The Nobel Peace Prize and the Highly Confused Masses

The Nobel Prize Laureates have been a pretty exciting bunch this year. From Herta Muller, one of less than a dozen females to ever win the Nobel Prize for literature to the winners of the Prize in Physiology or Medicine, the first time two woman have ever received the prize. But I think that the choice for the Nobel Peace Prize is going to make the most noise: newly elected President of America Barak Obama.

At first I was shocked at the news, but I was kind of okay with it. Then I started thinking about other people who might have deserved it more -- Zimbabwe's Morgan Tsvangirai for example. Here's someone's who's been an activist in his country since the age of 20, who had to deal with (maybe) rigged elections and extreme violence towards his supporters before he was finally able to come into power in February 2009. He brought democracy to Zimbabwe after generations of violence and dictatorship with little support from surrounding countries.

Obama has only been in power for 9 months, which is a full month longer than Tsvangirai. He had a whirlwind campaign in which he made promises (as politicians do) and people believed him (as people do) enough to elect him. Nothing against the guy, but he hasn't managed to get the American troops out of the Middle East, and his big-deal health bill hasn't even been voted on yet. He hasn't passed any foreign policies which were successful either. So what's he winning for, anyway?

"his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."

Fair enough.

Now, this might be a bit conspiracy theory of me, but I think this might be a bit of an insurance policy on the part of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. It is one thing to make promises and wave your arms around and talk about nuclear disarmament, but it is another to be given the equivalent of $1.4 million dollars for it. It's not a lot of money in American government terms, and I have a feeling that Zimbabwe could have used it more, but it means something.

The Nobel Prize is one of the highest honours that a person can win. There's a long history of the Nobel Committee choosing people who have already made a difference to the world: Marie Curie and the discovery of radium, Fire and Mello for RNA interference, Ernest Hemingway...

But this time, they made an anticipatory selection. By giving him this prize, especially for his ideas of global nuclear disarmament, they are putting their support behind an idea of a unified and nuclear-free world. And if his Nobel Bio one day reads, "won the Prize for his amazing vision for the future... which unfortunately did not exactly turn out how he told us it would." It would really suck.

Source:
Reuters. "U.S. President Obama wins Nobel Peace Prize." National Post. 9 Oct. 2009. Web. 9 Oct. 2009. .