The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama last year, despite the very modest nature of his success in actually achieving peace so far, has stimulated a record number of nominations for the prize this year:
A record 237 people and organizations have been nominated for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, with interest boosted by last year’s award to President Barack Obama, organizers said on Wednesday.
The world’s media focused on the Peace Prize after Obama was the unexpected choice for what some see as the world’s highest accolade, although he had been in office for just nine months and critics said he had only spelt out visions of peace.
“This is the highest number of nominations ... last year’s prize to Barack Obama has further enhanced interest in the prize,” Geir Lundestad, head of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, told Reuters.
In fairness, Obama is far from the worst-qualified winner of the Prize. His candidacy was much more impressive than that of the assorted terrorists (e.g. Yasir Arafat and Sean MacBride) and totalitarian oppressors (Le Duc Tho) who have won the award previously. Looking at the full list of past winners, my tentative view is that Obama was better qualified than roughly the bottom 20–30% of his predecessors. In most cases, however, I reach that judgment based on a far less favorable view of some of the previous winners than the Nobel committee probably had. Still, one could argue that Obama was a worthy winner based on the implicit standards established by prior awards. Obama also deserves credit for making an excellent speech when he accepted the prize (see here and here for favorable assessments by my co-bloggers).
As a law professor, I’m one of the many people who have the right to enter nominations for the Peace Prize. I have given half-serious thought to nominating Vaclav Havel for his achievements in promoting human rights (for which he spent many years in prison under the communists), inspiring the peaceful “Velvet Revolution,” and presiding over the “Velvet Divorce” between Slovakia and the Czech Republic (which could have been a more dangerous situation without his efforts). I highly doubt, of course, that the Nobel committee will choose anyone based on my say-so. In any event, Havel’s reputation might be almost as much tarnished as enhanced by association with some of the previous winners.
UPDATE: Based on some of the comments, I should make clear that I don’t think that Havel’s reputation would suffer a net harm if he won the Prize. Many people still regard it as a great honor to win, despite the dubious nature of many of the previous winners. I do think, however, that association with the likes of Arafat would be a negative for Havel, or indeed anyone else. More generally, I was trying to suggest that the degradation of the Prize’s standards raises serious questions about whether it is any longer worthy of a true hero like Havel. However, my choice of words was poor, so I want to clarify my meaning.
UPDATE #2: I should also make clear that, on balance, I still think it would be a good thing if Havel won the prize. It would attract more public attention to his achievements, and might also help set the award itself back on the right track. If I thought that my nominating Havel would have any real influence with the committee, I would do it. Hopefully someone with greater influence will take the initiative to do so. However, the dubious nature of many of the past winners (of whom Obama was far from the worst), makes the prize a less worthy honor for someone like Havel than it would have been otherwise.
Simon Jester says:
Choosing Vaclav Havel would certainly go a long way to restoring the reputation of the prize.
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March 12, 2010, 2:54 pmDave N. says:
Although the President mitigated the damage with his Nobel lecture, the importance and symbolism of the Peace Prize was badly damaged a year ago, perhaps irrevocably. I know I don’t particularly care who wins this year. Sadly, I used to.
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March 12, 2010, 2:54 pmstashy says:
Question: May ADJUNCT professors of law also submit nominations?
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March 12, 2010, 3:03 pmSteve says:
In any event, Havel’s reputation might be almost as much tarnished as enhanced by association with some of the previous winners.
This is kind of a silly statement. The vast majority of people think of the Nobel Peace Prize as an honor, in spite of the fact that a few notorious individuals have claimed the prize in the past. You would have to be a true oddball to respect Havel less just because the same award was once conferred upon Yasser Arafat.
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March 12, 2010, 3:06 pmStrict says:
Havel has been nominated, I think.
Le Duc Tho declined to accept the prize.
Le Duc Tho was partly responsible for the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia which removed the genocidal Khmer Rouge from power. His actions may have saved millions.
You omit Kissinger, who was nominated for the same thing as Le Duc Tho.
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March 12, 2010, 3:10 pmjosh says:
I’d like to echo Steve. The notion that Havel would be tarnished by the prize just b/c Arafat et al received it is silly.
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March 12, 2010, 3:18 pmwolfefan says:
Hi Dave N —
Was the damage you perceive to the Prize being given to Obama greater or less than some of the others Ilya names? If you continued to value the prize after Arafat received it (or perhaps more accurately if your esteem for the prize returned after a time), why would it not do so (eventually) after Obama?
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March 12, 2010, 3:20 pmIlya Somin says:
Le Duc Tho was partly responsible for the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia which removed the genocidal Khmer Rouge from power. His actions may have saved millions.
Tho was not the guy who made that decision. In any event, the Vietnamese government did it not because they objected to mass murder (which they had practiced on a large scale themselves), but because the Khmer Rouge was a client state of their enemy, China. By that standard, Stalin should have won because he helped overthrow Adolf Hitler.
You omit Kissinger, who was nominated for the same thing as Le Duc Tho.
I don’t think he was a worthy winner either. Kissinger himself agreed, since he tried to return the Prize once the Paris Accords broke down and South Vietnam was invaded and conquered by the North. However, he was not nearly as egregious as Tho.
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March 12, 2010, 3:20 pmMark Creatura says:
I’m with Simon. Give the Norwegians a chance to begin repairing the honor of the prize. And no matter that, as Strict points out, Havel may have been nominated before. Each nomination of a true hero for peace is a step for good.
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March 12, 2010, 3:21 pmIlya Somin says:
I’d like to echo Steve. The notion that Havel would be tarnished by the prize just b/c Arafat et al received it is silly.
I did not say that he would be tarnished by winning the prize, as such. I merely think that he would be tarnished to some degree by association with Arafat, et al, which is just one part of the effect of winning the prize.
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March 12, 2010, 3:21 pmBrianMac says:
Sean MacBride? Never heard of him — and the Wikipedia article, to which you link, makes no mention of his alleged terrorist activities. You do realise that the IRA in the 1920s was a radically different organisation to the provisional IRA (formed in 69), right?
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March 12, 2010, 3:24 pmDave N. says:
There have been controversial winners in the past (and probably undeserving) but at the very least they took actions that could be perceived as pushing forward the peace process in their respective regions (Tho and Kissinger for ending America’s participation in the Vietnam War, Arafat for appearing to be working for peace with Israel, etc.).
The 2009 Award, OTOH, was nothing more than “He’s not George W. Bush. We don’t like George W. Bush. That’s good enough for us.”
(Either Haval or Corazon Aquino, who has since died, would have been much worthier recipients)
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March 12, 2010, 3:32 pmMalvolio says:
Hmmm, I must be an oddball. Or at least I cannot help thinking of accepting a prize as in some way endorsing the judgment of the giver. If Havel won, wouldn’t he have to make a speech saying, in essence, “Thanks for including me in the company of Arafat and Henry Kissinger”?
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March 12, 2010, 3:32 pmSteve says:
I merely think that he would be tarnished to some degree by association with Arafat, et al, which is just one part of the effect of winning the prize.
I still think that’s silly. Winning the Nobel Peace Prize may put someone on a list that also contains Yasser Arafat, but the vast majority of people do not draw an “association” between the winner and Yasser Arafat for that reason, any more than Vaclav Havel and Yasser Arafat are “associated” just because neither of them has been in my kitchen.
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March 12, 2010, 3:33 pmKazinski says:
I don’t think the Noble Peace Prize would tarnish Havel, his reputation could survive that. On the contrary, I think awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Havel would possibly enhance the status of the prize, and definitely enhance the status and the respect given to the The Norwegian Nobel Committee. They haven’t been doing so well lately.
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March 12, 2010, 3:38 pmSigivald says:
Malvolio: He could just as easily be seen as saying “Thanks for returning to the original spirit of the prize after some horrible, posturing mistakes”.
Like Kazinski, I think that if they’re not going to abolish the Peace Prize, it would be good to burnish its reputation by picking solid, deserving winners in the best spirit of actually promoting peace and saving lives (Borlaug!).
In other words, if they’re going to give it out every year anyway, it might as well go to someone who will elevate, rather than hold down, the value of the prize.
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March 12, 2010, 3:46 pmwolfefan says:
Thanks, Dave N. I appreciate your response. I really like the idea of Havel as a nominee; he should have been awarded this prize long ago. I hadn’t thought of Corazon Aquino but I like that one too.
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March 12, 2010, 3:57 pmepluribus says:
Arafat didn’t win the prize because he was a terrorist. He won because he tried to reach peace with Rabin and Peres, despite the fact that he was a terrorist. If one who tries to achieve peace is deemed unworthy of the award, then we discourage trying. Whole libraries have been written on Palestinian-Israeli peace talks over the years, and much could be said about why Arafat and the Israelis failed. Maybe it was because he was a terrorist. Or maybe there were other reasons too. There are some good names on the list of Nobel Peace Prize winners: Martin Luther King, Mother Theresa, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Lech Walesa, Albert Schweitzer, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt. Havel would occupy a position much like Walesa, I think, as would Mandela.
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March 12, 2010, 4:20 pmepluribus says:
I wonder if the Democrats were ticked off when Theodore Roosevelt won the Prize, and the Republicans when Woodrow Wilson won it. I sense a lot of Republicans are down on the Prize right now because Obama won. Now if Bush got it, that would be a different matter, wouldn’t it?
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March 12, 2010, 4:24 pmMalvolio says:
I think a lot of people, even non-Republicans, thought the Obama prize was silly. Who didn’t respond to the announcement with “Obama won? For what?” The situation was probably made worse for Republicans but better for Democrats by the likelihood that the Norwegians really wanted to award Bush the Anti-Nobel and this was the closest they could come.
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March 12, 2010, 4:46 pmdearieme says:
Wilson got the Peace Prize? How many bits of Latin America did he invade?
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March 12, 2010, 4:53 pmThorley Winston says:
Yes, it would be a different matter because with President Bush, you could at least point to something he did in office and argue about whether he did something that should qualify him for receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. With Obama the general reaction upon learning he won the Nobel Peace Prize was “for what?”
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March 12, 2010, 4:56 pmgeokstr says:
As a matter of fact, unlike the adoring response of the left to Obama winning it, most on the right would be scratching their head and wondering what Bush had done to win the Nobel Peace Prize, if in fact he had. Fighting wars is not exactly the inspirational stuff that should warrant such an award. But at least he would have had some record to examine and debate over, besides being telegenic and a good reader, and writing two hagiographies about himself literally before he had done anything. Oh and the all-important being not-Bush.
I wish the left would get over this bizarre notion that conservatives loved Bush and slavishly supported everything he did, just because that’s how they view Obama.
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March 12, 2010, 5:02 pmliamascorcaigh says:
Seán MacBride was the son of Maud Gonne (Yeats’ life-long love) and Major John MacBride who fought with the Boers against the British. Major MacBride was one of those prominently involved in the Easter Rising in 1916 against the British occupation of Ireland. He along with the other leaders was stood up against the wall of the Stonebreakers’ Yard in Kilmainham Jail and shot by a British firing squad. A similar fate would not doubt have been meted out to General Washington and many more had the American Revolution been defeated by Lord Cornwallis.
His son, Seán, subsequently became a Volunteer in the Irish Republican Army in the War of Independence (1918–1921) and was on the side of Éamon De Valera in rejecting the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1922) which partitioned Ireland. Like De Valera and all of the subsequent ministers in the Fianna Fáil cabinets of the 1930s he fought on the Anti-Treaty side of the Civil War (1923–1925) which resulted from a split in the both the Sinn Féin party and the Army Council and Volunteer membership.
When in 1926 De Valera dumped arms and, founding Fianna Fail, entered Dáil Éireann (Irish Parliament), MacBride remained in the now thoroughly demoralized anti-De Valera IRA for some years and was briefly Chief of Staff in 1930. Realizing the futility of further conflict he soon afterwards resigned and studied law, becoming a highly sought after barrister in Dublin and eventually becoming a Senior Counsel (Irish equivalent of a QC).
He founded a political party in the 1940s (Clann na Poblachta or Children of the Republic) to further his Irish Republican aims and was subsequently Minister for Foreign Affairs [Secretary of State] in two coalition governments in the 1950s.
MacBride was a founding member and quondam International Chairman of Amnesty International. He was Secretary-General of the International Committee of Jurists from 1963 to 1971. Following this, he was also elected Chair (1968–1974) and later President (1974–1985) of the International Peace Bureau in Geneva. He was Vice-President of the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation ( later OECD) and President of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe.
He drafted the constitution of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU); and also the first constitution of a sovereign Ghana.
He held the following appointments to the United Nations:
Assistant Secretary-General, President of the General Assembly, High Commissioner for Refugees, High Commissioner for Human Rights, High Commissioner for Namibia, President of UNESCO’s International Commission for the Study of Communications Problems. He was also awarded both the Nobel Peace Prize and the Lenin Peace Prize .
Amnesty and the UN were not in those days the tainted organizations they have since become.
Seán MacBride was a great Irish patriot and an idealistic revolutionary whose integrity and humanity bear comparison with the best the United States produced in its own inspirational struggle for freedom.
Professor Somin would be advised to be very careful regarding whom he labels a “terrorist”, for if a man such as Seán MacBride was one, I, and many more like me, would regard it as a high honor to be so disparaged and the designation would quickly lose its moral force.
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March 12, 2010, 5:11 pmThorley Winston says:
As a matter of fact, unlike the adoring response of the left to Obama winning it, most on the right would be scratching their head and wondering what Bush had done to win the Nobel Peace Prize, if in fact he had. Fighting wars is not exactly the inspirational stuff that should warrant such an award. But at least he would have had some record to examine and debate over, besides being telegenic and a good reader, and writing two hagiographies about himself literally before he had done
Oh and the all-important being not-Bush.I wish the left would get over this bizarre notion that conservatives loved Bush and slavishly supported everything he did, just because that’s how they view Obama.
anything.
I agree with pretty much everything you wrote but I would say this: overthrowing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship and giving the people in Afghanistan and Iraq the chance to create peaceful democratic government (whether they will succeed or not in the long run is still unknown) was good thing even if the people who award the Nobel Peace Prize Committee don’t agree.
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March 12, 2010, 5:14 pmIlya Somin says:
Sean MacBride? Never heard of him — and the Wikipedia article, to which you link, makes no mention of his alleged terrorist activities. You do realise that the IRA in the 1920s was a radically different organisation to the provisional IRA (formed in 69), right?
The IRA of the 1920s and 30s was different in some ways from the later IRA, but it still engaged in terrorism against both British and Irish civilians (those who supported the Irish Free State). As the linked article says, MacBride was Chief of Staff of the IRA and held other influential positions within it.
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March 12, 2010, 5:24 pmStrict says:
“I merely think that he would be tarnished to some degree by association with Arafat, et al, which is just one part of the effect of winning the prize.”
Ilya, your argument is completely absurd.
In 1990, President Havel invited Arafat to Czechoslovakia. Arafat agreed to come. While in Czechoslovakia, Arafat invited President Havel to come to the West Bank. President Havel agreed to come.
I don’t understand why you think
1. Havel and Arafat have not been “associated” in he past.
2. Accepting the Nobel Prize would “associate” Havel and Arafat. That’s like saying Abraham Lincoln is associated with Rod Blagojevich because they both served in the Illinois legislature.
3. Accepting the Nobel Prize would tarnish Havel. If he rejected it, he would be in the exclusive company of Sartre and Le Duc Tho, both Marxists. Instead of being in the highly ignoble Nobel club with Arafat, he would be in the even more ignoble Nobel rejecters club with Sartre and Le Duc Tho.
—-
“Tho was not the guy who made that decision.”
How do you know what role in played in the decision making process? He gets no credit? He was the guy who led the first Vietnamese incursion into Cambodia to remove the Khmer Rouge. Even if it wasn’t a humanitarian intervention in purpose, do you deny that it did not have enormous humanitarian effects? The scientists who accidentally discovered interferons should still get some credit for the revolutionary and life-saving interferon therapies that resulted from their work...
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March 12, 2010, 5:29 pmStrict says:
Ilya,
Are you opposed to independence movements in general?
Menachem Begin was a member of anti-British paramilitary group Irgun, which carried out “terrorist” attacks. Ariel Sharon was a member of anti-British paramilitary group Haganah, which carried out “terrorist” attacks.
Is everyone “associated” with those two “tainted”?
Vietnamese Communists like Le Duc Tho and Ho Chi Minh fought imperialism for so long: they fought off the French, Chinese, and Americans in order to secure an independent, post-colonial, unified Vietnam.
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March 12, 2010, 5:39 pmepluribus says:
Yep, the Republicans are down on the Peace Prize because a Democrat won it. Well, actually a few Democrats have won it. Posts above confirm what I said. I’m not surprised, but I am discouraged. So many posters are unable to see beyond their party affiliations. It would be great, wouldn’t it, if you could tell the good guys from the bad guys merely by wehther they had a little Dem. or a Rep. after their name? But the world isn’t that simple. I say that as a proud Ind., with a registration card to prove it.
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March 12, 2010, 5:44 pmStrict says:
And the worst part is...when the US Gymnastic Teams won medals in the 2008 Olympics, they became associated with the German Team that won medals in the infamous 1936 “Nazi Olympics.”
A horrible taint.
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March 12, 2010, 5:52 pmzuch says:
What’s truly concerning is that it has become conceivable, nay, even defencible, to award the prize to someone simply for Not Being Dubya: That is to say, for not “pre-emptively” invading and occupying sovereign countries against the express will of the U.N. Security Council, and for not claiming that the exigencies of war allow for horrific treatment of detainees up to and including torture.
But any fault, if fault there be here, is not Obama’s. He didn’t “claim” the prize; it was awarded to him by others.
Cheers,
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March 12, 2010, 5:53 pmCase Law says:
I don’t think he was a worthy winner either. Kissinger himself agreed, since he tried to return the Prize once the Paris Accords broke down and South Vietnam was invaded and conquered by the North. However, he was not nearly as egregious as Tho.
Kissinger’s entire career should perclude any award to him.
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March 12, 2010, 6:15 pmgeokstr says:
I agree that was a good thing, but supposedly, we didn’t go there to “democratize” anything, it just happened to be a byproduct of our WOT (and being fed up with the UN’s endless toothless “resolutions”). If that was the stuff of Peace Prizes, Obama should invade China, Cuba, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and most of the other hundred fifty or so religious and political totalitarian/dictatorships tomorrow, and guarantee himself the PP in perpetuity. While in the long run, since democracies don’t seem to invade each other at all, it might be the best thing to do to eliminate war, it hardly seems a “peaceful” enough path to inspire others in a good way.
Although ridding the planet of the Religion of Leftism should certainly qualify one for the Perpetual Peace Price, if only that were possible.
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March 12, 2010, 6:20 pmepluribus says:
Thorley Winston:
I agree, up to a point. Overthrowing Saddam was, in my opinion, a good thing. If that’s all Bush did, I would applaud him, but he stayed in Iraq way too long, spent way too much money, and lost way too many lives. Overthrowing the Taliban was good, but it was just temporary. They are back again and fighting even harder. The problem with these things, even if they are good, is that they aren’t making peace. Now I agree that war is sometimes the only answer–but it isn’t peace, at least not if you reject Orwell’s Newspeak.
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March 12, 2010, 6:21 pmStrict says:
Kissinger wrote a “good job / thank you” letter to Pakistan President Yahya Khan for his efforts in killing millions of Bangladeshis and causing up to 10 million to flee the country. He helped the US sell weapons to Pakistan in the midst of one of the worst genocides in history.
He’s a nasty man. I’m not sure why he’s such a darling of the right wing.
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March 12, 2010, 6:26 pmStrict says:
“verthrowing the Taliban was good, but it was just temporary. They are back again and fighting even harder.”
They aren’t just “back.” They are seizing vast swaths of land in Pakistan, threatening to overthrow the Pakistani government. The Taliban poses a much greater threat now than it did in Dec. 2001 — it actually has a chance of gaining control of nuclear weapons now.
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March 12, 2010, 6:28 pmCase Law says:
Kissinger wrote a “good job / thank you” letter to Pakistan President Yahya Khan for his efforts in killing millions of Bangladeshis and causing up to 10 million to flee the country. He helped the US sell weapons to Pakistan in the midst of one of the worst genocides in history.
He’s a nasty man. I’m not sure why he’s such a darling of the right wing.
Exactly for the reasons he’s nasty–East Timor, Chile, Bangladesh, Argentina, etc.
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March 12, 2010, 6:30 pmElliot says:
By that standard we are all worthy.
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March 12, 2010, 6:34 pmgeokstr says:
More left wing mythology. I hadn’t thought about, heard about, or heard from Kissinger in decades, until he was brought up in this thread. He, like Nixon, was not a conservative (which is what the “right wing” is composed of) but since you hate them both, they must be ours, eh?
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March 12, 2010, 6:35 pmStrict says:
“More left wing mythology. I hadn’t thought about, heard about, or heard from Kissinger in decades, until he was brought up in this thread. ”
Interesting, I saw Kissinger speak soon after the 9/11 attacks. He seemed to be VERY relevant then, especially considering he was appointed by President George W. Bush to head the 9/11 Commission, and he was also an advisor to Bush on other warfare and foreign policy issues.
Of course, if you want to argue that he has been irrelevant for decades, go ahead. Or if you want to argue that after 9/11, Bush’s go-to man for policy advice was a non-conservative, non-right wing man, that’s fine. But unless you back it up, it’s baseless assertion.
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March 12, 2010, 6:46 pmStrict says:
Oh, and at that Kissinger speech, someone asked him what the Bush administration planned on doing. He replied something like “oh, WE have a plan.” So do you think he and Bush sat down together and hashed out a plan together — or that he sat down with Bush and told Bush what to do? What’s more likely?
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March 12, 2010, 6:50 pmgeokstr says:
I just said that Kissinger was not a conservative and have been making the point over and over again on this forum that neither was Bush. “Compassionate conservatism” was his term for liberal-lite, a philosophy he shared with the candidate your media picked for the Republicans to run in 2009.
If you want to use the term “right-wing” then at least understand that not everyone in the Republican Party is “right-wing”. You can have the country clubbers and RINOs on your team if you wish.
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March 12, 2010, 7:01 pmklm says:
Random thought about the Nobel Peace Prize and popularity: If there were a facebook page — Vaclav Havel For Nobel Piece Prize — with numerous members, would that hurt or help Havel’s chances of being awarded the prize? What if there were a movement to have qualified nominators nominate Havel — would that hurt or help?
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March 12, 2010, 7:07 pmStrict says:
Geok,
You didn’t just say that Kissinger is not right wing. You also implied that he is irrelevant. [Something to the effect of “He’s been out of the picture forever and I only hear about him when lefties bring him up.”]
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March 12, 2010, 7:09 pmCase Law says:
The IRA of the 1920s and 30s was different in some ways from the later IRA, but it still engaged in terrorism against both British and Irish civilians (those who supported the Irish Free State). As the linked article says, MacBride was Chief of Staff of the IRA and held other influential positions within it.
Not that there was anything wrong with that. The IRA was just a part of the long history of Irish rebellions for freedom that began in the 1500s against their English occupiers. Civilian loyalists supporting the occupier have always been targeted during such wars, as no doubt it happened during our Revolution.
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March 12, 2010, 7:18 pmlukas says:
The Free State wasn’t exactly an English occupier, now was it?
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March 12, 2010, 8:58 pmAndy McGill says:
The Nobel Peace Prize has tried to become a way to influence the future instead of a way to reward the past. History should trash it harshly for departing from its mission.
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March 12, 2010, 9:16 pmbyomtov says:
I just said that Kissinger was not a conservative and have been making the point over and over again on this forum that neither was Bush.
Neither one of them a true Scotsman.
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March 12, 2010, 10:54 pmArthur Kirkland says:
I recall Havel’s original support of the United States’ conduct with respect t Iraq.
Did he ever repent?
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March 12, 2010, 11:32 pmarbitrary aardvark says:
I would like to be nominated for a nobel peace price, 2011 or 2012. Any law/other professors available? I’m unemployed, and it would look nice on my resume. There are others more worthy of actually getting the prize — Havel, maybe Frank Zappa. But I feel worthy of being nominated. Since I’m relatively undistinguished, sombody nominating me would probably be making a point that Obama was a nobody too, or some related point. Or perhaps we could arrange a suitable incentive of some sort.
gtbear at gmail.
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March 13, 2010, 12:01 amRicardo says:
Not much to disagree with here. Havel certainly deserves the prize for a lifetime of work promoting freedom, rule of law, democracy and humanistic values.
It’s a real shame Cory Aquino didn’t get the opportunity to receive the prize before dying. It’s not everyday that someone leads a peaceful revolt against dictatorship, rewrites the Constitution from scratch giving herself less power in the process, faces down six different coup attempts from within the armed forces (one of which was put down with the help of the American fighter jets which patrolled the skies over Manila, preventing the coup plotters from using air power), and then peacefully passes power onto her successor and returns to private life.
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March 13, 2010, 12:22 amAndersen says:
The prize has been hijacked by ideologues intent on promoting their agendas — they have more than one. As someone with a Norwegian father I have been appalled at the direction I have watched Norway take since I spent my 19th year there 40 years ago.
Your concern for Havel’s reputation confirms my personal feeling toward the prize, developed over the last 30 years: the poor quality of winners has detracted from the prestige of the prize rather than enhanced the reputations of winners. And this is not caused by only the worst winners. Al Gore and Jimmy Carter probably rate somewhere in the middle, but Gore was chosen for his AGW scam and Carter has revealed himself to be an unrepentant antisemite in the years following the rapprochement he brokered between Egypt and Israel. Most Norwegians, sad to say, agree with both of them. The worst Peace Prize winners get attention, but the average winners are pretty bad as well, and the criteria for winning seem to have nothing to do with achieving world peace.
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March 13, 2010, 3:42 amDee says:
Any prize awarded to Jimma Carter, Yasir Arafat, Al Gore & Barack Hussein Obama can have no redemption. It is not worth having and the Norwegians should just discontinue it and hang their heads in shame.
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March 13, 2010, 7:12 amJeff Walden says:
An award to W. is plausible since he’s done some things which have led toward peace, among them perhaps PEPFAR, a far better Iraqi government in the middle of a tempestuous region of the world, and working to a defeat — not just a politically-easier uneasy truce — of terrorism, as unlikely as it might seem. We could argue over whether he would deserve it or not, but it seems inarguable that he’s done things which would at least qualify him for consideration for the honor. Obama had not, and therefore he should have been by all rights implausible as a legitimate choice.
Just to be clear, while a Bush selection would be justifiable in a way the Obama selection was not, it would not be justified. The potential exists for it, in a couple decades, if the chips fall well for him (extremely well, on second thought, given the political hole he’s starting from) — just as they might well do for Obama — but right now Bush would be a bad choice just as Obama was, if less emphatically so and if for entirely different reasons.
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March 13, 2010, 8:20 amOctavian says:
Any self-respecting proponent of human rights and basic standards of honesty and forthrightness would decline accepting this farce of an award.
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March 13, 2010, 8:37 amliamascorcaigh says:
The Free State Army was made up of the Pro-Treaty IRA and a Civil War broke out between them and their IRA comrades who opposed accepting the Treaty. It started when the FSA bombarded the IRA quartered in the Four Courts in Dublin with howitzers supplied by the ever kindly and solicitous British. The Free State troops had been terrorists when in the IRA but now, having acceded to British wishes, were by the ineffable power of London’s sanction, transformed each one into veritable Warriors of All That Is Good!!!
I truly wish that Ilya and lukas and the rest of the casually righteous would inform themselves about how the British behaved themselves during the War of Independence — let’s forget about the 750 years since the Anglo-Norman invasion — particularly the Black and Tans, the Auxiliaries and the Scottish regiments, the latter aflame with pure sectarian bigotry.
The ‘Tans burned down the City of Cork, where I now sit writing this, and a British murder squad, complete with blackened faces, shot dead Tomás MacCurtain, the city’s democratically elected Lord Mayor, in the dead of night on the landing of his stairs in his pajamas before his terrified wife and children — all within less than a mile from where I was born and bred.
Yes, he was also OC of one of Cork’s IRA battalions and he had a uniform to prove it and that was why he was the democratically elected Lord Mayor of a city which was the cockpit of the war to end British rule. We had, you know, tried politics — John Redmond, Charles Stuart Parnell and Daniel O’Connell spring to mind. As the American revolutionaries found, petitions to the Crown, absent firearms and men willing to use them against the mightiest military power then existing, are simply exercises in calligraphy.
I understand the ill-will of some British towards us as we bet them and bet them well when they were still in their pomp.
Americans of such a disposition mystify me. Their own country fought an earlier bloody war against the same all-powerful enemy though with far less provocation and a far mightier body of water separating them from the foe and his enduring malice. Were the American revolutionaries also “terrorists” or is that opprobrium reserved merely for the Irish among them?
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March 13, 2010, 9:40 ammarkm says:
He pretended to reach peace, as a cover for continuing terrorism.
Sean McBride was a terrorist once, but he appears to have genuinely renounced terrorism, several decades before he received the Peace Prize.
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March 13, 2010, 11:39 amlukas says:
I am not American, why would you assume I was? I live in the fair city of Dublin.
There is no doubt that the British behaved atrociously in Ireland, their prototypical colony. But does that excuse the Irish Civil War, a war fought against the elected government of Ireland whose death toll exceeded that of the war for independence? Does it excuse the post-war IRA terror? At the very latest, the 1932 elections should have made it clear that working with the Free State, not against it, was the way forward.
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March 13, 2010, 12:07 pmliamascorcaigh says:
I assume Ilya Somin is American and it was he who made the initial slur. Though you reside in Dublin, you do not say you’re Irish. From your silence one is free to infer that you are not. Your command of English points to a native speaker. There are no grounds for your indignation if I assume you to be a Britisher in one guise or other.
There is no excuse for any war except the reasons for which it is fought. One’s attitude to a war is determined by one’s attitude to why it was fought.
The British Government before Partition was similarly elected and sat in Parliament with 105 Irish MP, a gross over-representation, most of whom were Nationalist. Yet, you imply, the War of Independence was just because the British “behaved atrociously”. But only, you will admit, because the Irish refused to be quiescent. The Free State Government behaved more atrociously, ordering at cabinet level the execution by firing squad of 77 anti-Treaty prisoners of war, with not even the cloak of due process to cover their moral nakedness. The British would have balked at quasi-legal barbarism of this magnitude.
This of course is why the death-toll during the Civil War was higher than that of the War of Independence: the British were brutal but were constrained by world opinion and a decency which their populace expected them to at least pay some service to. Cosgrave, Mulcahy, De Blaghd, O’Higgins and the rest could operate free from such considerations and did so with no compunction. It is little wonder that the Free Staters formed the backbone of the Blue Shirts as Ireland’s contribution to the European Fascist rainbow in the 30s.
By the 1932 election, Seán MacBride had resigned from the IRA and was forming Saor Éire, a non-physical force Republican party. What happened subsequent to MacBride’s leaving the IRA is irrelevant to the slur of terrorist with which Ilya Somin smears him. No serious student of the Irish Civil War ever regarded the Anti-Treaty side as terrorists with the exception of those few Imperial apologists who view the IRA from 1918 onwards as such. They at least have consistency, if little else, on their side. The Civil War was tragic but as inevitable a result of the morally vacuous Anglo-Irish Treaty as Hitler’s rise and WW II were the fruits of the Treaty of Versailles to which the self-same British were eager signatories.
In the HBO mini-series “John Adams” Ben Franklin tells Congress that the British Crown, if given a choice between doing what is right and what is not right, invariably chooses the latter. If we could have dug him up at the time of the Anglo-Irish Treaty and revivified him with one of his kites in a thunderstorm, he would not have found any reason to revise his opinion.
Irish men have shed much blood in the twentieth century for the cause of Freedom and all of it, every drop, flows through the Palace of Westminster before entering the ocean of misery which the inhabitants of that place have squeezed out of my country. If we are are to be terrorists, then so are they because it is they and they alone who have made us so.
But, I forget myself! They were, are, and no doubt always shall be, an “elected” government. I’m sure the young men dragged to their deaths down Co. Cork boreens tied to the back of the military’s Crossley tenders consoled themselves with fond thoughts of the “electedness” of those who paid the driver to stamp on the pedal.
Bah, sir. Go bother someone who doesn’t know the bloody score with your ill-informed casuistry.
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March 13, 2010, 3:27 pmlukas says:
No more indignation than I reserve for ad hominems in general. I hope it will soothe your rage to find out that I hail not from Britain nor any of its former colonies.
I did not try to apologize for the pro-Treaty forces here (quite obviously none of them deserves a Peace Nobel), just to point out that a non-violent solution was possible within the confines of the Free State, as the peaceful victory of Éamon De Valera’s republican Fianna Fáil in the thirties clearly showed.
Seán MacBride did help to build Saor Éire in 1932, but he had not resigned from the IRA at that time. He even became chief of staff of the IRA for a short period of time when Moss Twomey was arrested in 1936, which he certainly wouldn’t have had he not identified with the organization. Even after his resignation from the IRA he maintained some of the IRA’s contacts with Nazi secret agents.
That doesn’t make him a bad person, overall. But it does call into question his qualification for a, y’know, Peace Prize.
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March 13, 2010, 7:09 pmliamascorcaigh says:
It is not an ad hominem to call some one British if you believe they are. It’s not an ad hominem at all, in fact. The British have truly much to glory in and are an ingenious, dogged and energetic people who have contributed greatly — indeed quite disproportionately — to human culture and civilization. One could do far worse than claim kinship with them. I do, for the simple reason that I am descended from them, just like Henry Grattan, Henry Munro, Thomas Russell, Thomas Davis, John Mitchel, Isaac Butt, Charles Parnell, William Yeats, John Synge, Patrick Pearse, Douglas Hyde, Earnán de Blaghd, Bulmer Hobson, George Plant, Gerry Adams, Bobby Sands and many, many more.
You mock my “rage” with your pious solicitude but mislocate its cause. Ilya Somin in an attempt to rehabilitate the absurdity of Obama’s award chose to smear a very great man, “not a bad person” in your cockamamie scheme of things. Like many a lawyer pleading a poor cause, he overplayed his hand with mention of MacBride. You supported him in his silliness and with a zeal he himself chose not to display. Your national identity is of course not relevant except as a polemical aside. You choose to mention it ever and always because, like most on the losing side of an argument, you find a nice fillet of red herring takes the edge off eating crow. Your desperate dragging of “Nazi agents” into the issue triggers Godwin’s Law and allows me to declare outright victory.
My “rage” abates. I survey the field. Nary a foe standing, be they American, British or, like Dev during the “Emergency”, coyly non-alligned. I nominate myself for the Nobel, y’know, Peace Prize. But, wait! What’s this? I am an Irish Republican and, in the nature of things, identify with “The Organization”. No, not that, not “The Organization”! I am rejected out of hand. The lesson has been learned. Outraged tut-tutting and anguished wringing of hands must at all costs be avoided, especially from American law professors and the indefatigably anonymized in Dublin. My crest falls with an unbecoming clatter on the worn lino of the safe house in Leitrim I now cower within. My “rage” returns but now redoubled, quadrupled, no, octupled, indeed upled beyond all hope of measurement. I seethe, I rend... Hang on, my wife is calling. Breakfast’s on the table. Oh well, at least I didn’t mention the Nazis...Oops!
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March 14, 2010, 6:11 amAndy Patterson says:
A minor query about Irish politics. Why was it that Ireland remained studiously neutral during WWII, thereby allowing Nazi submarines to operate in its waters, and distracting the UK home defence forces from the eastern flank? Like Sweden (which gladly sold its prime iron ore and steel to the Nazis), it was impossible to remain truly neutral in WWII.
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March 14, 2010, 3:29 pmliamascorcaigh says:
How could Ireland’s entering the war have any effect on German subs? Ireland didn’t have then and doesn’t now have anything but a tiny navy, three corvettes at the time and for long afterwards. The Royal Navy would have had to deal with the Germans in any case and I’m sure they did. The British — and Americans — garrisoned the occupied Six Counties very heavily, of course, and no doubt used the facilities of Belfast Lough and Lough Foyle. German U-Boats entering Irish waters did so illegally and I have a hard time believing that the RN didn’t follow them if it was tactically advantageous. In fact some forty German submarines are recorded as lying in Irish waters having been sunk in battle or subsequently scuttled by the British.
Of course, Britain had the run of the whole of Ireland during the intense and extensive submarine war of 1914–18. It didn’t do much good for the Lusitania whose passengers, both living and dead, my grandmother as a young woman saw being brought ashore in Cóbh.
One u-boat did show up off Ventry in Dingle Bay in October 1939 and shuttled ashore 30 Greek seamen whom it rescued from a freighter it had torpedoed. It was itself subsequently depth-charged off Shetland by, ironically, the HMS Kelly. Louis Mountbatten, the Commander, ordered the enemy crew, who had all safely abandoned ship, to be brought on board in chivalrous recognition of their treatment of the foundered Greeks.
BTW, it was the RAF’s Air-Sea Rescue Service that covered the whole Irish coast in the post-war era up till only a couple of years ago, and did heroic work in a most courageous and selfless fashion, saving many lives. The Irish and, of course, the foreign seamen rescued and, many of them, rushed to hospital owe them an especial debt.
On the subject of Sweden’s iron ore, Ireland, as you say, maintained a strict neutrality and had no commercial dealings at all with Germany. This neutrality was not so “studious”, however, as to prevent Irish citizens from joining the various branches of Britain’s armed forces. Some fifty thousand did so during the war. And many thousands more worked in the war industry in Britain.
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March 14, 2010, 6:34 pmKamal says:
I was a long time reader of this site.. and have just unsubscribed from the RSS feed. What was the reason for mentioning Arafat as the terrorist that won the peace prize? You forget the “terrorists” he shared it with, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin.
There was no point to adding that and just inflames people’s frustrations over a situation that isn’t improving. I enjoy many of the topics on this site but please.. advocating for one moment the idea that palestinians are the terrorists and thus implying that hebrews are just innocent chosen ones of god is stupid, and has no place here.
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March 15, 2010, 4:40 pm