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Comment by paggle | Hacker News Reader

With actual war criminals winning peace prizes I do wonder what is the point of it. The value of an award is in the company it puts you in, now it looks like the peace Nobel is just worth its dollar value and its value on the TED circuit.

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The value in awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to warmongers is — and the awarding committee is very conscious of it — that it has enough cachet to actually motivate warmongers to stop warmonging and go for the prize (and a relatively well-off, safe and calm retirement).

It may not be fair, but the people who don't die because of that effect won't complain.

Do you have any examples of this happening?

There are multiple instances of violent people who stopped being violent and got the prize. Arafat is one example.

Whether the prize played a role in their decision is something only they can say (and then you might not believe them).

So I find this question useless, because it cannot be answered. The mechanism I sketched is generally plausible, though.

There are also instances of relatively peaceful people who got the prize and became warmongers, e.g. a certain president of the us, who sent 500 drone strikes into Libya in a single year after winning the prize (among other military adventures)

How does that relate to the question in this sub thread?

Do you actually propose that they did violent things because they got the prize?

The prize may have given them political cover that let their violence go on longer

They only get the prize after stopping, so you're arguing for something more complicated: violence, then non-violence, then violence.

Possible, but not terribly plausible, IMO. And the examples proffered so far (Obama or Kissinger) certainly don't fit that pattern.

If there are as many examples of people receiving the peace prize then going on to be warmongers as there are the reverse, it suggests that the peace prize isn't really doing anything here and we're just looking at the base rate of leaders switching between peaceful and warlike actions.

No, that's a fallacy, unless you can credibly argue for a causal link, i.e. because of the prize people feel they can get away with violence.

I find that not impossible to argue, but incredible, and would want to see supporting evidence.

Yes, but that cuts both ways.

I only argue that there is a plausible mechanism, you argued in quantitative terms.

Do you talk about war criminals being awarded the Nobel peace prize or about Nobel peace prize laureates turning into war criminals? This is an important difference in my opinion. Since you seem to follow this more closely than I do, would you mind giving an example?

Aung San Suu Kyi is probably the most recent example with a very dubious legacy.

> Do you talk about war criminals being awarded the Nobel peace prize or about Nobel peace prize laureates turning into war criminals?

For the former, Henry Kissinger.

There are examples of the latter, as well.

Holy hell, Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize?! I'm was familiar enough with him to know he's disgustingly immoral, and never imagined people back then would have been stupid enough to give him that award.

With 2 members of the committee resigning in protest, it seems not everyone with power to award it was so morally corrupt.

Gorbatschow sent tanks on civilians in Vilnius just one month after being awarded the Peace Nobel

Obama pursued policies that arguably (https://www.amnestyusa.org/the-obama-bush-doctrine/) amount to war crimes, and refused to allow the obvious war crimes of the preceding administration to be investigated. He got a Nobel peace prize essentially for being less terrible on that front than his predecessor, George W Bush.

> But does the drone program amount to a war crime as Marc Thiessen suggests? That is a complicated question to answer. Unlike the use of torture, there are circumstances in international law and under the laws of war in which the use of lethal force can be lawful. Much depends on where, how and with what intent such force is used. We do not, as yet, have sufficient evidence to make a determination regarding the legality of the US drones program. It has been conducted in secret and in places where it is very difficult to mount an effective investigation.

Also there was a 1,200+ page Senate investigation into the use of torture by the previous administration.

It’s not more complicated. The same flawed intelligence apparatus which provided the lists of people to capture and interrogate during the Bush administration also compiled Obama’s kill list.

Neither method really provides any useful intelligence. The difference is victims of torture can go on ‘60 Minutes’, victims of targeted drone strikes can’t.

Obama certainly did not deserve his Peace prize by the time he was elected and continued violence in the Middle East, started new wars (such as Libya) and expanded the (secret) drone strikes.

Well to be fair he did most of those things after winning the Nobel.

Which makes it even worse.

Well humans are human. Mistakes happen and as long as they aren't increasing over time, it's all cool.

Awards don't just exist to award the individual.

In polarizing times, where the instinct is to create more conflict as a path to resolving conflict, what many of the Peace Prize winners have done, is to remind everyone that alternate non-obvious paths exist.

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