A second look at the Nobel Prize

Okay, I admit it. When I heard the news yesterday morning my thought was the same as everyone else's: Barack Obama? Current U.S. prez? The guy in charge of two pointless wars and countless armed interventions? Leader of the biggest and most actively destructive military machine on the planet? THAT Barack Obama? WTF has he done for whirled peas? And come to think of it, what could he have done by Feb 1, when the nominations closed? He hadn't been in office a week!

But then I had second thoughts. I mean, the peace prize has been a joke for more than a century. And at least he joins the ranks of such luminaries as Al Gore, Jimmy Carter and the Dalai Lama who, while they never brought peace to anything, at least haven't killed all that many people themselves.

It could be worse. I went to a list of recipients, and in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in addition to the famous terrorist Yasser Arafat it contains a list of some real monsters - or at least people and organizations whose actions brought monstrous results. Such as:

The United Nations 2001
Fredrik Willem De Klerk
UN Peace Keeping Force 1988
Menachem Begin
Henry Kissinger
Le Duc Tho, (who alone among recipients had the grace to decline the prize)
International Labor Organization
UNICEF
Cordell Hull
Charles Dawes
Woodrow Wilson
Theodore Roosevelt

You have to give the Prize committee credit for one thing, though. It has done one wonderful and honest thing, and it has done it repeatedly. It awarded the Peace Prize to:

None of the Above (1914, 15, 16, 18, 23, 24, 28, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 48, 55, 56, 66, 67, 72)