2013 Nobel Peace Prize

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

OPCW gets Peace Prize.

 

I guess they needed the funding.

[Duke87 1,070]

Shame, I was hoping Chelsea Manning would get it (she was nominated!) just to be able to see all the conniptions everyone would have over that.

 

But really, it's a good thing the Nobel Committee gave the award to a recipient actually deserving of it rather than using it to troll us as they've occasionally done in the past (see: Al Gore, Barack Obama).

[LexusInfernus 908]

I dunno. I mean, they are kind of just doing their job. Its good that they do it, but should you really get an award for doing your job? No one gave Hans Blix or the UN nuclear weapon inspector teams any prices for doing what they do. 

 

I always thought the Nobel Price, especially the Nobel Peace Price was for people who went extraordinary lengths to make a significant contribution to peace. In that sense I think someone like Chelsea Manning, Malala Yousafzai or even Edward Snowden are more deserving. 

[Cobraroll 138]

What Obama did can really by summed up as "not being George W. Bush".

 

After eight years of "War On Everything Un-American" and "If you're not with us, you're against us", the rest of the world was rather fed up with the US. Obama showed a new rethoric, a new way of treating other countries, he wanted to end the wars the US were fighting in the Middle East, and a bunch of other stuff, which in sum led to a large boost in optimism, and the world gradually shifted their view on the US to a more positive one. Obama represented a "restart" of US overseas communication and public image. And promptly got the prize.

 

Now, the view is sliding back towards the dominant one after the Bush era again. Spying on their allies as if they had been their enemies, monitoring the Internet traffic of millions of people (and then only raising a fuzz about it when it was revealed that - gasp! - Americans were also monitored!), continuing to bomb the Middle East, and trying to restrict the freedom of the Internet is... well, worse than we had expected of the US with Obama in office. I wonder how the world would have reacted if the winner of the 2008 election had continued Bush's line instead, and then done all of that. We'd probably have seen trans-Atlantic trade boycotts by now.

 

 

 

Either way, congrats to the OPCW. After all, they have achieved significant results in the last 20 years, the world's stockpiles of chemical weapons have been reduced to less than one-fourth of what they were in 1990. Here's hoping Malala will keep fighting for her cause as well, which might earn her the prize in not too many years.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

The cause of literacy and education in the world is bound to produce better results than living in ignorance and fear.