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Doesn’t it, though?
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I was 4 when he resigned and I grew up hearing of him portrayed in our culture as pretty much just a notch above Hitler. But at some point in adulthood my dad tried to impart to me just how hugely important his China moment was at the time.
To Understand the future sainthood of Donald Trump, just look at
George W BushThe Martyrdom of St. Bartholomew
Canonization has to be earned. I say we let Ramsay Bolton explain it to him.
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If he gets it, I feel like the Peace Prize has lost basically all of it’s reputation.
First they gave it to Obama for NOTHING… I mean literally he got it for NOT being George Bush. Who, while he did see the inevitable withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, also went on to see an increase in private contractors and drone strikes, while allowing Gitmo to continue as well.
Now if they give it to Trump for NOTHING, one can cue that table flip gif. Although the SK president did say Trump should be up for it. But I think that might be buttering him up for the, “Oh, BTW, we need you to withdraw all US forces from the Korean peninsula as part of the peace treaty.” Though, I suppose, if he actually did that, it might actually be a good thing.
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To his credit, he did seem as surprised as anyone else by the announcement.
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In academic/diplomatic circles, it never really had any. A Nobel Prize is a major achievement, but the Peace Prize is not a real Nobel.
Yup.
Obama’s award was primarily a fuck-you to GWB. It didn’t actually have much to do with Obama himself.
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He’s joked about it publicly too.
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Self-effacing humor—yet another attribute that Trump lacks in its entirety. The closest Trump ever came to making a joke at his own expense was when he mocked his own wife at the 2016 Al Smith dinner. (“Hey, wasn’t that crazy how Melania plagiarized Michelle Obama’s speech? What a stupid c***, am I right? That’s why I never let her talk at home! Now, back to how great I am…”)
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That seems like a difficult statement to defend? The peace price is one of the original prices funded and explicitly arranged by Nobel, at the same time as and on equal footing with the others. (The debatable one is the Nobel memorial economics price.)
Not that they haven’t made peculiar decisions at times - the Obama one was inexplicable - but it’s not like the other prices have been immune to that either.
The chemistry/physics/etc prizes are judged by a panel of scientific experts. The Peace Prize is judged by a panel of Norwegian politicians.
I’m from a scientific research background, and that’s the perspective I was speaking from. The scientific awards are respected, the Peace Prize is laughed at. And, yeah, folks sneer at the economics pseudo-Nobel as well.
You’re right on the history, though.
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The Peace Prize has some extremely questionable winners. People who turned away ships of Jewish refugees in the lead up to the second world war, people who went on to preside over genocide, people who have done nothing in particular to deserve the prize (but giving the prize to them was a middle finger to someone the committee didn’t like); they didn’t give it to Ghandi in 1948 and instead awarded it to no one because no one fit the bill. They gave it to Kissinger.
I looked through some lists of bad nobels, and only one name who ever won a science prize stood out as an obvious mistake - the guy who invented lobotomies as a treatment for mental illness. No nobel prizes in physics for people who later went on to destroy some large percentage of the physics of their country.
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In theory, it seems that a panel of scholars who study, write about, and teach on issues of war and peace would be a better fit. Politicians don’t have the best track record with regards to judging how something is central to maintaining peace.
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We’re now upset because we have Hitler running the country, and it’s only natural that he is compared unfavorably to Hitler, who ran the country from 2001-2009, and to Hitler, who ran the country from 1981-1993.
We did dodge a bullet by not electing Hitler in 2012, though.
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Kinda
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