On the Immorality of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee

Democracy Now! quotes Haitian authorities as saying that the death toll due to the earthquake may exceed 300,000. Public service organizations around the world have been donating to the relief effort. Police officers from New York City, the Red Cross and many other organizations have been donating time and money. CNN lists the highest rated American charities that have been helping the Haitians.

The Nobel Peace Prize Committee has failed to contribute to the Haitian relief effort. Much as Wal-Mart failed to contribute to environmental causes, so might the Nobel Peace Prize Committee be considered to have behaved selfishly and with disdain for world peace. Its self-centered commitment to its charter overlooks more important social justice considerations. If Wal-Mart ought to have breached its duty to shareholders, why might the Nobel Foundation be exempt from a parallel moral imperative? As of 2007, the Foundation had over $500 million laying fallow.

The mass deaths in Haiti would seem to outweigh the committee's obsession with fiduciary duty. If one might complain about a business firm's lack of corporate social responsibility, might we say that the morals of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee are tainted? And because they are tainted, the Committee has lost credibility in designating a peace prize, which by its own nature depends on good ethics.

Thierry Meyssan of Voltaire.net asserts that the Nobel Peace Prize Committee breached its fiduciary duty in an additional way. Meyssan claims that there was a "despicable relationship between Barack Obama and the Nobel Committee" before the Committee chose to grant the award to him. Meyssan writes:

"in 2006, the European Command (i.e. the regional command of U.S. troops whose authority then covered both Europe and most of Africa) solicited Barack Obama, a Senator of Kenyan origin, to participate in a secret inter-agency (CIA-NED-USAID-NSA)" task force that was meant to destabilize the Kenyan government. The goal was to use his status as a parliamentarian to conduct a tour of Africa that would defend the interests of pharmaceutical companies (against off-patent productions) and to counter Chinese influence in Kenya and Sudan..."

Washington wanted to topple the regime in Kenya, according to Meyssan and recruited Obama to make a much-publicized trip to Kenya, in which he interfered with local politics and indeed helped to destabilize the country and helped his cousin, Odinga. The intervention led to a political crisis, and Madelaine Albright invited the Oslo Center for Peace and Human Rights to mediate. The Prime Minister of Norway, Thorbjørn Jagland chaired the Center. Jagland went on to become chair of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee. Meyssan seems to be asserting that Obama and Jagland cooperated in the destabilization of Kenya. As a result, there were elements of self dealing and a moral breach in the award to Obama.

In any case, it is evident that the Nobel Peace Prize Committee has ceased acting as a socially responsible body. The appointment of a political hack like Jagland, who also has been appointed "Secretary General of the Council of Europe following a behind-the-scenes agreement between Washington and Moscow" is consistent with my letter last week that the Committee has become politicized and so no longer retains credibility. In particular, Madeleine Albright is a Democrat and the Committee has awarded two prizes to US Democrats in the past two years.

The public ought to demand that the Nobel Foundation end its self-centered and frivolous fixation on peace prizes and donate the large growth in Alfred Nobel's original endowment to dying Haitians. If Wal-Mart is expected to behave charitably, should we ask less of those who award peace prizes?

Letter to Nobel Peace Prize Commitee Suggesting Liquidation of Nobel Prize Endowment

PO Box 130
West Shokan, NY 12494, USA
January 19, 2010

Thorbjørn Jagland
Chair, Nobel Prize Committee
Secretary-general Council of Europe
Henrik Ibsens gate 51
0255 OSLO Norway

Dear Mr. Jagland:

The current tragedy in Haiti, involving the death of 200,000 human beings, calls for a new policy on the part of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee. I urge you to liquidate the Peace Prize endowment and donate it to the Haitian relief effort.

The recent awards of the Peace Prize to Barack Obama in 2009 and to Al Gore in 2007 suggest a failure of imagination. You lack the intellectual and moral competence to award a peace prize, preferring to involve yourselves in American partisan politics, concerning which you are as destructive as were the Swedes in the 1930s and 1940s, who although claiming neutrality, backed the Nazis. The Swedes' most famous intellectual, the national socialist Gunnar Myrdal, was an open backer of Hitler in the 1930s.

Last year, you awarded your prize to a cheap, socialist Chicago politician while he was escalating the war in Afghanistan and re-appointing George W. Bush's defense secretary. But this gaffe followed on the heels of an even worse absurdity: your 2007 award to Al Gore, who has been involved in corrupt self-dealing with respect to cap and trade and other environmental proposals and who has based his anti-scientific arguments on falsified research (as evidenced by internal e-mails now made public).

It is apparent from the Gore and Obama fiascoes that you lack the moral wisdom and the intellectual competence to award a peace prize.

The people of Haitia are suffering. You have used the peace prize to feather Scandinavia's reactionary, socialist self-image rather than to further peace. I urge you to liquidate the endowment and provide Haiti with meaningful aid.

Sincerely,


Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.