A clarification: the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded by the Norwegian Parliament, with the help of a special committee , according to the Will of Alfred Nobel, whose mother was Norwegian. He also specified that no mathematician was ever to be awarded a Nobel Prize, since his wife had apparently an affair with a mathematician. The Nobel Prize for Economics is a later addition - one of the many bastardizations of the original Will, but it does not violate its spirit. I disagree with Bernanke: economists are not mathematicians.
Nominations for the Nobel Prize are made by many idiotic organizations and previous winners of the Prize in that "field". For Peace, a nomination from Mandela or bishop Tutu would have been good enough. These nominations are not publicized but they are “known” by some of people.
I am no friend of Kissinger, but I have a better one: Lê Ðuc Tho.
Lê Ðuc Tho and Henry Kissinger were jointly awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts in negotiating the Paris Peace Accords. However, he declined to accept the award, stating that there was still no peace in his country.
Some facts about him:
“In 1930, Lê Ðuc Tho helped found the Indochinese Communist Party. French colonial authorities imprisoned him from 1930 to 1936 and again from 1939 to 1944. After his release in 1945, he helped lead the VietMinh, the Vietnamese independence movement, against the French, until the Geneva Accords were signed in 1954. He then joined the Lao Dong Politburo of the Vietnam Workers' Party in 1955, now the Communist Party of Vietnam. Lê oversaw the Communist insurgency that began in 1956 against the South Vietnamese government.
From 1978 to 1982 Le Duc Tho was named by Hanoi to act as chief advisor to the Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation (FUNSK) and later to the nascent People's Republic of Kampuchea. Le Duc Tho's mission was to ensure that Khmer nationalism would not override Vietnam's interests in Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge was overthrown.
He was the Standing Member of the Central Committee's Secretariat of the Party from 1982 to 1986 and later became the Advisor of Party's Central Committee.”
What a nice guy!
Anyway, the Nobel Peace Prize has been a bad joke and an embarrassment for Norwegians for a long time. I like Norway but this morning, talking on the phone to a friend in Edinburgh and asking him what he thought of the latest story, he replied: “What can you expect from a bunch of Vikings?!"... The wounds of the Norwegian raids in Scotland are not healed after over 1,0000 years.
AI
