by Bruce Thornton
Why we shouldn’t waste our time on the Nobel committee's Newspeak.
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Last week nominations for the Noble 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.
Bruce Thornton
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-orwellian-noble-peace-prize/
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