Writer and Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann once said “a harmful truth is better than a useful lie.” So in that spirit, perhaps we should thank former Nobel Committee member Geir Lundestad for conceding in December of last year that “Obama did not do much before winning [the Peace Prize], but he represented the ideals of the committee. And when we have an American president who supports that message, we like to strengthen him.”
In the same interview he also prophesied, “I would be extremely surprised if Donald Trump ever received the Nobel Peace Prize. He may say he wants to bring peace to the Middle East or the Korean Peninsula, but he has not accomplished anything,” adding, “And his policies do not fall into line with the ideas of liberal internationalism.”
Now that President Trump has rattled off three noteworthy international peace accords in short order—Israel-United Arab Emirates, Israel-Bahrain, and Serbia-Kosovo—the premise of Lundestad’s statement is suddenly and substantially challenged. In a move to recognize these achievements, the president received two nominations for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize.
“I think he has done more trying to create peace between nations than most other Peace Prize nominees,” noted Christian Tybring-Gjedde, the Norwegian Parliament member who nominated Trump first for the Israel-UAE agreement.
The second nomination, by Magnus Jacobsson, a member of the Swedish Parliament, was for the “joint work for peace and economic development, through cooperation signed in the White House” by the leaders of Serbia and Kosovo.
In a pure meritocracy, both nominations would be considered, but in the real world infected by political bias and toxic personal animus, such influences are never far away. So it should have caught no one by surprise when a leftwing publication smugly suggested that the noble Norwegians “End the Nobel Peace Prize” altogether, or at least put it on a shelf for a while. The mere chance of Trump holding the golden medal bearing the visage of Alfred Nobel was too much. “Better to shut it down.”
Such an audacious appeal would be understood had the committee received nominations for a war-mongering totalitarian, a human rights abuser, or perhaps someone quite nice with a perfect crease in his pants but wholly undeserving as a matter of actual achievement. Those descriptions actually apply, respectively, to past nominees Benito Mussolini (1935), Josef Stalin (1945 and 1948), and Barack Obama (2009), but the argument falls short when considering this president’s record, including his determined policy of withdrawal from unending global wars.
But does it matter? The harmful truth Lundestad revealed is that ideology matters more than achievement in the realm of globalist elitists, the princes of power who jet from Brussels to Bonn to ponder climate change for the lowly masses of proletariats, returning promptly for a quick 18 holes.
Protests that his achievements are not real, that they are not fully bloomed yet, reek of an impudent child, angry that the other team scored. Of all the complaints against the man across the pond, the one most frightening to them is perhaps the one seldom spoken, that he is a nationalist who threatens their new world order. That he could ever boast the imprimatur of the Nobel Committee in carrying out his populist work rattles the tables that hold their glasses of Louis XIII cognac.
Evidencing the ideological bias is the list of 2020 Peace Prize nominees from the United States. It includes Chelsea Manning, the soldier convicted under the Espionage Act of illegally releasing 750,000 classified and sensitive documents to WikiLeaks, for which he received a 35-year prison sentence (commuted in 2017 by Obama).
In the trial, the lead prosecutor noted that Manning “was not a humanist; he was a hacker who described his fellow soldiers as ‘dykes’ or ‘global idiots.’ He was not a troubled young soul; he was a determined soldier with the ability, knowledge, and desire to harm the US. He was not a whistleblower; he was a traitor.”
For refusing to testify before a grand jury pertaining to WikiLeaks and its creator Julian Assange, Manning was jailed again last year. For this and more, Manning is a repeat nominee for the Peace Prize.
There’s also Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Code Pink, a leftwing radical who claimed that reports of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez cracking down on free speech and civil rights were a myth. When Chavez shut down the last television station criticizing him, she defiantly defended the action and rebuffed claims of abuse against citizens, saying “they falsified footage that showed pro-Chavez supporters killing people.”
The International Press Institute called the shutdown “a flagrant attempt to silence the station’s critical voice and in violation of everyone’s right ‘to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers,’ as outlined in Article 19 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” No matter to Benjamin or the Nobel Prize Committee.
Also on the list are husband and wife Peter and Cora Weiss. The daughter of a member of the Communist Party USA, Mrs. Weiss has been long known for her support of radical leftwing groups, beginning early as a founder of the Institute for Policy Studies, an influential leftwing think-tank still active today that began in 1963 to undermine American interests in favor of the Soviet Union. She was an anti-American activist who met with the communists in Hanoi during the Vietnam War.
They were sponsors of “The Wilfred Burchett 60th Birthday Committee,” a group that raised money for a communist member of the Australian parliament with ties to the KGB and the Chinese communists. In 1976 they were involved with a Marxist-led group called the “July 4th Coalition,” organized to protest the 200th anniversary of America’s independence. The list of communist groups with whom they were affiliated is quite lengthy. Both are repeat nominations.
The list of nominees includes Americans Kathy Kelly, an activist who supported the violent communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 1980s, Richard Faulk, a professor whose work has been described as influenced by the writings of Karl Marx and Marxist acolytes, Herbert Marcuse and C. Wright Mills, as well as Daniel Ellsberg, famous for leaking the top-secret Pentagon Papers, and David Swanson, a Bush impeachment activist and advocate of the idea that the United States should be broken up.
The treachery of American subversion or promotion of murderous Marxist ideology is implicitly endorsed by the globalist plutocrats and their media myrmidons. But the nomination of a man who is unapologetically pro-capitalism and pro-America is a step too far.
Allegiance to the left’s ideological mob is sine qua non for inclusion in the club. To their dismay, it is one cuff-linked club that this nominee refuses to join. So there is war over the Peace Prize.
