13 Oct 2009 Quote of Note: Nobel Peace Prize Winners in Perspective

“The list of Nobel peace laureates is not an especially august one. I’ve never heard of most of the people on it, and I’d bet you haven’t either. So I have no comment on them. Then there are the perfectly ridiculous ones, the paradigmatic figure being the Guatemalan peasant, Rigobertu Menchu Tum, who literally invented her life, for which fabrication the custodians of the prize bestowed it on her.

Yasser Arafat — well, yes, Yasser Arafat — spent his life as a murderer, and he got a Nobel, too.

Kofi Annan received the Nobel as well. Perhaps for Bosnia, where he delayed an intervention by the West, and for Rwanda, where he literally prevented both the United Nations and the United States from intervening. I don’t know what the Bosnian death toll attributable to him is. But we all know how many Tutsis were murdered in the Rwanda enormity. One million. The jackpot.

Frank B. Kellogg and Aristide Briand each became a Nobel Peace Laureate for designing an international treaty outlawing war. It was approved by all of the salient governments. Within a decade, however, the world had gone to war … to World War II.”

-Marty Peretz, “Obama Would Have Been Better Off Saying Simply ‘I Am Not Worthy’ or ‘Nolo Episcopari’,” The New Republic, October 11, 2009.

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