{"id":170253,"date":"2020-10-12T12:00:58","date_gmt":"2020-10-12T11:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=170253"},"modified":"2020-10-10T08:03:30","modified_gmt":"2020-10-10T07:03:30","slug":"not-nobels-will-world-food-programmes-peace-prize-sparks-criticism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/10\/not-nobels-will-world-food-programmes-peace-prize-sparks-criticism\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Not Nobel\u2019s Will\u2019: World Food Programme\u2019s Peace Prize Sparks Criticism"},"content":{"rendered":"

9 Oct 2020 – This year\u2019s Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to the World Food Programme. The UN institution beat famous and notorious competitors for the prestigious award, notably climate activist Greta Thunberg, US President Donald Trump and the World Health Organization. The award to the WFP has nonetheless generated criticism.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Alfred Nobel<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cWe recognise the great value of the World Food Programme<\/a>, but the 2020 prize is much less ambitious than Nobel’s idea of \u2018conferring the greatest benefit on humankind\u2019,\u201d says a statement by Fredrik S. Heffermehl, a Norwegian lawyer and long-time critic of the process behind the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Heffermehl, author of the 2010 book The Nobel Peace Prize. What Nobel really wanted<\/em>\u00a0and who runs\u00a0a website<\/a> scrutinising the original will of Alfred J. Nobel, says that \u201cthe committee again deals with arbitrary, single aspects of the war problem, and never addresses the root causes that Nobel wished to remove.<\/p>\n

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\u201cIt may be a peace prize, but it is not the Nobel Peace Prize,\u201d says Heffermehl, contacted by RFI via Zoom. \u201cIf you are going to implement a testament, to realise a will, you have to check what that will is.\u201d<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

‘Undeserving’ winners<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Heffermehl is an angry man, who says that \u201conly 33 out of all the Nobel Prize winners\u201d deserve it, over the 120 year period <\/a>that the prize has been awarded. Two thirds of the winners, he says, do not.<\/p>\n

On 21 September, Heffermehl, who earlier this year published the book Medaljens bakside\u00a0<\/em>(Behind the Medals<\/em>,) wrote an angry letter to the Nobel Committee in Oslo, stating that \u201cThe Nobel testament was never professionally interpreted and never followed,\u201d<\/p>\n

While admitting that \u201cThe Nobel Committee has given general peace prizes to many fine recipients,\u201d the will of Alfred Nobel is not being respected as Heffermehl thinks it was meant.<\/p>\n

‘Greatest benefit to mankind’<\/strong><\/h2>\n

The original text of Alfred Nobel\u2019s testament is published in full<\/a> at the website of the Nobel Committee.<\/p>\n

After giving substantial amounts of money to family members, the remaining fortune was to be divided annually in five equal parts as prizes for \u201cthose who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind,\u201d in the fields of physics<\/a>, chemistry<\/a>, medicine<\/a> and literature<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The fifth part, says the testament is to be awarded to \u201cthe person who has done the most or best to advance fellowship among nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and the establishment and promotion of peace congresses.\u201d<\/p>\n

But, says Heffermehl, that doesn\u2019t happen as it was meant.<\/p>\n

\u201cNobel’s main intention was to support contemporary ideas of a change of course away from military competition,\u201d Heffermehl says. \u201cThe goal was to avoid war through cooperation on international law, international organisation and the abolition of national military armaments.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stiff bureaucracy<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Instead, he says, the Norwegian Nobel Committee<\/a> (which grants the peace prize, the other prizes are awarded by the Swedish Academy<\/a>) grew into a stiff \u201cbureaucracy that merely occupies itself with picking a winner from all the submissions they receive\u201d.<\/p>\n

Of the 101 Nobel Peace Prizes that have been awarded since 1901, only the early nominees would have met the terms of Nobel\u2019s testament, according to Heffermehl, \u201cespecially in the first decade,\u201d with the most prominent example being the Austrian-Bohemian writer and peace activist Baroness Bertha von Suttner<\/a>, who won the prize in 1905.<\/p>\n

Von Suttner\u2019s 1889 novel Die Waffen Nieder<\/em> (Lay down your arms<\/em>)\u00a0was one of the main sources of inspiration for Nobel when he decided to use his money to support the struggle for world-wide disarmament, according to Heffermehl.<\/p>\n

High treason<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Not many of the awardees contributed to disarmament. The worst example, says Heffermehl, was the awarding, in 1973, to then US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople were horrified when he got the prize, it caused an uproar in the Norwegian Parliament. Kissinger betrayed Lyndon B. Johnson in the negotiations on peace in Vietnam, colluded with the presidential candidate, Richard Nixon,\u201d thus postponing a peace deal and protracting the war for several years.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think this is high treason, and he should have been punished for this. And certainly, he is not the type of person who deserved a prize for global disarmament,\u201d fumes Heffermehl.<\/p>\n

Heffermehl\u2019s candidate for the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize was peace activist David Swanson<\/a>, winner of the 2018 US Peace Prize, and a fierce critic of US military involvement in world affairs.<\/p>\n

What has been the answer of the Nobel Committee to Heffermehl\u2019s insistent probing and letters?<\/p>\n

\u201cTotal silence. They pretend I don\u2019t exist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Go to Original – rfi.fr<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

9 Oct 2020 – This year\u2019s Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to the World Food Programme. The UN institution beat famous and notorious competitors for the prestigious award, notably climate activist Greta Thunberg, US President Donald Trump and the World Health Organization. The award to the WFP has nonetheless generated criticism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":170255,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[105],"tags":[1074,1846],"class_list":["post-170253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nobel-laureates","tag-nobel-peace-prize","tag-nobel-peace-prize-watch"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=170253"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170253\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/170255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=170253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=170253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}