The leftist prize

By Jorn K. Baltzersen
web posted March 4, 2002

Across the street from the American Embassy in Oslo lies the
Norwegian Nobel Institute, which houses the Norwegian Nobel
Committee, responsible for awarding the notorious Nobel Peace
Prize.

The members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee are elected
for a period of 6 years. There are 5 members in total, and they
are elected such that 2 or 3 members are up for election every 3
years. The committee is elected by the Norwegian Parliament.
The committee members have, since the start of the Nobel
Peace Prize in 1901, all but two, had partisan affiliation. The
committee has all too often been leftist dominated. One might
wonder how anyone in his right mind could have assigned the
appointment of such a committee to the Norwegian Parliament.

The Nobel Peace Prize is often considered to be the highest
ranking of the Nobel prizes. You might wonder why. It is
awarded by a politically elected committee, whose members'
political backgrounds all too often have been dubious, to say the
least. The other prizes aren't polluted by politics in the same way,
perhaps with the exception of the literature prize, which should
give them the higher rank. The Peace Prize is received from the
hands of a mere committee chairman. The other prizes are
received from the hands of a head of state, namely the King of
Sweden. And last but not least; a lot of the committee decisions
are clear proofs of poor judgment.

What are the merits of the Norwegian Nobel Committee? For
1919 U.S. President Woodrow Wilson was awarded the prize.
He was the founder of the League of Nations, which failed. He
redesigned Europe from behind his desk, thinking that would
actually work out. His bad solution was a major cause of World
War II. Apart from that he did help Europeans win a war, and
honor to him for that, but that was not why he was awarded the
Nobel Peace Prize.

In 1969 the prize was awarded to the International Labor
Organization, an organization promoting "social justice", trade
union rights, and labor legislation. This organization is an
advocate of "positive" rights, in the sense that employees have
the right to something that belongs to employers, or to the tax
payers.

In 1973 Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho were awarded the
prize for ending the Vietnam war. As John McCain so eloquently
put it, the wrong side won the Vietnam war. The biggest problem
with the Vietnam war was that American forces were not
allowed to win it. Awarding the Nobel Peace Prize for the peace
accord was absolutely, without a doubt, bad judgment.

The prize was awarded to Amnesty International in 1977. This
organization seems more concerned with capital punishment for
serious crimes in the United States than the death penalty for
petty crimes in China. Lately, Amnesty International has tended
to believe that "positive" rights, such as the right to a paid
vacation, are as important as "negative" rights, such as the
freedom from torture. Of course, this is how the organization is
today, but it still says something about an organization which has
the "glory" and "honor" of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Mikhail Gorbachev was awarded the prize in 1990. Some
people actually believe he brought an end to the Cold War.
However, Ronald Reagan left him little choice. If someone
should have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for ending the
Cold War, it should have been Ronald Reagan. The leftist
committee didn't seem to care about that. Instead it awarded the
prize to the man who later founded Green Cross International, an
organization which today is part of the global governance
movement. By the way, Gorbachev's ambition was actually to
save communism.

Yasser Arafat was awarded the prize in 1994. That decision
speaks for itself. At least a member of the committee had the
decency to step down in protest.

In 1995 Joseph Rotblat and the Pugwash Conferences on Science 
and World Affairs  were awarded the prize
for their work against nuclear arms. The press release ended
with the following sentence: "It is the Committee's hope that the
award of the Nobel Peace Prize for 1995 to Rotblat and
Pugwash will encourage world leaders to intensify their efforts to
rid the world of nuclear weapons." Do Rotblat, Pugwash, and
the Norwegian Nobel Committee believe that you can pass a
law to make nuclear arms vanish from the face of the earth? Fact
is that the knowledge of nuclear arms will always exist, and as it
does, the world would be safer if civilized nations have nuclear
arms instead of only "rogue" states or organizations having them,
maybe without our knowing it before it is too late.

Another peacenik award came in 1997. Jody Williams and her
International Campaign to Ban Landmines got the prize. Yes,
landmines harm civilians years after the end of a war. However,
war is serious business, and it is material in a war to protect
one's military in an effective way, and to prevent the
advancement of enemy forces. Abandoning the use of landmines
is in this sense bad war business. But peaceniks don't care about
such protection. They just care about their non-violence utopia.

The latest prize went to the United Nations and Secretary-
General Kofi Annan for "their work for a better organized and
more peaceful world". What is a "better organized" world? Of
course, we need a common framework within which we can
interact in an ever more globalized world. What we do not need
is the world of the global governance movement. The global
governance agenda is a threat to liberty. Is the Norwegian Nobel
Committee embracing the global governance agenda? There
should be no doubt that it isn't. However, we do not know. This
month the U.N. is holding the International Conference on
Financing for Development in Monterrey, Mexico. At this
conference the U.N. may be embarking on leading the world on
the road to serfdom through global tax policy and cooperation.
The U.N. certainly has been preparing for it.

Why is this leftist prize so high ranking? It beats me!

By the way, you might have heard of the announcement of a
nomination of U.S. President George W. Bush and U.K. Prime
Minister Tony Blair for this year's prize as the February 1
postmark deadline closed. Forget about it! Today's committee
has two members from the Labor Party, one member from the
Socialist Left Party, and one member being a bishop from
Norway's religious left. The latter publicly asked that the
bombing of Afghanistan be stopped, and that we should sit down
and talk instead. All in all, the committee has 4 clear leftists.
Probably, for all they care, Bush is a warmonger. They would
never award Bush, or Blair for that matter, let alone for the war
on terrorism. That would indeed be too good to be true!

Jorn K. Baltzersen is a Norwegian conservative. He lives in
Oslo, Norway, where he works as a senior consultant of
information technology. He can be reached at jornbalt@pvv.org.

Enter Stage Right - http://www.enterstageright.com