Insult of the Nobel Peace Prize
Its own words and actions reveal certain defects in its analyses. In fact, it has discovered certain problems in that process but has chosen to ignore them.
Severe partisanship has already made the Nobel Peace Prize a prize of the West, although countries in the East are playing an increasingly important role in today's world.
One example of this partisanship is the selection of Hollywood's Anne Hathaway as hostess for the Nobel Concert. Why has there never been a hostess from Bollywood in India? Does the committee still consider India a peripheral country? Does it still believe the center of the world is somewhere in the Atlantic? Let's not forget there are more than 1 billion people in India, more than that in Europe and the US combined.
Of course, the Nobel Committee has many a time chosen the right people for the peace prize, people who deserved the honor. But the present chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Thorbjorn Jagland, is an ambitious man. He hopes to change the world by influencing certain events. But he has always failed.
By granting the 2009 prize to US President Barack Obama, the Nobel Committee had already created some negative effects. Jagland may have wanted to award this year's prize to a Chinese, but why did he choose Liu Xiaobo?
If Jagland wanted to simply cheer up China's "reformists" with the prize, Liu was by no means a wise choice, for he criticizes Chinese culture and wants to mold China into a Western-style society.
Any reform in China has to take place in line with the changing times in the country.
The committee must have been full aware of the negative effects of giving the prize to Liu, who is behind bars, but it still went ahead because it simply intended to promote Western values in China.
If the Nobel Committee wants to remodel history, it should have a clear idea about the changing world. All the five members of the committee are aged politicians. They hope to change the world but lack the basic knowledge about the global situation. This will make the Nobel Peace Prize lose its importance and glory some day.
Sadly, there is little we can do to stop the Nobel Committee from making decisions that violate the original purpose the Nobel Peace Prize.
After the US president was given the prize last year, a columnist wrote in The New York Times that Obama had been "thorbjorned". We could now say that Alfred Bernhard Nobel has been "thorbjorned", too.
