Posted by
Dave Smith on Friday, October 09, 2009 10:48:59 AM
It's official: the Nobel Prize for Peace has been awarded to US
President Barack Obama, making him the fourth U.S. President to win the
award, and the third US Democrat to win the award in the past decade.
The previous winners were Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, who brokered a
peace treaty ending the war between Russia and Japan, and Woodrow
Wilson, who helped broker the peace treaty that ended World War I,
Jimmy Carter, and former Vice President Al Gore.
According to
the official website of the Nobel Prize, the prizes are "awarded for
achievement
in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and for
peace" [emphasis added]. Yet in its announcement of President Obama's
win, the Nobel Committee said that he had achieved the award "for his
extraordinary
efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples" [emphasis added].
In
naming President Obama as this year's Peace Prize Laureate, the Nobel
Committee has chosen effort over achievement. Rather than giving the
prize to someone who has stood up to tyranny, like Zimbabwean Prime
Minister Morgan Tsvangirai -- who challenged brutal dictator Robert
Mugabe, and whose wife was killed for it -- or dissidents in Cuba,
North Korea, or even Venezuela, or for womens' rights activists in
Muslim countries like Afghanistan, the Committee has chosen to award
someone for giving a speech.
True peace can not coexist with
tyranny -- true peace requires individual liberty; to claim otherwise
is to equate peace with slavery or oppression. Those who stand against
oppression, against tyranny, are true peacemakers. People like
previous winner Aung San Suu Kyi, who continues to stand against the
military dictators in Burma, or the Dalai Lama who fights against the
Chinese dictators for political and religious freedom in Tibet: those
are true peacemakers. These are people who, even if they don't
accomplish their goals, make sacrifices for their ideals and for the
good of others -- for the idea of freedom and peace. No speech, no
matter how eloquent, equates with this sacrifice, and no speech made by
the President has freed a single person from the shackles of
oppression. But, according to the Nobel Committee, merely his effort
is enough.
President Obama's win is the ultimate triumph of symbolism over substance, and of effort over achievement.