The Nobel Peace Prize for Wishful Thinking (December 2002)
Perhaps for the sake of nostalgia, this is an article I’ve avoided writing for the past two months. When I learned that the Nobel Peace Prize this year was going to President Jimmy Carter, my first thought was: the Swedes have embarked on a one way trip down the road to degeneration.
It’s been widely repeated that giving the prize to Carter was intended as a strong criticism toward Bush, though there were as many members of the Nobel commission who denied this intent as those who confirmed it. In any case, it wouldn’t be the first time that the Nobel was given to one person in order to send a message to another. It happened in 1975 when the Swedish commission angered the Soviets by giving the prize to Andrei Sakharov, the dissident intellectual. Then, in 1983, the communist authorities in Poland didn’t exactly take out the champagne when the prize went to Lech Walesa. And in 1989, the Chinese were beside themselves when the Dalai Lama received the award, an implicit criticism of China’s occupation of Tibet.
Who knows? Maybe they give the peace prize for wishful thinking, for good will, even if the good will is followed by bad results. I’m referring to Arafat, but maybe he isn’t even a good example since he’s neither a case of good will, nor of good results, but rather, bad faith and monstrous deeds. Kofi Annan is perhaps a better model. He received the prize last year on behalf of the United Nations, the organization whose many questionable merits include having kicked the United States off the human rights commission, favoring Sudan, a country that’s a bona fide bloodcurdling bulwark in such matters. And if only that were the sole sin of the United Nations!
Who can forget the UN of infinite infamies and distinctive disgraces? The UN that pulled out of Ruanda at just the “right” moment in 1994, leaving the field a free for all for the Hutus to perform their massacres. Or the minister in Bosnia, Hakija Turajlic, who was traveling in a well-marked UN vehicle, on his way to receive a diplomatic delegation. He never reached his destination: two Serbian tanks blocked the road, forcing him to get out of the vehicle and killing him with eight shots of their firearms. Or Srebrenica, the symbolic city of shame par excellence, declared a UN protected territory, but where the worst massacre in post-war European history was committed: 7, 500 people assassinated and buried in a mass grave between the July 12-18, 1995. And that’s just a tiny taste of its ignominious opera. The organization applauded, praised, and prized despite its many acts of ill repute. Notwithstanding its growing tendency to side with tyranny, and tie the hands of the upright.
I began this piece inferring that it would cost me to write an article in which I had to speak badly of Carter. He’s the first president I ever voted for. I was living in North Carolina, attending university and we’d spent the entire night waiting for and then celebrating the results. He seemed like the perfect choice: With his degree in nuclear physics, who could understand better than he, the merits and the demerits of nuclear power as a choice of energy for the future? He spoke Spanish, demonstrating an openness and interest toward the outside world, especially our Spanish neighbors close to home. He had a gentlemanly way of presenting himself to the public. He didn’t pontificate like the usual politician. Unfortunately, I’ve since classified him as one of the greatest errors of judgment of my youth.
Today when I think of Carter, I think that the particular situation in which the world finds itself today is in part due to his errors of evaluation. I think of Iran in the sixties and seventies, well down the road to modernization and the Shah that Carter was unable to save from the winds of revolutionary fundamentalism. I think of Khomeini and the Iranian girls that were forced to give up their mini-skirts for the Chador. It was from that moment on that the Islamic world began its regressive and inexhaustible march toward a new medieval, the damages and dangers of which the Western world only began to take notice the day before yesterday, that is to say, last year. I’m sorry to say that it’s partly Carter’s fault, because the fault certainly wasn’t in his heart. I’m sorry because of the special place that he holds in my young girl’s heart. However, as the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and for such intentions the Swedes are great at giving prizes.
December 2002
Return to home page Return to list
Editors interested in subscribing to this syndicated column may request information by sending an e-mail to: giogia@giogia.com