“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
-Inigo Montoya, “The Princess Bride” (movie)
At this rate, Inigo Montoya is the leading candidate to win the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. Sure, he’s fictional and is known primarily for making death threats. But the way things are going, that looks like an improvement.
As a nearly lifelong pacifist, I know a thing or two about peace. I know how rare my set of beliefs about the world and human interaction are. I know the joys of explaining to people why one wouldn’t kill the person whose finger was on the button to destroy the world or why killing in self-defense is still just murder you thought of after the guy who you’re killing. I know what an uphill battle the very concept of peace has in this world and how counter-intuitive it is to most people.
This is why it has always been great comfort and solace to me that a world so beleaguered and prone to violence has created (and recently) an award designed to honor my belief structure and those espousing it. Has recognized, with the prestige of the world stage, that peace is and should be a universal human goal and that making strides in achieving it is no more a pipe dream than progressing in medicine or scientific pursuits.
The history of the Nobel Peace Prize is certainly not perfect. They failed to recognize the world’s greatest pacifist of all time, only posthumously offering him acknowledgment once he’d been killed. They have a long history of giving pretty notorious killers the prize for either reforming (see most of the Israelis and Palestinians who have won it) or doing one thing out of the ordinary that’s peaceful (see Teddy Roosevelt and Henry Kissinger). While this isn’t my favorite practice in the world, there has always been a concrete step in the direction of peace, actual peace, that has justified the awarding of the prize.
Then in 2006, a funny thing happened. The Nobel Peace Prize committee completely abdicated their mandate and decided that the spread of capitalism was somehow a peaceful aim, justifying the awarding of the Prize to someone whose only life achievement was setting up a microfinance bank. The link between this and peace is sort of like a bad loose-link resolution extrapolation in a parliamentary debate round: “Well, when I think of peace, I think of pieces of things, like pieces of eight, which is money, which leads me to microfinance.” Okay, that’s a bit of a straw-man, admittedly – the real link is that if we all are democratic capitalists, then some people believe in democratic peace theory and then, someday in the vast unforeseeable future and ignoring the wealth disparity and rampant inequalities of capitalist systems, we might have peace.
It’s pretty weak and it doesn’t make sense. The Peace Prize is supposed to be about direct peace work, work that ends a conflict or prevents a war or replaces a violent movement with a nonviolent one. Muhammad Yunus may, arguably, be a good guy, but he has nothing to do with these goals. Even if you believe in microfinance, believe that it really builds up the poor in a way that doesn’t ultimately destroy their rights, it has nothing to do with questions of violence and non-, unless you believe that everyone receiving a loan would have committed armed robbery and assault instead of running their business. Given the gender statistics on the loan recipients, if nothing else, this is just facially inaccurate.
But 2006’s gaffe was nothing compared to the subsequent year, where the Peace Prize decided to sub in “Environmentalism” for “Peace”. While the co-opting of the peace movement by environmentalists is nothing new, to have it recognized and codified on an institutional level was profoundly disheartening. The fact is that while environmentalism is a good cause (although I have long-stated qualms with the whole global warming obsession, but that’s for another time), it is completely tangential to issues of war and peace. Human violence and natural disasters are on opposite ends of the spectrum – one can argue that humans have the will and capacity to prevent the latter in this age, but the former is clearly preventable and always has been. The sheer preventability and self-inflicted nature of the harm is one of the factors that has made pacifism and the peace movement so powerful. All we are trying to do is prevent man’s inhumanity to man.
But Al Gore’s selection was also appalling because he hasn’t accomplished anything. It’s not like his power-point and movie crusade has led to the adoption of new strict standards on greenhouse gas emissions and power plant methodology shifts. And his personal hypocrisy in having an enormous carbon footprint is a little akin to a pacifist slaughtering people who shout him down while he gives speeches because they are impeding his message. Pacifism is means-based, so the method matters as much as the message. Al Gore may get a prize for effort in a compromising role, but certainly not for achievement in a consistent way.
But all that gets away from the larger point: none of his work is about peace. It’s just not. Even if you believe global warming is the greatest threat to humanity that exists, it’s not a violent threat. It may, very slowly, change the way that some people live their lives by forcing them to move from the coasts or changing what they farm or what animals they surround themselves with. It may even increased the number of natural calamities, though predictions of doom after 2005 have been met with a series of record-settingly light hurricane seasons. But it doesn’t matter: peace is about the violence that people do to each other, not that acts of God inflict on people.
It’s like giving a firefighter an award for being a good police officer. You can say their interests are sort of vaguely aligned, you can say that there’s a common interest in some ways, you can draw tangential links between the two offices. But in the end, it’s a total flub. Firefighting is not police work. It’s just a tautologically false move.
Last year was fine, a refocusing of the prize on the actual work Alfred Nobel charged his committee with enacting. But this year, oh this year. Disaster has struck again, possibly even worse than in ’06 and ’07.
Barack Obama has talked an interesting game about peace. On the one hand, he has created a compelling smokescreen of arguments about hope and change and a new day and we being the people we have been waiting for, one that has swept most of my generation away with starry-eyed idealism and the promise of tomorrow. At the same time, his presidential rhetoric has actually closely mirrored George W. Bush on practical matters of the prosecution of wars. This might be a good time to remind everyone that Barack Obama is currently prosecuting two full-scale wars (three if you count the amorphous drone-bombing “War on Terror”) and, despite vague promises, has done nothing to limit the scope or scale of any of them.
I’m going to repeat that. Barack Obama is currently prosecuting more wars than any other standing government official in any nation and has done nothing tangible to bring any of them to a close.
The idea that he was even nominated is insulting to the very concept of peace. It’s like giving it to Kissinger or Peres or Arafat before they turned their policies from killing to conflict resolution. But, you may say, his rhetoric has changed the tone of discourse about peace.
Really? The problem is that, in running against John McCain and then running the country, his rhetoric has actually been remarkably hawkish. He’s made it clear that one of the main goals of the government is to hunt down and kill people who disagree with us in other countries. He’s advocated crossing any border and violating any agreement to do so. He’s said that while the Iraq War may eventually end, the War in Afghanistan is just getting started, taking concrete steps to expand that conflict and widen the violence. He’s continued to advocate a policy of war without end, war without limit, war without definition in the most powerful country on the planet.
Yes, he’s not George W. Bush. He probably wouldn’t have started the Iraq War, even though he’s not in any hurry to end it. Yes, he’s a symbol of greater cooperation and openness. I understand that much of the world just feels better about the planet and this country because the US was capable of electing an African American. But one does not give awards to symbols, especially when what they symbolize is belied by their actual record of action. Not only is it ill fitting of the mandate of the Peace Prize, but it sets a terrible precedent. The message is that warlike leaders can win awards if only they talk a good game, go make a couple speeches that seem to extend an olive branch while directing bombings and troop movements in the back room. This is precisely the kind of message the Peace Prize was created to counteract, to thwart, to pre-empt.
What’s so personally disheartening about watching the crumbling integrity of this award is that I have to question whether I even want to win it anymore. Winning the Nobel Peace Prize has been the highest aspiration of my last two decades and now the company I would be keeping is questionable to the point of absurdity. This is not Time Man of the Year or some similarly meaningless appellation that’s a popularity contest intended to sell magazines or stir controversy. This is a (perhaps until recently) respected, dignified award with lasting consequences. And now it seems to have abdicated its purpose, content to honor people for not being other people or for accomplishments in economics or the environment.
I know there aren’t a lot of true peace advocates in today’s world, that most people are content to urge the killing of all sorts of people. But they are out there. And if you can’t find them, heck, not awarding the prize sends a stronger message than just picking some approximation out of a hat. The Peace Prize has the power to call great attention to a particular injustice, conflict, or method.
Instead, this Prize only calls attention to how far the committee has strayed while endorsing policies belligerent enough to make most world leaders blush. My only hope is that in his press conference in seven minutes, Obama recognizes all these facts and declines the award.
