Kissinger helped establish a ceasefire in Vietnam (although it didn't stick). I don't know why that would be more surprising than Obama's prize. Kissinger donated the money to charity and didn't turn up to the awards ceremony, he didn't think he deserved it. I don't understand why Obama was awarded the prize at all.
According to Samantha Power's memoirs and interview, Obama and the whole Obama administration felt the same. They felt just awkward.
Power, Samantha, The education of an idealist : a memoir, ISBN 978-0-06-295650-7
>In October of 2009, I awoke to a very different form of bad news: Barack Obama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Less than a year into his presidency, Obama was receiving an award previously bestowed on Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
>When I relayed the news to Cass, he looked stricken, as if I had told him someone we knew had fallen ill. The choice seemed wildly premature, as well as a gift to Obama’s critics, who delighted in painting him as a cosmopolitan celebrity detached from the concerns of working-class Americans. But there was no getting around it: come December of 2009, Obama would travel to Norway to accept the most prestigious prize in the world.
>Jon Favreau and Ben Rhodes, Obama’s two gifted speechwriters, took on the difficult task of drafting the Nobel address. I popped into Jon’s tiny office on the first floor of the West Wing, and he told me that the President had decided to directly confront the awkwardness of receiving the prize so early in his presidency. He also wanted to frame the speech around the more profound irony of winning a peace prize at the very time he was deploying 30,000 additional soldiers to Afghanistan, augmenting the force of over 67,000 US troops already there.
I think Obama was awarded the prize, basically, because he was not Bush. It was the zeitgeist of that time. We (and by we, I mean most people in the planet) were really tired of the Bush administration exploits.
Kissinger could help to establish a ceasefire in Vietnam, but it feels like the things they did in Cambodia before that, should subtract some points for a Peace Prize.
> Kissinger helped establish a ceasefire in Vietnam (although it didn't stick).
Nixon was elected in 1968 with Kissinger as his National Security advisor, and they assumed their posts in early 1969. That means he held off an immediate US withdrawal from Vietnam for 6 years - and that was the only legitimate course of action.
While it's true that he did spend time negotiating a potential cease fire / armistice, he and Nixon continued an illegitimate war of aggression in a foreign country, trying to prop up a puppet regime.
But that's not all: Kissinger initiated the US campaign in Cambodia, in which, over several years, hundreds of thousands were killed. See:
My point was that giving the prize to an American diplomat for taking a break from his collaboration with Nixon to try to end the imperialist war that we started, on terms agreeable to us, after at least a million Vietnamese people were killed, is insane. He also got behind the bombing in Cambodia as a way to force North Vietnam to capitulate to American demands. This is not a man you award a peace prize to unless your idea of peace includes Carthaginian peace.
The Nobel peace prize has had a long tendency of handing out awards short-sightedly for promises rather than solutions, not just when giving it to American politicians:
• In the 1920s, Britain and France got the Peace Prize for telling Germany that it's allowed to attack Poland, and Germany received it as well for graciously accepting these terms.
• The International Peace Bureau and Inter-Parliamentary Union got multiple prizes for the great accomplishments of existing, despite having achieved nothing of note in the 120+ years of their existence.
• Similarly, the League of Nations got several prizes in the first few years of existence (when everyone was too broke to afford another war anyway), despite being a toothless paper tiger that did nothing to prevent WW2.
• Kellogg received the prize in 1930 for a treaty he organized in 1929, which failed as early as 1931.
And that's just the questionable awards up until 1930. Its track record later isn't much better.
I don't have any objections to this year's laureates (though I'm not too familiar with their works), but ultimately, the question is whether the prize is living up to its high expectations, and if not, what should be done to improve it.
* They knew about the heinous crimes for which recipients such as Kissinger had already been responsible. (With Obama this is somewhat less of an issue, but he already had a record as US senator and president for a few months; and those did not suggest a future worthy of a peace prize, to say the least).
* They knew those recipients were not penitent regarding their crimes.
* They never acknowledged the awardings of these people as a mistake.
So - they got it right, in their view. It's just that your or my idea of what's right is not theirs.
I already gave the two examples necessary to address this.
- Kissinger. He was Nixon's National Security Advisor, intimately involved in prosecuting the Vietnam War, a war which he fully supported on the grounds of containing the influence of communism. By awarding the peace prize to him, the prize committee shows that they don't think it's crazy for millions of Vietnamese people to die in order to protect the interests of global capital. No credibility.
- Obama. His prize was awarded nine months into his first term. This was based on essentially nothing. The prize committee treated it as little more than a Time Magazine Person of the Year style popularity contest. No credibility.
So there's no need to keep score on correct vs incorrect calls based on unreliable prognostication about future outcomes. These are concrete examples of times when, even just considering the information they had at the time, they made an absolute mockery of the prestige of the Nobel prize.
Instead of looking at people as good and bad, it helps to look at them as people who do good and bad things, to be slightly more accurate.
I look at the Peace Prize as being awarded for certain things people do, not as an endorsement of every action they have done in their life. The language from this year's prize committee makes this rather plain.
It's not like it is the same people now who were on the committee when either of those were chosen to receive it the current member who have been on it for the longest got appointed in 2012
veltas|4 years ago
nabla9|4 years ago
Power, Samantha, The education of an idealist : a memoir, ISBN 978-0-06-295650-7
>In October of 2009, I awoke to a very different form of bad news: Barack Obama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Less than a year into his presidency, Obama was receiving an award previously bestowed on Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
>When I relayed the news to Cass, he looked stricken, as if I had told him someone we knew had fallen ill. The choice seemed wildly premature, as well as a gift to Obama’s critics, who delighted in painting him as a cosmopolitan celebrity detached from the concerns of working-class Americans. But there was no getting around it: come December of 2009, Obama would travel to Norway to accept the most prestigious prize in the world.
>Jon Favreau and Ben Rhodes, Obama’s two gifted speechwriters, took on the difficult task of drafting the Nobel address. I popped into Jon’s tiny office on the first floor of the West Wing, and he told me that the President had decided to directly confront the awkwardness of receiving the prize so early in his presidency. He also wanted to frame the speech around the more profound irony of winning a peace prize at the very time he was deploying 30,000 additional soldiers to Afghanistan, augmenting the force of over 67,000 US troops already there.
RobertoG|4 years ago
Kissinger could help to establish a ceasefire in Vietnam, but it feels like the things they did in Cambodia before that, should subtract some points for a Peace Prize.
einpoklum|4 years ago
Nixon was elected in 1968 with Kissinger as his National Security advisor, and they assumed their posts in early 1969. That means he held off an immediate US withdrawal from Vietnam for 6 years - and that was the only legitimate course of action.
While it's true that he did spend time negotiating a potential cease fire / armistice, he and Nixon continued an illegitimate war of aggression in a foreign country, trying to prop up a puppet regime.
But that's not all: Kissinger initiated the US campaign in Cambodia, in which, over several years, hundreds of thousands were killed. See:
https://www2.irrawaddy.com/article.php?art_id=2412
lordlic|4 years ago
bettysdiagnose|4 years ago
creshal|4 years ago
• In the 1920s, Britain and France got the Peace Prize for telling Germany that it's allowed to attack Poland, and Germany received it as well for graciously accepting these terms.
• The International Peace Bureau and Inter-Parliamentary Union got multiple prizes for the great accomplishments of existing, despite having achieved nothing of note in the 120+ years of their existence.
• Similarly, the League of Nations got several prizes in the first few years of existence (when everyone was too broke to afford another war anyway), despite being a toothless paper tiger that did nothing to prevent WW2.
• Kellogg received the prize in 1930 for a treaty he organized in 1929, which failed as early as 1931.
And that's just the questionable awards up until 1930. Its track record later isn't much better.
I don't have any objections to this year's laureates (though I'm not too familiar with their works), but ultimately, the question is whether the prize is living up to its high expectations, and if not, what should be done to improve it.
einpoklum|4 years ago
* They knew about the heinous crimes for which recipients such as Kissinger had already been responsible. (With Obama this is somewhat less of an issue, but he already had a record as US senator and president for a few months; and those did not suggest a future worthy of a peace prize, to say the least).
* They knew those recipients were not penitent regarding their crimes.
* They never acknowledged the awardings of these people as a mistake.
So - they got it right, in their view. It's just that your or my idea of what's right is not theirs.
matsemann|4 years ago
blackoil|4 years ago
lordlic|4 years ago
- Kissinger. He was Nixon's National Security Advisor, intimately involved in prosecuting the Vietnam War, a war which he fully supported on the grounds of containing the influence of communism. By awarding the peace prize to him, the prize committee shows that they don't think it's crazy for millions of Vietnamese people to die in order to protect the interests of global capital. No credibility.
- Obama. His prize was awarded nine months into his first term. This was based on essentially nothing. The prize committee treated it as little more than a Time Magazine Person of the Year style popularity contest. No credibility.
So there's no need to keep score on correct vs incorrect calls based on unreliable prognostication about future outcomes. These are concrete examples of times when, even just considering the information they had at the time, they made an absolute mockery of the prestige of the Nobel prize.
SyzygistSix|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
erk__|4 years ago
https://www.nobelpeaceprize.org/nobel-committee/
w4rh4wk5|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]