The Nobel Peace Prize 2021
nobelprize.org
nobelprize.org
I'm not saying you owe Nobel Prize committees better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
They are always the most controversial, specially across a wide range of viewpoints. To me, they give an opportunity to critique your own values more than anything else.
The prize comes with money granted to the individuals and also the fame. If the committee wanted to make a statement they should stop giving prizes to people but only organizations for instance (which the committee does from time to time).
But this award text mainly speaks about stuff they did in the nineties. That struck me as a bit odd compared to the peace prize earlier years.
If you read the original documents, all Nobel prizes where supposed to be given based on work in done the previous year. However it turns out that judging the value of anything in real time is hard, so all the prizes have been taking a longer and longer view.
The most popular proposal for the Peace Prize this year were two people: Maria Kolesnikova and Aleksey Navalny, both currently jailed by the dictatorial regimes of their respective countries. Overlooking them for a journalist with rather flexible moral principles is a big disgrace.
And then, Muratov is not a martyr, Navalny is.
And if you are indifferent to this counterbalancing, at least take heart that over the past 6 years there has been a significant decline in fatalities related to armed conflicts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_armed_conflicts_in_202...
And 2021 is continuing the trend, and 2022 will hopefully as well as the Afghanistan conflict winds down.
Muratov is a great man, I really like his thinking and he curtailed Russian politics with extreme agility, but he did not sacrifice his freedom for democracy the same way Nelson Mandela did.
He participated in Russian marches some 20 years ago but kept his distance afterwards. FYI, ultra-nationalists outside of government structures were all jailed or killed since then, and the state nourishes similar sentiments in people much more successfully.
He is favoring the idea of abolishing free travel with poorer countries like Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, but this is pretty much in line with the politics of all other governments (US vs Mexico as opposed to US vs Canada).
Anything else is state propaganda trying to discredit him.
Regarding hate against sexual minorities, in the more than a decade of following Navalny on social media, I have never seen him exhibiting any hate or resentment towards sexual minorities, so I think that this accusation is an outright lie.
The status quo is that the Russian state pays loads of money to little czars in Caucasus to keep them comfy instead of fighting them in civil wars.
If you followed him more than 10 years, you would be aware of his extremely hateful comments against all kids of minorities in his blog.
For example, his proposals to kick all "rats" (Georgians) out of Russia and bomb them[1]. That's just one example out of many.
SOURCES
You continuously claim Navalny to have hateful views on sexual minorities or jews, but you fail to provide any sources.
As for georgian 'rats'. 1. This was a statement done during an actual WAR with georgia, with extremely distorted information field and difficult to judge situation. I myself was very anti-georgian at that moment, but my views have changed since then. Navalny has also retracted his statement on the matter and apologized for it a long time ago, but propagandists like you endlessly cite it without any context or follow ups.
2 or 3 statements in the past = "rich history of hate"
People are inherently complex.
99% are his LJ comments though.
The way you describe him he must be an Adolf Hitler. Heck even Adolf Hitler probably wasn't blaming the Jews and communists 99% of the time, your depiction is more of the Westboro Baptist pastor.
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.
It looked like a promising new era and they were not the only ones swept up in that.
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.
Genuinely curious: what did I miss here? (I read up on Cambodia a few months 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:
• 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.
And that is supposed to be a bad thing? If they only give out trophies for feats accomplished years ago that prize would be worthless decoration. The whole point is that the prize offers acknowledgment and support. It is not magic, as you point out, but it does not have to be.
And yet, that's how all the other Nobel prizes work, not just in the "hard sciences", but also literature. Why is the peace prize the only exception?
If you want to be condescending, at least have an idea of what you're talking about. Just stop now.
The peace prize is the only one that regularly ignores this informal guideline and goes for what must be assumed to be cheap publicity grabs.
* 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.
- 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.
The fact that Obama also turned out to be a murderous warmonger just illustrates how it's better to judge people on their actions rather than their rhetoric.
Or identity in general. Obama even admitted that he doesn't know why he received it. Perhaps everyone knows that the Peace Prize has lost respect in the 21st century since it can be won with little effort or for no reason.
What a shame and a complete waste.
Only Americans obsess over the skin color of Obama. The Nobel committee were more concerned about thing like torturing people indefinitely at "black sites", attacking countries without UN approval and such.
I don't know about that. Berlusconi seemed to, as a quick example that comes to mind.
I’m not even sure to include on such a list, which itself indicates the problem. Probably some inventors and technologists that have reduced fights over resources.
Quoting Wikipedia:
He declared the intention to pursue an "independent foreign policy", and strengthened relations with China and Russia.[20]
When Assange or Snowden get the Nobel, I’ll believe that the committee cares about a free press.
I would have expected to see WikiLeaks, or Julian Assange personally, among the recipients of a prize with this focus. Although, as other commenters suggest, the Nobel committee might be considered discredited enough for us not to have any expectations of them.