The Nobel Peace Prize 2022 | Hacker News Reader

The Nobel Peace Prize 2022

nobelpeaceprize.org

42 pointsdanielskogly48 comments

> The Nobel Peace Prize 2022 is awarded to human rights advocate Ales Bialiatski from Belarus, the Russian human rights organisation Memorial and the Ukrainian human rights organisation Center for Civil Liberties

Since the award for Obama I can't take this serious anymore

what brings more peace than droke strikes though?

Maybe one for Putin '23 after he dropped a nuke and started the nuclear war, as the ultimate form of peace? SCNR

This seems to have gone to deserving recipients though.

Arafat and "Mother Teresa" weren't laughable enough?

mother teresa didnt bomb half the middle east

"...caring for the sick by glorifying their suffering instead of relieving it" seems bad enough.

I recently changed my mind on Mother Teresa situation after reading some of her writings. Not that I like her more after that, but I do think of the situation itself differently.

Mother Teresa sounds very unsurprisingly as an extremely religious person. She constantly talks about God and Jesus and how people's spiritual needs are paramount, and how abortion and contraception is evil, and how her agenda is spiritual, and how she's not a social worker. All of that is said in very plain language.

Now as an atheist that doesn't cause any particular positive impression on me, but what I find it interesting is that she's 100% clearly a religious worker first, second, third and probably fourth before she's anything else. The Catholic Church was very right in canonizing her, if you take canonicalization as a recognition of somebody's religious work, not as some sort of "very good person" stamp of approval.

With her there seems to be no "dirty landry" like Gandhi having his weird tests of will or whatever that was. No, she's very upfront about what she is, and barely shuts up about it.

So it baffles me why she ended up with the reputation she did. She's very clearly a religious worker and has that as a first priority above anything else. Seeing her as somebody would want to take care of people in a manner people who aren't religious zealots would approve is just a mistake.

This is a very reasonable take.

One needs to remember that for many religious people, the spiritual “health” is as important, if not more important, than the physical health.

I would assume her argument about using funds for the church rather than healthcare would be something like “the money is used to for both the spiritual and health needs of the destitute”.

You can clearly disagree with that take, but it’s not like she was stealing the money or diverting it for her own gain.

That's all fine if all she ever did was preach. No real harm done. But that's not what she did. You can't dismiss someone's actions because they believe they were doing the right thing or that the impact was unimportant to them. That may help explain why they did them but they still did them.

There's a short book by Christopher Hitchens called The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, which does go into her dirty dealings and doings. Recommended read, as it may very well change your mind again.

Certainly, denying health care to the destitute, while diverting donations intended for them to the gilded edifices of the Catholic Church does hurdle the low bar of not bombing people. Seems a tad unambitions for a feted prize though.

Her entire ideologue and work was entirely vile and horrible. Well marketed, but vile. Anyone supporting her must be evil.

it was marketed by media. she always did what she told she would. she is a religious worker like every other religion has. media just liked the idea of a woman saving dying people in the third world.

Arafat at least signed a peace treaty that superficially ended one of the most impactful and divisive conflicts of our time. He arguably came closest at the times to being the Palestinian Mandala (alas he had many flaws to be that imo)

I would definitely not put him in the same category as awarding it to either Obama or Kissinger. If anything they initiated or architected some of the worst conflicts in the last 50 years.

I think Alfred Nobel made too challenging of a target. It's an annual prize to be awarded to those who have "done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses"

Think of the absolutely immense amounts of political capital that any of those things require, and how likely it is to find a person in any given year who could be personally credited with improving relationships between countries, or reducing standing armies.

It's also not democracy-friendly, funnily enough. In most democratic countries such actions are a collective effort. A single member of a parliament can't get anything done on their own, and there doesn't necessarily need to be some sort of charismatic leader pushing such efforts. An army can shrink just because we have a general consensus that war isn't a good thing and the army can do with a smaller budget, and who do you award for that?

So it makes perfect sense to me that the committee ends up blundering it. Maybe if it was a once a decade thing it'd be a more reasonable one.

Yes, if the committee declined to award it most years, and only gave it to the truly worthy, it would be much more impactful.

dang posted this[0] on the thread of last year's winner:

> All: please don't post if you have a reflexive-indignant reaction rather than a curious one. This site is for the latter, not the former, and the former tends to drown out the latter.

> I'm not saying you owe Nobel Prize committees better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28797286

I know the feeling, but please keep the cynicism in check. Some of these people are worthy of the prize, and peace isn't an exact science. There'll be errors, and there'll be choices you don't agree with. Criticism on the actual choice is fine, the rest doesn't help.

To paraphrase: give it a chance.

True, there were recipients that really deserved it, including the winners this year. Blunders like with e.g. Obama just leave a really bitter taste wrt to the overall integrity.

Obama was awarded it because of his net-zero goal for nuclear arms and his progress on Iran. Even that all these turned out to be failed now, the decision back then made sense.

It didn’t make sense at all. Obama was selected for the Nobel peace prize after 6 months of being president. What exactly had he accomplished?

Obama was just another warmonger, in my opinion.

Citing Wikipedia:

"Jagland said the committee was influenced by a speech Obama gave about Islam in Cairo in June 2009, the president's efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation and climate change, and Obama's support for using established international bodies such as the United Nations to pursue foreign policy goals."

What he accomplished was to set a new tone for peace. This is more than many other presidents.

That 'warmonger' label is just bonkers. He prevented an engagement in Syria, this caused and still causes a lot of harm.

I think awarding it to Obama was the wrong decision. That said, people sometimes misunderstand what the Nobel Peace Prize is about. "Peace" is interpreted in a very abstract sense by the committee and should perhaps be better understood as "Civilizational Progress". The reason the committee awarded it to Obama was because it wanted to commend the progress the US has made on the Civil Rights movement. Dr. Martin Luther King received the peace prize, and Obama is seen as a culmination of this movement. In short, Obama's prize should be seen as a prize given to the American people for their progress.

I think the other way to look at it, is that the prize can also be a political tool. That’s how we achieve peace after all.

You’re not just recognising the progress he US might have made, but signalling the current leader that hey, you could also leave your mark. Obama seems like a pretty reasonable and intelligent person to me. He probably thought about why they awarded it to him.

Obama himself was somewhat mystified by the award.

But it is indeed as you say: the thinking process is somewhat opaque at times. I watched the announcement just now from the Nobel museum in Stockholm where they discussed it. It was inevitable that the award this year would relate to Russia somehow, but they thought it inappropriate to award to a leader actively waging war (even a defensive war).

Discussed yesterday when we were there was your talking point about Obama's award being about what he represented and not about anything he did.

If you think it was a wrong decision who should have received it in 2009?

Also I think the civil rights argument seems wrong to me. Citing Wikipedia:

Alfred Nobel specifically requested that the prize be awarded "to the person or society that shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses." You can definitely view Dr. King's work as furthering brotherhood among nations, since so many wars are motivated by ethnic conflict and Civil Rights are critically important to defusing such conflict; but the prize is not merely intended for "civilizational progress" of any arbitrary kind.

In this case they should have awarded it to one of the civil right movements. The symbolism of awarding it in the first year of Obama's presidency would have had the same impact in underscoring the civilisational progress of having him elected without making a mockery of the award. Trump bombed an order magnitude less civilians than Obama ever did per year in office. He even comes close to Bush's record.

If you want to award to him I think awarding it for his nuclear treaty with Iran comes closest to making sense.

Kissinger wasn't enough to have you questions it?

Did you take it seriously before, or did it just trigger you somehow that he got it?

And why not use this opportunity to discuss this year's worthy recipients, instead of derailing the thread?

Remember that the price is based on one year of work, not the total of everything a person have done.

The Obama award was from one of his years as president.

From wikipedia: According to Nobel's will, the Peace Prize shall be awarded to the person who in the preceding year "shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses"

Arafat didn't do it for you? Or Kissinger?

Don't worry this year they nominated Zelensky just after he asked NATO for a preemptive nuclear strike against Russia

I remember in 2006 when Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize[1]. As a teen I wasn't particularly interested in the peace prize and knew that the quality of it was quite low compared to the other Nobel prize; The peace prize is given out by a committee elected by _Norwegian parliament_ a political organization, unlike the scientific one which came from the Academy, in Sweden.

Why I remember Yunus was because it was shocking to teenager me, that a banker received the prize; but when the details of why it was revealed to me, it blew my mind how helping poor people through lending is actually helping for the somewhat "vague" goal of peace. To young me it was the first time "take a big problem, such as peace, and break it down to smaller problems which you can solve. Solving big problems directly often fails" resounded.

Then the following year I was ofc like everyone else disappointing with EU, Obama getting it. I often even joked with my friends that the Peace prize is actually cursed because Syrian crisis and migration crisis, and Ukraine 2014 happened quite quickly after and made the entire peace prize look stupid.

I wish the Peace prize focused more on concrete action that have be proven to *lead to peaceful results*, rather than throwing the price at people/organization that *represent* something virtuous.

Attention economy and Social medias "like" culture already cover the "appraisal to the virtuous sayer than the pragmatic doers" phenomenon enough.

But I guess going around actually looking for results and evaluating it is a time-consuming and a hard thing, compared to just searching for symbols and words.

That said, it seems like this years recipient seems to rather be on the good side.

[1] https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2006/yunus/facts/

> The peace prize is given out by a committee elected by _Norwegian parliament_ a political organization

Eh, the problems we got from Liu Xiaobo being awarded the prize, it should be pretty clear the Norwegian government has little say in who the prize is awarded to.

Personally to me the "Memorial" org is an interesting case. Similar organizations are spread across the globe but we see they can be forcibly shut in authoritarian states. The risk of losing amounts of historically accurate (crowd sourced) information is at stake. How to decentralize the ownership of such data to prevent the loss in cases when people get killed?

There are some sensitive matters they deal with related to the privacy of the victims and their relatives, so decentralization is not the best way to do it (I doubt encrypted torrents are reliable enough). We need a globally distributed network of backups with data centers in safe harbors that have minimal interference from local government.

This feels well thought out as it puts a focus the issue of how top down autocracy affects these countries both past and right now, those left picking up the pieces and that there are those that do offer an alternative.

The Nobel prize is becoming a joke. It's mostly political at this point with few exceptions. I won't even start on literature or peace prize, just the fact you'll get it for applied research.

> It's mostly political

The Nobel prize for peace is literally political. It couldn't be any other thing.

The scientific ones are fine. Occasionally questionable, but overall fine. The political ones (including literature) are of course a joke, no need for “becoming”.

Despicable attempt to paint this clearly good vs. evil war with a uniform grey paint.

"Oh, it's just a civil war between 3 "brother nations". It not clear who the real real culprit is, and who is the victim."

PS: it's not the laureates who are in the wrong. No, they are all good. It the precise timing and selection of laureates which is scummy.

Not to demean the work done by all past recipients, but it feels like we're just a handful of years away from handing this prize to Elon Musk.

> Center for Civil Liberties

Didn't take long, on this page [1], towards the end, links to donors: NED (always them) and the US Department of State. The warmongering neoliberals have won.

[1] https://ccl.org.ua/en/about-the-ccl/

> European Commission

> Open Societies Foundation

This is quite the array of influential backers. Too bad more information about the Nobel deliberations isn't made public, it would be interesting to see how much this factors into their calculus. There are a lot of Ukrainian organizations doing important work during this conflict, but I had never heard of this one.

I do find it distasteful than an organization funded by the CIA's outreach division won a Nobel Peace Prize. It doesn't guarantee the CfCL is undeserving, but it's a fairly bad look.

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