Reproducing an interesting article written by Rakesh Krishnan Simha.
Prize and Prejudice : Why a lot of rotten people win the Nobel Prize
In 1964 when Jean-Paul Sartre was given the Nobel Prize for literature, the French author and leftist icon rejected the award, saying it was "an honour restricted to Western writers and Eastern rebels". Sartre also understood the underlying intent of the Nobel awards as a tool of co-option. In fact, his other objection to the Nobel was that the winner of the prize is "in a way inevitably co-opted by simply being crowned. It's a way of saying, finally he's on our side".
Just as entry to elite universities is not always based on merit, the winners of the Nobel Prize are not always deserving of honour and recognition. The unfortunate mutation of peace prize winner Malala Yousafzai from a diehard (no pun intended) critic of the Pakistan Taliban's misogynistic laws to a mouthpiece of the very Islamist forces that tried to kill her, is a pointer to the bad picks - and misses - of the Nobel Academy.
Here's a short list that even a blind judge could not have missed:-
* Mohandas Gandhi (rejected all forms of violence)
* Dmitri Mendeleyev (the Russian scientist famous for the Periodic Table
* Leo Tolstoy (the greatest novelist of all time)
* U Thant (played a key role in defusing the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis)
* Antony Chekhov (one of the world's greatest writers) and
* RK Narayan (most prolific Indian author of the modern era).
Against this backdrop it comes as no surprise that Swedish teenage climate activist for her cringe-worthy How Dare You monologue - has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize to be awarded this month. At 16, she would be the youngest recipient of the $930,000 award won by the likes of Nelson Mandela, Jimmy Carter and Mikhail Gorbachev.
Peace Prize for warmongers
For all his failings as a political leader, Gandhi should have been a shoo-in for the peace prize. Many people of British origin living in different parts of the world today owe their existence to Gandhi because he prevented the Indian revolutionaries from carrying out a massacre of their forefathers - the 100,000-odd British soldiers, bureaucrats and civilians ruling India.
The British were committing genocide in India, but Norway - which which annually awards the Nobel Peace Prize - did not want to ruffle any feathers in Britain by honouring Gandhi. It was a clear case of racial solidarity. Considered the home of the Germanic people, Norway enjoys very close relations with Britain.
In 1972 the peace prize should have gone to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Firstly, she stopped the genocide of Bengalis in East Pakistan, where three million of them had been killed by the Pakistan Army in a short span of eight months during the previous year. Correspondents of Time magazine quoted a US official admitting that what the Bengalis had endured was"the most incredible, calculated thing since the days of the Nazis in Poland.
Secondly, Mrs Gandhi prevented the massacre of 93,000 Pakistani prisoners who had surrendered before the Indian Army by mass evacuating them out of East Pakistan, thereby preventing their killings by vengeful Bengali soldiers of the Mukti Bahini guerilla army.
However, Norway had no problems awarding the peace prize to Henry Kissinger in 1973. There is a special place in hell for Kissinger, the US Secretary of State, who was responsible for the use of chemical weapons in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. During the 1971 Christmas bombing - named Operation Linebacker - American bombers dropped 20,000 tons of explosives on North Vietnam, mostly Hanoi. During Linebacker and a bombing campaign preceding it, the US dropped a total of 155, 237 tons of bombs on Nort Vietnam, killing thousands.
American satirist Tom Lehrer commented : "Political satire became obsolete when henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize".
Kissinger was a serial offender. Just two years earlier, he had winked at Pakistan's massacre of nearly three million Bengalis, mostly Hindus, in East Pakistan or modern Bangladesh. He had described Indians as "bastards" for putting an end to the genocide.
The Norwegians were red faced when North Vietnamese leader Le Duc Tho, who was jointly awarded the prize, declined it, saying peace in Vietnam was a big lie. Kissinger had no such scruples and accepted the prize "with humility".
In 1994, the Peace Prize was awarded to three people jointly - Yasser Arafat, the head of the terrorist outfit Palestinian Liberation Organisation, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. One of the Nobel peace prize committee members, Kare Kristiansen, resigned in protest at the honour given to Arafat, whom he described as "too tainted by violence, terror and torture".
Presidential follies
By giving the 2009 peace prize to Barrack Obama even as he was ramping up the war in Afghanistan and in 2012 to the European Union after it had bombed and destroyed Libya, the Nobel awards gave tacit approval for war. It was almost Orwellian. Russian channel RT commented ; "Sometimes the makers of permanent war are awarded for bringing in temporary peace".
Obama wasn't the first American president with a penchant for war to be honoured by the Nobel Academy. In the exact same year he became a Nobel Laureate, Theodore Roosevelt showed his determination to see the US as a great power using military force, primarily in the Caribbean. Many American newspapers found the award curious and The New York Times later commented that "a broad smile illuminated the face of the globe when the prize was awarded.....to the most warlike citizen of the United States.
US President Woodrow Wilson was awarded the peace prize in 1919 for his sponsorship of the League of Nations. But Wilson was a racist whose administration wreaked havoc on the government careers of thousands of African Americans in the 1910s, says Eric S Yellin, associate professor of History and American Studies at Richmond University, Virginia.
"In 1912 and when Wilson arrived in the nation's capital in Mar 1913, he brought with him an administration loaded with white supremacists", Yellin writes in the literary magazine Berfrois. "His lieutenants segregated offices, harassed black workers and removed black politicians from political appointments that had been held by black men for more than a generation".
.........to be continued.
Tailpiece.
Had got up leisurely and we saw Chambu off, who was going for a test at Kochi. We reached the Foundation by about a quarter past 9. By a quarter past 10, we were at the venue and kicked off the painting competition for children of all ages at a half past 10. The exhibition, meanwhile, was on the roll. The afternoon session saw two MLAs visiting the exhibition and we went through the prize distribution ceremony as well as the weekly discussions on 'Start Ups and their relevance in contemporary times'.
The curtain came down on the three-day exhibition at 1800 hrs, this evening. The Foundation's footprint all over India was the factor that was passed on to the people who had dropped by over the last three days! The legendary PN Panicker and his extraordinary library and literacy movements were getting to be known far and wide!!
Prize and Prejudice : Why a lot of rotten people win the Nobel Prize
In 1964 when Jean-Paul Sartre was given the Nobel Prize for literature, the French author and leftist icon rejected the award, saying it was "an honour restricted to Western writers and Eastern rebels". Sartre also understood the underlying intent of the Nobel awards as a tool of co-option. In fact, his other objection to the Nobel was that the winner of the prize is "in a way inevitably co-opted by simply being crowned. It's a way of saying, finally he's on our side".
Just as entry to elite universities is not always based on merit, the winners of the Nobel Prize are not always deserving of honour and recognition. The unfortunate mutation of peace prize winner Malala Yousafzai from a diehard (no pun intended) critic of the Pakistan Taliban's misogynistic laws to a mouthpiece of the very Islamist forces that tried to kill her, is a pointer to the bad picks - and misses - of the Nobel Academy.
Here's a short list that even a blind judge could not have missed:-
* Mohandas Gandhi (rejected all forms of violence)
* Dmitri Mendeleyev (the Russian scientist famous for the Periodic Table
* Leo Tolstoy (the greatest novelist of all time)
* U Thant (played a key role in defusing the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis)
* Antony Chekhov (one of the world's greatest writers) and
* RK Narayan (most prolific Indian author of the modern era).
Against this backdrop it comes as no surprise that Swedish teenage climate activist for her cringe-worthy How Dare You monologue - has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize to be awarded this month. At 16, she would be the youngest recipient of the $930,000 award won by the likes of Nelson Mandela, Jimmy Carter and Mikhail Gorbachev.
Peace Prize for warmongers
For all his failings as a political leader, Gandhi should have been a shoo-in for the peace prize. Many people of British origin living in different parts of the world today owe their existence to Gandhi because he prevented the Indian revolutionaries from carrying out a massacre of their forefathers - the 100,000-odd British soldiers, bureaucrats and civilians ruling India.
The British were committing genocide in India, but Norway - which which annually awards the Nobel Peace Prize - did not want to ruffle any feathers in Britain by honouring Gandhi. It was a clear case of racial solidarity. Considered the home of the Germanic people, Norway enjoys very close relations with Britain.
In 1972 the peace prize should have gone to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Firstly, she stopped the genocide of Bengalis in East Pakistan, where three million of them had been killed by the Pakistan Army in a short span of eight months during the previous year. Correspondents of Time magazine quoted a US official admitting that what the Bengalis had endured was"the most incredible, calculated thing since the days of the Nazis in Poland.
Secondly, Mrs Gandhi prevented the massacre of 93,000 Pakistani prisoners who had surrendered before the Indian Army by mass evacuating them out of East Pakistan, thereby preventing their killings by vengeful Bengali soldiers of the Mukti Bahini guerilla army.
However, Norway had no problems awarding the peace prize to Henry Kissinger in 1973. There is a special place in hell for Kissinger, the US Secretary of State, who was responsible for the use of chemical weapons in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. During the 1971 Christmas bombing - named Operation Linebacker - American bombers dropped 20,000 tons of explosives on North Vietnam, mostly Hanoi. During Linebacker and a bombing campaign preceding it, the US dropped a total of 155, 237 tons of bombs on Nort Vietnam, killing thousands.
American satirist Tom Lehrer commented : "Political satire became obsolete when henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize".
Kissinger was a serial offender. Just two years earlier, he had winked at Pakistan's massacre of nearly three million Bengalis, mostly Hindus, in East Pakistan or modern Bangladesh. He had described Indians as "bastards" for putting an end to the genocide.
The Norwegians were red faced when North Vietnamese leader Le Duc Tho, who was jointly awarded the prize, declined it, saying peace in Vietnam was a big lie. Kissinger had no such scruples and accepted the prize "with humility".
In 1994, the Peace Prize was awarded to three people jointly - Yasser Arafat, the head of the terrorist outfit Palestinian Liberation Organisation, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. One of the Nobel peace prize committee members, Kare Kristiansen, resigned in protest at the honour given to Arafat, whom he described as "too tainted by violence, terror and torture".
Presidential follies
By giving the 2009 peace prize to Barrack Obama even as he was ramping up the war in Afghanistan and in 2012 to the European Union after it had bombed and destroyed Libya, the Nobel awards gave tacit approval for war. It was almost Orwellian. Russian channel RT commented ; "Sometimes the makers of permanent war are awarded for bringing in temporary peace".
Obama wasn't the first American president with a penchant for war to be honoured by the Nobel Academy. In the exact same year he became a Nobel Laureate, Theodore Roosevelt showed his determination to see the US as a great power using military force, primarily in the Caribbean. Many American newspapers found the award curious and The New York Times later commented that "a broad smile illuminated the face of the globe when the prize was awarded.....to the most warlike citizen of the United States.
US President Woodrow Wilson was awarded the peace prize in 1919 for his sponsorship of the League of Nations. But Wilson was a racist whose administration wreaked havoc on the government careers of thousands of African Americans in the 1910s, says Eric S Yellin, associate professor of History and American Studies at Richmond University, Virginia.
"In 1912 and when Wilson arrived in the nation's capital in Mar 1913, he brought with him an administration loaded with white supremacists", Yellin writes in the literary magazine Berfrois. "His lieutenants segregated offices, harassed black workers and removed black politicians from political appointments that had been held by black men for more than a generation".
.........to be continued.
Tailpiece.
Had got up leisurely and we saw Chambu off, who was going for a test at Kochi. We reached the Foundation by about a quarter past 9. By a quarter past 10, we were at the venue and kicked off the painting competition for children of all ages at a half past 10. The exhibition, meanwhile, was on the roll. The afternoon session saw two MLAs visiting the exhibition and we went through the prize distribution ceremony as well as the weekly discussions on 'Start Ups and their relevance in contemporary times'.
The curtain came down on the three-day exhibition at 1800 hrs, this evening. The Foundation's footprint all over India was the factor that was passed on to the people who had dropped by over the last three days! The legendary PN Panicker and his extraordinary library and literacy movements were getting to be known far and wide!!
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