BOLTON: Peace Prize honoring favorites over accomplishments

[Geee]

Washington Times:

Despite speculation that WikiLeaks might receive this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, the winner turned out to be the European Union. Some thought this might be a satire. While WikiLeaks would have been incandescently controversial, the EU decision nonetheless demonstrates how the Peace Prize Committee has gone wrong in recent decades, increasingly honoring political favorites rather than substantive achievements. The 2009 award to Barack Obama, after just a few months in the presidency, exemplifies the problem.

The 2012 decision continues this pattern, graphically demonstrating the Nobel Committee’s ideological slant. First, the Committee’s justification misreads contemporary European history, although to be sure its misreading reflects conventional wisdom in some circles. According to this view, nationalism is the scourge of Europe, undermining democratic government and leading inexorably to war after war, on the continent and worldwide. Thus, the way to peace is, over time, to eliminate nationalism itself, hence the supra-national EU.

But this “history” is simplistic. Wars originate in conflicting interests and objectives, differing correlations of political and economic power, and an endless list of other sources. Nationalism may be an accelerator of tension and adversity, but it is hardly the only cause. Today, for example, we see Islamic radicalism threatening international peace and security through terrorism and the pursuit of nuclear weapons. Not too many centuries ago, we saw conflicting religious views as the principal cause of seemingly endless European wars. And surely, in recent years, the Yugoslav conflict of the 1990s was as much over religion as over ethnicity and proto-nationalism. To end the cause of military conflicts based on differences of faith, then, shall we all become Lutherans, the established church of Norway? Simplistic analysis leads to simplistic solutions, hence the conventional wisdom’s worship before the EU altar.

[logicnreason]

"When all are called "exceptional"; no one is exceptional."

 

Kind of goes hand-in-hand with the incredible overuse of the term "hero".

 

If you only listened to (and couldn't see) any given professional sporting event, you'd swear the players were absolutely better than any who've come before. Words such as "Incredible", "Fantastic", "Stupenduous", "Great" and the like are used on most plays.

 

At $3,000,000+++ per year in salary....these "athletes" ought to make the plays they do.