Actually, i think Kissinger and Arafat were also pretty problematic.
I like Obama, and think he’s a good President, but i thought that awarding him the Peace Prize was a bad idea.
But at least Obama himself had the grace to appear somewhat embarrassed by the award, and to acknowledge in his acceptance speech that his nation was in the midst of two wars, and that he was at the beginning and not the end of his efforts for peace. He also made clear that he believed that many others were more deserving.
I see Rune has clarified why he considers the Nobel peace prize to be a joke, but to throw in my two pence on why I, a non-conservative, consider the Nobel peace prize to be a rather sick joke; or how willing 250 millions of dollars to PR wins out after shuffling off this mortal coil.
The story of Alfred Nobel as I was first told it in school: Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, and being a man of peace he wanted it used for peaceful ends. Man in all of his wickedness used it to better kill each other. Distraught, Nobel created the Nobel prizes to further the work of peace.
Alfred Nobel, the actual story: Alfred Nobel was an armaments manufacturer. He made his millions selling weapons and inventing things to make better weapons, like dynamite. He owned Bofors, which was primarily an iron and steel producer before he redirected it to armaments production. One day 8 years before Alfred passed on his brother died while visiting France. A French newspaper, mistakenly believing Alfred had died, ran his obituary, Le marchand de la mort est mort, the merchant of death is dead. Seeing that his actual life’s work as a merchant of death, "“Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday,” wouldn’t be so wonderful of a legacy, Nobel willed most of his estate to creating the peace prize. Fast-forward 114 years, and Nobel is known as a man of peace, I doubt most know of his legacy as the merchant of death.
That being said, it’s not like she won the Nobel for saying that dumb shit. And mhendo appears to be correct in saying that the release of this guy in China had nothing to do with the Nobel Prize and that it is basically an extradition issue.
Bull. I’ve never heard he “wanted dynamite to be used for peaceful ends.” It’s well known that the prizes were created by the man who invented dynamite. If you type “Alfred Nobel” into Google, the third prompt you’ll see is “Alfred Nobel Dynamite.”
Only four US presidents have won the Nobel Prize: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter, and Barack Obama. One can certainly argue about the merits of those awards, or the lack of them. However, 4 out of 90 Nobel Peace Prizes which have been awarded so far (if I count correctly) is not that many.
Not bull. It was as I said “The story of Alfred Nobel as I was first told it in school,” you’d have to take it up with hmm, probably Mrs. Jones, my 8th grade History teacher if she’s still alive. I don’t have any polling data and may very well be wrong, but my guess is most people think of the peace prize and the inventor of dynamite if you’d ask them about Nobel. Dynamite has a great many uses, an explosive used in shells and bombs to kill people is just one of them. I doubt merchant of death or armaments manufacturer jumps into most people’s mind. Much less that the prize money was created from the sale of weapons; it’s as if Pablo Escobar had willed his estate to the creation of drug rehabilitation clinics. Bofors is still alive and kicking; Nobel didn’t shut it down or have it cease manufacturing armaments in a change of heart. If you type “40mm” into Google, the fourth prompt you’ll see is “40mm bofors.” That’s how much the Bofors 40mm L/60 was the world standard of medium caliber anti-aircraft gun from 1932 on.
Don’t be silly. A reading of the articles made available in the thread makes it abundantly clear that the Nobel Foundation scheduled the announcement near the day of Zhao Fei 's inevitable release just to further embarrass China.
IMHO, all that one needs to know about the Nobel prizes is that Yasser Arafat received a Nobel Peace Prize, and Mark Twain was never even nominated for one for literature.
I think it’s sort of stupid and pointless to dismiss the Nobel Prize because certain people didn’t win it. And i say that as a HUGE fan of Mark Twain.
It’s not even clear to me that Twain was never nominated. Do you have a list of nominees for each year? Because i couldn’t find one anywhere. A search of the ProQuest Historical Newspapers database turned up a New York Times article suggesting that Twain had been “suggested for this honor” in 1907, the year it was won by Rudyard Kipling.
You had a bad history teacher. How does that make the prize a joke again? I admit I never heard some of the details you just posted. I still never thought Nobel was a great guy who founded the prize because he was disappointed dynamite was used for war. That’s just stupid.
But I admit Nobel successfully altered his legacy. I disagree that that makes the prize fraudulent on its own terms. And I admit the prize doesn’t have any particular validity. Neither do the Oscars or a lot of other things. Sometimes they make good choices and other times they don’t, but it means about as much as you decide it does.
Would it be a bad thing if he did? You make a fair case he was a hypocrite, but if the work has a positive impact that should be considered as well.
The prizes are also not handed out by the same people. I believe the peace prize is administered by the Norwegian government and the others are administered by the Swedish government. And nominations for the prize don’t mean anything. Hundreds of people are nominated every year and a huge number of people can submit nominations.
I wasn’t trying to say the peace prize is inherently bad or fraudulent, but that it’s a sick joke that Nobel created it to be known to posterity linked to peace, when he spent his entire life making his millions off of war. Had Escobar willed his estate to drug rehab clinics, I’d consider the clinics themselves to be a good thing, not Escobar who had made all of his money peddling drugs, and made money up to his dying day peddling drugs, and left his cartel fully intact still peddling drugs after his death. That’s pretty much how I view Nobel.
But that goes for the Rockefeller, Carnegie et al. legacy, too, right? All those guys who got rich by active fraud/ land-grabbing/ stealing, plus exploiting their workers with too-low-to-live on wages, driving competitors into ruin - in other words, the robber barons - then turned around and donated a fraction of their millions into museums, opera halls and universities/ scholarships, all not from a change of heart, but to whitewash their legacy? And it worked, too.
To the OP: what I find much more pit-worthy is the reaction of China with regards to the Nobel peace prize committee and Norway itself. Before the prize was awarded, when the chinese dissenter was already under discussion, China issued a rather obvious ultimatum to the Norwegian government along the lines of “If you give this dissident the prize, we will severely cut trade relations and investment to you, which will badly hurt your economy, so obey us instead of spitting in our face”.
Since the prize committee is indepent of the govt.* and both sides value this and don’t like being blackmailed over their nominations, the comitee went ahead and gave it to the dissident anyway, all the more now because of the opposition from the Chinese govt.
So the Chinese govt. went and said basically “Well now we are really insulted, you better apologize grovelling, plus other impossible demands.”
That’s what the Chinese govt. should be … well, fucked for, or beaten some sense into.
The same goes for the scientific Nobel prizes and the Swedish govt.
As a former librarian, I must put in a word for Andrew Carnegie. He founded more than 2,500 Carnegie Libraries. He would build any town a library for free. But, there was a catch: Carnegie would pay only for the building. If they wanted to accept such a generous gift, the town’s people and government had to put up the money to acquire a collection of books, and to hire at least one librarian for the indefinite future, and, in short, make an open-ended political commitment to running a public library system. And it worked. And today a public library is something no town in America can think of being without. Regardless of his motives or where he got his money, he accomplished something of great and lasting value for American society.
