All: please don't post if you have a reflexive-indignant reaction rather than a curious one. This site is for the latter, not the former, and the former tends to drown out the latter.
I'm not saying you owe Nobel Prize committees better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
Worth listening to Maria Ressa's episode on Your Undivided Attention podcast back in 2019, where she talked about how authoritarian regimes like in her native Philippines have been using social media to manipulate discourse.
This prize is more about making a political statement about society or its values more than anything and more than the other of the Nobel prizes, which are similar but less so.
They are always the most controversial, specially across a wide range of viewpoints. To me, they give an opportunity to critique your own values more than anything else.
> This prize is more about making a political statement about society or its values more than anything and more than the other of the Nobel prizes, which are similar but less so.
The prize comes with money granted to the individuals and also the fame. If the committee wanted to make a statement they should stop giving prizes to people but only organizations for instance (which the committee does from time to time).
One curious thing, is that compared to the prizes for science, the one for peace should be awarded based on the previous year. So science ones have old and proven stuff, peace has recent stuff (which also explains why it often gets controversial with time).
But this award text mainly speaks about stuff they did in the nineties. That struck me as a bit odd compared to the peace prize earlier years.
One curious thing, is that compared to the prizes for science, the one for peace should be awarded based on the previous year.
If you read the original documents, all Nobel prizes where supposed to be given based on work in done the previous year. However it turns out that judging the value of anything in real time is hard, so all the prizes have been taking a longer and longer view.
It's not the first time that someone who was awarded the peace prize turned out with their later actions to be unworthy. So while this isn't exactly Nobel's will it may be better.
As a Russian, this is a complete and utter disgrace. Kremlin is very pleased with this decision and has already congratulated Muratov. Good job, Nobel Peace Prize committee.
As a non-Russian, can you explain why? Novaya Gazeta has been a persistent thorn in the Kremlin's side and many of its journalists like Politkovskaya have been assassinated.
Novaya Gazeta and Echo of Moscow are state-sanctioned news outlets that help opposition minded people vent off. These media exist because the state allows them to exist. Of course, for them to be of any interest to people resenting Kremlin rule they need to employ some good and brave people. These people do risk their lives, but it is they who are heroes, not their employer. When time comes to choose the sides, like the recent blatant and open fraud committed with the 'electronic voting' in Moscow elections, Muratov was quick to jump in and defend [1] his friend Venediktov, which shows that Muratov knows the rules of the game and will obey and cowtow to Kremlin when needed. That's why Kremlin was so quick to congratulate him: they are very content with this decision, they have won, again.
The most popular proposal for the Peace Prize this year were two people: Maria Kolesnikova and Aleksey Navalny, both currently jailed by the dictatorial regimes of their respective countries. Overlooking them for a journalist with rather flexible moral principles is a big disgrace.
Because Novaya Gazeta has limited reach. Yes, we know it's the source of great journalism, but Navalny changed the perception of the state in 10 years much more than Novaya Gazeta ever could.
If you see the Nobel Peace Prize as a committee trying to "counterbalance" war, choosing journalists committed to truth in the era of seemingly neverending misinformation and disinformation is about as on-the-nose a statement as you can make.
And if you are indifferent to this counterbalancing, at least take heart that over the past 6 years there has been a significant decline in fatalities related to armed conflicts:
Well Mahatma Gandhi, who literally pioneered the Non-Violence Movement, never won the Peace Prize so any of its credibility has long been gone. In fact its probably better /not/ to win it.
Awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to a Russian whose name is not Navalny is a blow to the democracy.
Muratov is a great man, I really like his thinking and he curtailed Russian politics with extreme agility, but he did not sacrifice his freedom for democracy the same way Nelson Mandela did.
I don’t think you statement is correct. Multiple colleges of Muratov have been assassinated. Muratov never knew he would live this long, by continuing his work he has continuously endangered not only his freedom but also his live.
He participated in Russian marches some 20 years ago but kept his distance afterwards. FYI, ultra-nationalists outside of government structures were all jailed or killed since then, and the state nourishes similar sentiments in people much more successfully.
He is favoring the idea of abolishing free travel with poorer countries like Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, but this is pretty much in line with the politics of all other governments (US vs Mexico as opposed to US vs Canada).
Anything else is state propaganda trying to discredit him.
Please cite some sources on his hateful views on gays and jews.
As for hateful views on immigrants, well, they boil down to that Russia needs a visa regime with certain middle asian countries. To note, every single EU state, US, Canada, Australia, etc DO have visa regime with those states, and with Russia. Apparently, all politicians in these countries who do not act to abolish the visas are hateful extremists.
I don't agree with you about that sentiment. Navalny compared middle asian immigrants to "cockroaches" and "rotten tooth". Just because Navaly is anti-Putinist doesn't allow him to say such disgusting things.
Not true. His 'hate' against ethnic minorities is a gross overstatement. "Stop feeding Caucasus" means stop giving money to murderous criminals who rule in the region, not make people of the Caucasus starve, and his suggestions to restrict travel from former USSR countries are not unlike existing EU or US restrictions of travel applied to Russian citizens.
Regarding hate against sexual minorities, in the more than a decade of following Navalny on social media, I have never seen him exhibiting any hate or resentment towards sexual minorities, so I think that this accusation is an outright lie.
A note to the readers from the US: "Caucasian" in Russian has the opposite meaning, so some Russians may collide the "Stop feeding Caucasus" slogan with nationalistic statements, but it is more about rule of law and economics.
The status quo is that the Russian state pays loads of money to little czars in Caucasus to keep them comfy instead of fighting them in civil wars.
You continuously claim Navalny to have hateful views on sexual minorities or jews, but you fail to provide any sources.
As for georgian 'rats'. 1. This was a statement done during an actual WAR with georgia, with extremely distorted information field and difficult to judge situation. I myself was very anti-georgian at that moment, but my views have changed since then. Navalny has also retracted his statement on the matter and apologized for it a long time ago, but propagandists like you endlessly cite it without any context or follow ups.
And 99% too... Got a collection of these comments?
The way you describe him he must be an Adolf Hitler. Heck even Adolf Hitler probably wasn't blaming the Jews and communists 99% of the time, your depiction is more of the Westboro Baptist pastor.
For ones who don't know context, Russians from both spectrum are really bad in terms of approach to immigrants. You don't hear it because immigrants doesn't have enough hold in media. However in everyday life, even the most liberal Russian can easily scorn and discriminate immigrants by saying that they are "blacks"(chyornie) and "churka".
A Filipino here. The timing of the Nobel couldn't have been better: it came one day after Vice President Leonor Robredo filed her candidacy for next year's election. And the misogynist president, he of rape jokes and profanities notoriety (on live TV at that) hates them both for, among others, them being merely women.
Kissinger helped establish a ceasefire in Vietnam (although it didn't stick). I don't know why that would be more surprising than Obama's prize. Kissinger donated the money to charity and didn't turn up to the awards ceremony, he didn't think he deserved it. I don't understand why Obama was awarded the prize at all.
According to Samantha Power's memoirs and interview, Obama and the whole Obama administration felt the same. They felt just awkward.
Power, Samantha, The education of an idealist : a memoir, ISBN 978-0-06-295650-7
>In October of 2009, I awoke to a very different form of bad news: Barack Obama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Less than a year into his presidency, Obama was receiving an award previously bestowed on Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
>When I relayed the news to Cass, he looked stricken, as if I had told him someone we knew had fallen ill. The choice seemed wildly premature, as well as a gift to Obama’s critics, who delighted in painting him as a cosmopolitan celebrity detached from the concerns of working-class Americans. But there was no getting around it: come December of 2009, Obama would travel to Norway to accept the most prestigious prize in the world.
>Jon Favreau and Ben Rhodes, Obama’s two gifted speechwriters, took on the difficult task of drafting the Nobel address. I popped into Jon’s tiny office on the first floor of the West Wing, and he told me that the President had decided to directly confront the awkwardness of receiving the prize so early in his presidency. He also wanted to frame the speech around the more profound irony of winning a peace prize at the very time he was deploying 30,000 additional soldiers to Afghanistan, augmenting the force of over 67,000 US troops already there.
To me it feels like the Norwegians were also fanboying (and fangirling) hard over the charismatic guy. I also find him very charismatic, but hey, it doesn't influence my job and even if it does, I'm not in charge of judging who gets a globally recognized prize...
Fanboying over the promise of Obama and also over the turning away from the Bush era Project for a New American Century, which was beginning to look like a long term US plan at that point.
It looked like a promising new era and they were not the only ones swept up in that.
I think Obama was awarded the prize, basically, because he was not Bush. It was the zeitgeist of that time. We (and by we, I mean most people in the planet) were really tired of the Bush administration exploits.
Kissinger could help to establish a ceasefire in Vietnam, but it feels like the things they did in Cambodia before that, should subtract some points for a Peace Prize.
> Kissinger helped establish a ceasefire in Vietnam (although it didn't stick).
Nixon was elected in 1968 with Kissinger as his National Security advisor, and they assumed their posts in early 1969. That means he held off an immediate US withdrawal from Vietnam for 6 years - and that was the only legitimate course of action.
While it's true that he did spend time negotiating a potential cease fire / armistice, he and Nixon continued an illegitimate war of aggression in a foreign country, trying to prop up a puppet regime.
But that's not all: Kissinger initiated the US campaign in Cambodia, in which, over several years, hundreds of thousands were killed. See:
My point was that giving the prize to an American diplomat for taking a break from his collaboration with Nixon to try to end the imperialist war that we started, on terms agreeable to us, after at least a million Vietnamese people were killed, is insane. He also got behind the bombing in Cambodia as a way to force North Vietnam to capitulate to American demands. This is not a man you award a peace prize to unless your idea of peace includes Carthaginian peace.
The Nobel peace prize has had a long tendency of handing out awards short-sightedly for promises rather than solutions, not just when giving it to American politicians:
• In the 1920s, Britain and France got the Peace Prize for telling Germany that it's allowed to attack Poland, and Germany received it as well for graciously accepting these terms.
• The International Peace Bureau and Inter-Parliamentary Union got multiple prizes for the great accomplishments of existing, despite having achieved nothing of note in the 120+ years of their existence.
• Similarly, the League of Nations got several prizes in the first few years of existence (when everyone was too broke to afford another war anyway), despite being a toothless paper tiger that did nothing to prevent WW2.
• Kellogg received the prize in 1930 for a treaty he organized in 1929, which failed as early as 1931.
And that's just the questionable awards up until 1930. Its track record later isn't much better.
I don't have any objections to this year's laureates (though I'm not too familiar with their works), but ultimately, the question is whether the prize is living up to its high expectations, and if not, what should be done to improve it.
> The Nobel peace prize has had a long tendency of handing out awards short-sightedly for promises rather than solutions
And that is supposed to be a bad thing? If they only give out trophies for feats accomplished years ago that prize would be worthless decoration.
The whole point is that the prize offers acknowledgment and support. It is not magic, as you point out, but it does not have to be.
No, that is telling you you are asking the wrong question. They all started the same way and were intended to stay that way. For hard sciences they changed anyways because ..., this is not the case for this one.
They didn't change, the very first Nobel prizes in the other categories, including literature, so it's not just the hard sciences were awarded for lifetime achievements.
If you want to be condescending, at least have an idea of what you're talking about. Just stop now.
Nobel's will specified that the prizes were supposed to be handed out for the greatest contributions done during the last 12 months. They've slowly moved away from that, since as your examples demonstrate, it's hard to judge the lasting impact of anything that fast.
Nobel put the same clause in for all the prizes, but in all other categories, this clause was ignored even for the very first Nobel prize in each category: They've been mostly consistent in awarding them as recognition of life works, at most for topics that have been recognized in their field for longer, but were of recent public interest and thus could fall within the 12 months clause based on reporting on such older works that stood the test of time.
The peace prize is the only one that regularly ignores this informal guideline and goes for what must be assumed to be cheap publicity grabs.
* They knew about the heinous crimes for which recipients such as Kissinger had already been responsible. (With Obama this is somewhat less of an issue, but he already had a record as US senator and president for a few months; and those did not suggest a future worthy of a peace prize, to say the least).
* They knew those recipients were not penitent regarding their crimes.
* They never acknowledged the awardings of these people as a mistake.
So - they got it right, in their view. It's just that your or my idea of what's right is not theirs.
I already gave the two examples necessary to address this.
- Kissinger. He was Nixon's National Security Advisor, intimately involved in prosecuting the Vietnam War, a war which he fully supported on the grounds of containing the influence of communism. By awarding the peace prize to him, the prize committee shows that they don't think it's crazy for millions of Vietnamese people to die in order to protect the interests of global capital. No credibility.
- Obama. His prize was awarded nine months into his first term. This was based on essentially nothing. The prize committee treated it as little more than a Time Magazine Person of the Year style popularity contest. No credibility.
So there's no need to keep score on correct vs incorrect calls based on unreliable prognostication about future outcomes. These are concrete examples of times when, even just considering the information they had at the time, they made an absolute mockery of the prestige of the Nobel prize.
Instead of looking at people as good and bad, it helps to look at them as people who do good and bad things, to be slightly more accurate.
I look at the Peace Prize as being awarded for certain things people do, not as an endorsement of every action they have done in their life. The language from this year's prize committee makes this rather plain.
It's not like it is the same people now who were on the committee when either of those were chosen to receive it the current member who have been on it for the longest got appointed in 2012
Many despise the fact that they gave Obama one, too. I think there is a misunderstanding here. In my opinion that prize really went to the American people, who elected their first black president, which the Nobel committee saw as a great step away from racism, towards equality. So, it was symbolic, in a way it was like the Time Person of the Year 2006: You, except they had to put the prize physically in the hands of someone, and the choice was obvious.
I think it was more because he'd replaced that murderous warmonger Bush, and came with a message of hope and peace that contrasted with his predecessor.
The fact that Obama also turned out to be a murderous warmonger just illustrates how it's better to judge people on their actions rather than their rhetoric.
> The fact that Obama also turned out to be a murderous warmonger just illustrates how it's better to judge people on their actions rather than their rhetoric.
Or identity in general. Obama even admitted that he doesn't know why he received it. Perhaps everyone knows that the Peace Prize has lost respect in the 21st century since it can be won with little effort or for no reason.
It's hard to beat the award of the Nobel Peace Prize for the engineering of the profoundly undemocratic Oslo peace accords, that led one of the recipients to start the Second Intifada (i.e. a revolution against the deal that he himself had negotiated) and the assassination of the other and the rise of the deeply unsavoury Netanyahu. It's set back meaningful peace in the region by at least a generation.
Obama wasn't awarded it because of his skin color. He was awarded it because of his stated foreign policy ambitions which was in contrast to the Bush-era warmongering and ignoring of international treaties like the Geneva Convention. Of course it was a mistake to award the price based on promises before seeing the results. (I suspect they wouldn't have chosen him if they had known he wouldn't actually close Guantanamo as he promised to.) But anyway, that was the reason.
Only Americans obsess over the skin color of Obama. The Nobel committee were more concerned about thing like torturing people indefinitely at "black sites", attacking countries without UN approval and such.
I wish this wasn’t just a proxy for who western elites deem important or politically advantageous, but was actually honoring those who have made the world more peaceful. In an increasingly multipolar world, such an award would be appreciated by everyone, I think.
I’m not even sure to include on such a list, which itself indicates the problem. Probably some inventors and technologists that have reduced fights over resources.
Because it makes Duerte look bad, who is the “Trump” of Southeast Asia. Please note that I am not defending Duerte, simply saying that Western media and elites clearly don’t like him.
Quoting Wikipedia:
He declared the intention to pursue an "independent foreign policy", and strengthened relations with China and Russia.[20]
When Assange or Snowden get the Nobel, I’ll believe that the committee cares about a free press.
> The ... Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize ... to Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.
I would have expected to see WikiLeaks, or Julian Assange personally, among the recipients of a prize with this focus. Although, as other commenters suggest, the Nobel committee might be considered discredited enough for us not to have any expectations of them.
I'm not saying you owe Nobel Prize committees better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.