What’s with Desmond Tutu being on the list?
Looking at the winners in the last few decades, Elie Wiesel seems a pretty weak choice. Writing and speaking about the Holocaust isn’t sufficient grounds for receiving a Nobel Peace Prize IMO. Particularly since there was a much more deserving winner that year (1986): Corazon Aquino who helped restore democracy to the Phillipines.
If they wanted to give a Holocaust-related prize it should have gone to someone like Chiune Sugihara: a Japanese diplomat who saved thousands of lives and was still alive in 1986.
Nelson Mandela is one of the 10 worst Peace Prize winners of all time? Are you serious?
Polls and discussions of polls go in IMHO, not GD.
Off to find a better home.
Indeed, I assume the objection comes from his history of terrorist activity, but I’d like to see some justification as well…
The linked article also contained this:
Not surprisingly given the overall tone of the article, this is not correct. The reparations were created by the Treaty of Versailles. The Dawes Plan reduced them.
My all-time favorite was Frank B. Kellogg (1929), best known for the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which “outlawed war as an instrument of national policy.” Wow! What a great idea! Who’da thunk it? I guess they forgot to tell Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini about this wonder.
Also, Rigoberta Menchu, Al Gore, Yasser Arafat, Jimmy Carter, Henry Kissinger, Le Duc Tho, etc.
I would say Gorbachev really did deserve it, because in the broad sense, without him the Cold War would’ve lasted much longer.
Gorbachev really was an effective leader in bringing about change slowly and he enabled the Communist countries to slowly break their chains.
Has Konstantin Chernenko or Yuri Andropov lived longer they were much more hardliners and would’ve put up a LOT of a fight against Reagan. Gorbachev allowed a tight enough reign to keep the liberals from going wild and getting crushed, while hitting the conservatives hard with the idea they had to change and adapt.
Without him the Communist World would’ve collapsed, but it would’ve taken a lot longer to do so. Especially Chernenko who was a very hardliner. He would’ve never permitted the changes Gorbachav did. And Reagan’s attitude toward the USSR only got by because Gorbachav wanted the same changes
Blind partisanship is an ugly thing.
Ending the cold war was never about putting up a fight against Reagan - that is a wholly unjustified and US-centric view of what transpired in the last days of the USSR that is largely discredited by most people studying the period. The task that Gorbachov was facing (and that Chernenko and Andropov would have faced) is that of dealing with pressures internal to the communist world, economic ones first of all, then the nationalist ones, then the pressure of the satellite countries in the Warsaw Pact fighting for independence, and at the same time the countervailing pressure of the hardliner communists both at home and in the GDR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. Ronald Reagan, however, does not play into this picture, much as you might like to think he does.
Just a little.
Alright, someone please cure my ignorance! I admit to not knowing much about history, so can someone please give a couple POSSIBLE reasons why these people deserve to be demonized? I read the wikipedia entry on Gorbachev, but what has he done to deserve scorn?
You honestly can’t think of a reason to scorn Henry Kissenger?
How about that heinous bitch Mother Teresa?
What does feeding poor people have to do with peace?!
He isn’t on the list. Whoosh?
I’m thinking they had a lot in common psychologically with our Teabaggers, even though the content of the two groups’ politics couldn’t be further apart.
Disagree. The Oslo Accords have completely fallen by the wayside. If there had been a comprehensive peace sometime before the second (Al-Aqsa) intifada, I would have agreed with you, but it’s all pretty much a wasted effort at this point. Arafat could have done a whole hell of a lot more to make peace than he did, too. (So could a lot of Israeli leaders, fwiw. There’s a lot of blame to go around here.)
And Mohammed Yunus? Why the hate? I admit it seemed like a weird choice at the time, given that he’s an economist, but if you believe that violence is a side effect of poverty (which I do think is the case a great deal of time), then you have to embrace a successful new method of lowering the poverty rate. Microfinance has come under some fire, and it’s not a perfect cure-all, but I’ve heard too many stories of it changing people’s lives for me to dismiss it as a flash in the pan. Grameen Bank has changed the lives of literally millions of people in Bangladesh; it operates what is practically a parallel government in a country with a weak and ineffectual “real” government.
- from the linked article.
Wow, is this ignorant. Is it a surprise to people that violent conflict often arises over scarce resources? At its root, the Darfur conflict/genocide is based in water rights, for instance.
Here’s a flow chart:
Climate change -> shifting weather patterns -> lack of water/arable land -> conflict over scare water/arable land -> bad shit.
The argument for land mines is beyond stupid. I’m procrastinating instead of writing a paper right now, and even the desire not to do my work isn’t strong enough to make me want to rebut that.
Clearly if someone wins a Nobel for their overwhelming drive to outlaw a particular weapon, regardless of what it is, they don’t deserve it as long as that weapon has reasonable uses. And clearly land mines have all sorts of uses that are perfectly legitimate in times of war; thus, we can’t agree with giving a peace prize to someone that wants to ban them.
Yeah, I should have not bothered reading past Jimmy Carter being labeled the worst ex-president. The rationale that the leaders behind the League of Nations didn’t deserve their prizes since it didn’t prevent WW2 is rather nauseating as well. My guess is these folks would prefer to see the awards go to people that most benefit causes they believe in, regardless of whether it’s in attempt to maintain (or create) peace
The Peace Prize will almost always be highly controversial because peace in general is fleeting and the causes of conflict are rarely apparent well ahead of time. Economics is similar, but it’s not a true Nobel Prize. The Literature prize is sometimes controversial, but it’s based on static works of art. The hard-science Nobel Prizes (Medicine, Physics, Chemistry) are generally given for work that has stood the test of many, many years; to require the same test of time for those who win the Peace Prize would mean there would very rarely be anyone deserving of it that was still alive.