The Orwellian Noble Peace Prize Why we shouldn’t waste our time on the Nobel committee’s Newspeak. by Bruce Thornton
https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-orwellian-noble-peace-prize/
Last week nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize were announced, and the nominees were typical of the Prize’s history. A perusal of past winners reveals that the majority of prizes are for good intention, moralizing internationalism and its institutions, short-lived peace treaties, feckless disarmament, and any choice that gratifies global anti-Americanism.
And let’s not forget terrorists and their enablers included in this year’s nominees: the United Nations’ Palestinian refugee agency, the International Court of Justice, and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. All three reflect the Prize’s long history of promulgating globalism and the “rules-based international order” that has serially failed to deter aggression.
The Wall Street Journal’s profile of this year’s nominees is a must read. Take the International Court of Justice, which took up South Africa’s specious charge of “genocide” against Israel, a despicable lie, given that South Africa seems unconcerned that Hamas’ founding charter explicitly calls for the genocide of Israel’s Jews. Worse, the ICJ “ruled that Israel ‘must immediately halt its military offensive’ in Rafah and other areas ‘which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.’”
The other two nominees–– United Nations’ Palestinian refugee agency, and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres––are just as morally idiotic, and obviously hostile to Israel and indifferent to the Israeli people. Employees of the UNRWA joined in Hamas’ butchery, and Secretary General Guterres claimed that Hamas’ violence, rape, and murder did “‘not come in a vacuum,’ but instead was grown from a ‘long-standing conflict, with a 56-year long occupation and no political end in sight.’”
The moral equivalence between the victims and murderers, like the lie “occupation,” makes a mockery of the UN’s claims to serve justice and peace. As the Journal concludes, “These aren’t peace makers. They’re apologists for war makers.”
Fortunately, the Peace Prize was awarded to Japan’s Nihon Hidankyo, an organization comprising atomic-bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki who lobby to rid the world of nuclear weapons. This choice expresses the Nobel Committee’s preference for good intentions and impossible disarmament dreams, but it’s much more respectable and less morally offensive than celebrating enablers of terrorist murderers.
But the Nobel Peace Prize has before legitimized not just the enablers, but the terrorists themselves. In 1994, Yasser Arafat, head of the terrorist Palestinian Liberation Organization, shared the prize with Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin “for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East.” The fruit of that collaboration between the terrorist and two leaders of a liberal democratic state was the doomed Oslo Accord signed in 1993.
Typical of the Prize’s premature celebrations of “peace,” terrorist attacks against Israelis were about the same as the pre-Oslo toll, and continued escalating. In 2000, Arafat turned down a “peace package” offering most of what Arafat said the Palestinians wanted, and instead began the Second Intifada that murdered 1000 Israelis.
This rewarding of “diplomatic engagement” is an important component of the Nobel Prize’s foreign policy preferences for the globalist “rules-based international order,” and its distrust of a realist foreign policy that acknowledges the primacy of national interests and, humanity’s lust for power and dominance, no matter how many prize-winning pacts and treaties have serially failed to resolve conflicts. There are, of course, some Prizes that acknowledge success–– such as the 1998 prize to John Hume and David Trimble “for their efforts to find a peaceful solution to the conflict in Northern Ireland,” efforts that produced a peace that still holds today. But most of such Prizes have failed like the Oslo Accord.
Consider the history of Peace Prizes after World War I. In 1919, Woodrow Wilson won the Prize “for his role as founder of the League of Nations.” The next year Léon Bourgeois, a leftist French government official who served in numerous offices, “for his longstanding contribution to the cause of peace and justice and his prominent role in the establishment of the League of Nations.” In 1922, Fridtjof Nansen, a Norwegian explorer and statesman, won “for his leading role in the repatriation of prisoners of war, in international relief work and as the League of Nations’ High Commissioner for refugees.”
Also in the Twenties, two much celebrated multination treaties were negotiated in order to normalize Germany and put the Great War behind Europe. Both the Locarno Treaties in 1925, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact in 1929 were awarded Prizes for their principal architects. The delusional idealism of both pacts is obvious in the terms of the Kellogg-Briand agreement. The contracting parties “condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it, as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another,” and “agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts . . . shall never be sought except by pacific means.”
These awards for good intentions were repudiated in the following years, when three members of the League of Nations, and signatories of the Locarno Treaties and the Kellogg-Briand pact––Japan, Italy, and Germany––violated the terms of the agreements, and simply walked away from the League. All that was needed to ignite World War II was yet another act of feckless and delusional “diplomatic engagement,” the infamous Munich agreement in 1938.
Yet despite those fruitless Prizes, “diplomatic engagement” and negotiations still are favorites when selecting winners. Another notable example of failed “diplomatic engagement” that ended badly are the Prizes give to Henry Kissinger and North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho for negotiating a cease-fire in 1973. Le Duc Thos declined the award, no doubt knowing the cease-fire was merely a tactical feint in the North’s plan to continue the war, which ended in the U.S.’s shameful abandonment of South Vietnam in 1975.
Not just diplomacy, but the multinational institutions and their functionaries are favorite beneficiaries. Thus, this year’s nomination of the UNRWA is part of a long tradition of the five-member Norwegian Nobel Committee awarding the Prize to the UN and its Secretary General, along with UN agencies that are frequent winners. In 2001, the Prize went to the UN and its Secretary General Kodi Annan, “for their work for a better organized and more peaceful world.” Notice again how aspirations rather than concrete achievements are rewarded.
Other favorites are NGO’s like the International Atomic Energy Agency and other organizations focused on controlling or eliminating certain kinds of armaments such as landmines and chemical weapons. But such ambitious projects are like Jonathan Swifts’ laws: “Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.” These organizations can lobby and hector national governments, but like the UN itself, have no power of enforcement.
Other prizes for the UN have been awarded for its agencies that frequently fail and make conflicts worse. In 1988 the UN’s Peacekeeping Forces won the Prize “for preventing armed clashes and creating conditions for negotiations.” How did that worked out in southern Lebanon, where the peacekeeping forces were deployed in 1978, becoming a launching pad both for terrorist incursions, and Hezbollah’s continuous barrages of missiles into Israel? About as well as the subsequent UN Security Council’s Resolution 1701 in 2006 forbidding such attacks ––a tacit admission that the earlier deployment of peacekeepers was a failure. Again, the Prize more frequently rewards aspirations and posturing rather than results.
Finally, another blot on the Prize’s reputation is that it’s often awarded to anti-American individuals and organizations in Europe, and to oikophobic progressives rather than conservatives in America. Take this notorious example: in 1990, a year before the Soviet Union finally collapsed from its chronic economic failures, and Ronald Reagan’s realist policies and military build-up the Soviets couldn’t afford to match, the Noble Peace prize went to USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev, “for the leading role he played in the radical changes in East-West relations.” In fact, his only “role” was accepting the inevitable fate resulting from Ronald Reagan’s realist policies, the actual “leading role.”
Progressive Americans, on the other hand, who endorse and promote globalism’s erosion of national sovereignty, and the anti-national “global community” delusions, are welcome. Hence, it’s no surprise that Jimmy Carter, the most ineffective foreign policy president in U.S. history, in 2002 won the Peace Prize “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”
Again, it’s not about concrete achievements, but paying homage to the globalist “international rules-based order.” In fact, Carter was a defeatist and apologist for the U.S. He set the tone in his first Inaugural Address, when he confessed the nation’s “recent mistakes,” counseled Americans not to “dwell on remembered glory,” and reminded citizens that “even our great nation has its recognized limits,” and can only “simply do our best.” Such defeatist rhetoric no doubt pleased the Europeans and the Soviets with a de facto rejection of American exceptionalism. Naïve promotion of human rights and disarmament, not defending our Constitution and national security and sovereignty, was Carter’s mission.
Finally, one can’t end an exposure of the Nobel Peace Prize’s function as a press agent for the shibboleths of globalism and the “international community,” without mentioning the Prize bestowed on Barack Obama in 2009 after only a few months in office, “for his decades [?] of untiring efforts to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”
Once again, campaign rhetoric rather than achievement sufficed to “earn” this prestigious honor. In 2007 Obama had published an article in Foreign Affairs that comprised a panegyric to “diplomatic engagement” that the U.S. allegedly had neglected for decades. He called the war in Iraq a “morass” from which American forces should be withdraw before the dreaded “escalation” would hastens a looming disaster. In 2011 Obama did just that, only to send our force back a few years later when ISIS threatened to conquer Iraq.
Also music to globalist ears, Obama promised “to reinvigorate American diplomacy” and “to rebuild the alliances, partnerships, and institutions necessary to confront common threats and enhance common security.” These statements reflected the Democrats’ campaign smear that George W. Bush had compromised alliances and ignored diplomacy, a claim that is empirically false. And Obama denigrated American exceptionalism, reducing it to a nationalist amour propre. Finally, he pledged to use American wealth and power to help other countries “not in the spirit of a patron but in the spirit of a partner––a partner mindful of his own imperfections.”
When it comes to our security and interests, and our unalienable rights and freedoms, the Nobel Peace Prize has no interest in acknowledging the benefits America has given the world. But it is quick to reward those, including Americans, who criticize our actions and threaten our security and interests. We shouldn’t waste our time on this Orwellian Newspeak.
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