of starting wars in Syria and Iran.
I agree, somewhat, but HOW has Putin caused wars in Chechnya, which is in RUSSIA?!
Yeah, Chechnya was a civil war which began under Yeltsin.
I can't think of any wars Putin has actually started. The Georgian War was under Medvedev and Russia didn't exactly start that one. If they do give it to Putin, at the very least we could argue that at least he actually did DO SOMETHING in the case of Syria. BHO literally had done nothing when the award was given to him.
I Hope it is Gene Sharp. My prediction for Last year was He. But it did not came True. This Year I also Predict Mr Gene Sharp. Gene Sharp is Senior Scholar at the Albert Einstein Institution and founded the Institution in 1983. He holds a B.A. and an M.A. from Ohio State University and a D.Phil. in political theory from Oxford University. He is also Professor Emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. For nearly thirty years he held a research appointment at Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs. He is the author of various books, including The Politics of Nonviolent Action (1973), Gandhi as a Political Strategist (1979), Social Power and Political Freedom (1980), Making Europe Unconquerable (1985), Civilian-Based Defense (1990), and From Dictatorship to Democracy (1993, 2002, and 2003; downloadable as a free e-book here). His most recent book is Waging Nonviolent Struggle: Twentieth Century Practice and Twenty-First Century Potential. His writings have been published in more than thirty languages. http://www.aeinstein.org/organizations9173.html
Albert Einstein Institution – About AEI > Staff & Board – 07 Gene Sharp http://www.aeinstein.org
At least Le Duc Tho had the decency to decline his, so that he might not be connected with Kissinger.
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Even though the government has acknowledged that the secretive program has exceeded its legal limits, violating Americans’ Fourth Amendment constitutional rights, the Obama administration aggressively pushed for its full renewal.