K-SCORE: 64
Author: Jay Nordlinger
After President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, I was confused, and wanted to learn what the prize was all about, so found a book on its history that wasn’t written by somebody in the pocket of the Norwegian Storting, author and journalist Jay Nordlinger. His book, Peace, They Say, is a mostly dry overview of every single recipient of the Nobel prize since its inception in 1901. I guess that’s what I signed up for. It’s periodically interesting, but I came to the conclusion from the pre WWII era winners that the prize was awarded mostly to the hopelessly naive advocates of disarmament and therefore not a meaningful accolade given to actual champions of peace. (Partly this is a problem that champions of peace are often not recognized for what they are until decades later, and the prize (is supposed to) be awarded to such people for their work in the previous year.) So it’s frustrating reading hundreds of pages about an institutional award that you don’t have much respect for.
“How do you respect a prize for world peace given to a terrorist?”
By the time I got past Henry Kissinger, I was appalled either by the controversies or commentaries of winners of the prize. By the time I got to Yassar Arafat in 1994, I was nothing short of disgusted. How do you respect a prize for world peace given to a terrorist? The man blew up Swiss airplane killing almost fifty people, he laundered money and made millions while his Palestinian people starved, he and his affiliates killed over 2000 Jordanians in the 70s, his Fatah group killed Israeli athletes in the 1972 olympics, he was a close ally with Sadam Hussein whose atrocities don’t bear imagining, and in his later years he made a mockery of the Oslo accords for which he was supposedly receiving his prize, shaking hands and claiming false peace in order to attempt to gain a political and militaristic advantage over the nation he sought to wipe off the map.
When the final chapter on Obama’s prize did roll around, I just shrugged. I disagreed with many of Obama’s policies and political strategies, but he’s a paragon compared to Arafat, so who cares? Who cares that he was given an award in October 2009 for a presidency that hadn’t lasted even a year? Who cares that the Norwegian council that gives the award had to receive his nomination only 11 days after his inauguration? Who cares that the prize became an unveiled attack against American conservatism in its later decades, which is where it now stands? All of that is an improvement to its reputation after it awarded the peace prize to a murdering monster.
“The woman from Northern Ireland in 1976... said... she’d like to kill George W. Bush”
What I learned from Peace, They Say, is that it’s possible that’s not the stupidest prize they gave out. And for that, I’m grateful to the book. Certainly Arafat is the worst person ever to win the world’s highest honor for humanitarianism, but the worst prize, it might not be. The IPCC received its awards before the worst of their falsifying warming data scandals AND there’s only a loose (at best) definition of peace that ties it intimately to environmentalism. Mohamed ElBaradei received the award along with his UN crossover organization the International Atomic Energy Agency, which was only destructive to the notion of international safety and peace with regard to the human race’s most devastating weapons. Tasked with investigating, reporting on, and ceasing nuclear programs of nations run by ruthless dictators and regimes that want to eradicate others from the entirely, the IAEA turned a blind eye, misrepresented, and proclaimed indifference to such programs. The award to Adolfo Perez Esquivel, the Argentinian leader, looks particularly pathetic given his support of Fidel Castro, but then again, so does the one to Jimmy Carter. The woman from Northern Ireland in 1976 whose story became famous through the peace prize, said on numerous occasions, rather peacefully, that she’d like to kill George W. Bush.
All of this of course is a means of complementing the book, because it was often eye-opening for me, discussing the intricacies of the lives of Peace Prize winners I’d never heard of. Yet I wasn’t all-too impressed by the quality of Nordlinger’s prose. His mind seemed to wander and his personal interjections were neither meaningfully separated from the bare-bones facts nor were they equally substantial. I often wished he’d just tell me what he really thought of a laureate because he clearly wanted to as he alluded to controversies, or I wished he’d only give me inarguable information and data. He too often tries to split the difference, which I fear hinders the book’s impact as a historical work and weakens whatever points he wants to make. He also claims at the beginning of the book that he won’t give equal time to each laureate, but he basically does, as a variance of two to six pages isn’t significant. I could have read forty pages about the details of The Camp David Accords and the award that was split between Anwar Al-Sadat and Begin, but yet another UN shill? I get it, the Norwegians want to jump up the asshole of the UN so as to really get the best possible whiff. Too graphic? They gave the award to Kofi Annan, who most notably did nothing as Rwandans were massacred. Stomach my fecal analogy because that’s what many of these people are or were: pieces of shit.
It helps that I agree with him on the issues of disarmament not leading to peace and that being one of the fundamental problems of The Nobel Peace Prize (though he did miss the point that our species can’t selectively uninvent things, which is an essential facet of the nuclear debate). It also helps that I agree with Nordlinger on the issue of The Nobel Peace Prize being driven, especially now, by devout leftists, social justice, and identity politics, but anyone who claims otherwise is either a liar or a fool. (Which is not to say that I belong to the political right, I don’t.) But those things alone weren’t enough for me to love this book. Like The Nobel Peace Prize itself, Peace, They Say frustrates as it fails to find a clear narrative or stance on anything meaningful, solid, and consistent. It is, however, filled with lots of little anecdotes that make sane people shake their head at the world’s hypocrisies and want to condemn the whole concept of awards and prizes, especially for something like peace. (Like Alfred Nobel, apart from setting the prize in motion in his will, is best known for inventing dynamite.) That’s satisfying enough.