The Nobel Peace Prize and its Detractors

Mark Pitzke at Der Spiegel has a good rundown of the conservative reaction to the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore:

Steve Doocy has a question for his viewers. "What do Al Gore, Yassir Arafat and that crazy Jimmy Carter all have in common?" crows the morning host of the American cable channel Fox News. His co-hosts look at him eagerly, half-emptied coffee cups in reach. Doocy waits a beat before answering his own question with a smug yet nauseated smile. "The Nobel Peace Prize."

Leading the attacks on Gore is the conservative weekly National Review. The global warming denier Steven Hayward laments the damage done to this "once-prestigious award" by giving it to Al Gore.  Hayward predicts "Gore’s Peace Prize will take its place alongside Le Duc Tho’s 1973 award as a Nobel embarrassment." Ironically, 1972 was the last year that conservatives had something to cheer about in the Nobel Peace Prize award, for the committee also awarded it to the notorious war criminal Heny Kissinger. Of course, the National Review was especially vicious in its attacks on Jimmy Carter, when he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. And blogger Brad DeLong takes us down memory lane with a National Review essay that essentially accuses Nobel Peace Prize winner Martin Luther King of domestic terrorism:

the doings of such high-minded, self-righteous “children of light” as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and his associates in the leadership of the “civil rights” movement. If you are looking for those ultimately responsible for the murder, arson, and looting in Los Angeles, look to them: they are the guilty ones, these apostles of “non-violence.”

But the National Review doesn't reserve its venom just for American Nobel Prize winners. Managing editor Jay Nordlinger went after Willy Brandt , the"West German naif (at best)" in a 2005 piece. The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Willy Brandt in 1971 for his "Ostpolitik" earned him the derision of the reactionary press in Germany, especially from his nemesis, Bild-Zeitung editor Peter Boenisch (See Heinrich Böll's book Bild-Bonn-Boenisch).  Amazingly, the Bild-Zeitung again smeared Willy Brandt again in 2005 with a column by Hugo Müller-Vogg "So kam Willy Brandt an den Nobelpreis" and managed also to cast aspersions on the Nobel Peace Prize award in 1935 to Carl von Ossietzky (see account in the Netzeitung).  Ossietzky was a in a Nazi concentration camp when he was notified of the Prize; his captors refused to allow him to travel to Stockholm to receive the award. The official reaction of the Nazis was swift and predicatble:

"Die Verleihung des Nobelpreises an einen notorischen Landesverräter ist eine derart unverschämte Herausforderung und Beleidigung des neuen Deutschland, dass darauf eine entsprechend deutliche Antwort erfolgen wird" (The awarding of the Nobel Pize to a notorious traitor is such a provocation and an insult to the New Germany that a clear response is called for.)

The Nazis failed in their efforts to get Ossietzky to renounce the prize.  Instead, Ossietzky died in the camp, his commitment to peace intact.

Comments

[Axel]

I really love profound statements from such honorable persons like William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer that Gore is "anti-American" and that he "got the Nobel Peace Prize for bloviating about global warming. I mean, it’s a prize given by bloviators to a bloviator for nothing."
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/10/14/kristol-krauthammer-gore/

And don't forget Pat Buchanan who ranted on MSNBC that the Nobel Peace Prize has become nothing more than political power grab by "Swedish Socialists."

For the the European reactions - a bunch of cowardly anti-Americans and phoney Swedish Socialists, I suppose - see "Gore's Nobel Win Greeted With Cheers by Europeans":

LONDON, Oct. 12 -- News of Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize was received with delight Monday across Europe, where President Bush is deeply unpopular, climate change is generally accepted as undisputed fact and the former vice president is widely seen as a welcome anti-Bush.

"He's the evidence that America is still capable of intelligent discourse," said Peter Kellner, who heads the British polling firm YouGov. According to Kellner, opinion polls show that British people generally admire America and Americans but strongly dislike Bush. He also said surveys routinely find that more than 80 percent of Britons agree with Gore that climate change exists and is man-made.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called Gore "inspirational," and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said he hoped Gore's honor would encourage world leaders to "approach this challenge even more swiftly and decisively."

John Noach, 69, a Dutch citizen who was sitting in a London Starbucks on Friday, said that in Europe, "most reasonable people" think of Gore as "a lifeline to sanity."

Respect for environmentalism crosses political and social lines in Europe; the 27-country European Union views itself as the global leader in addressing such issues as warming and pollution. The choice of Gore for the honor, conferred by an independent committee appointed by the parliament of Norway, reflected mainstream thinking in Europe as a whole.
[...]
Le Monde newspaper called the screening a "triumph," and its columnist Dominique Dhombres hailed Gore as "the American hero of the fight against global warming."

After the award was announced Friday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy praised Gore as "an outstanding personality" and said that "today's fight against climate change is a determining factor for tomorrow's peace. . . . I'm very happy that such a great American used his position to set an example."
[...]
Gore's Nobel met with applause in Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel has sought for months with limited success to persuade the Bush administration to do more about climate change under the auspices of the United Nations and the Group of Eight major industrial powers.

"Like no other, Al Gore has for many years through his personal commitment contributed to heightening global awareness of the need to develop effective strategies to counter climate change," Merkel said Friday.
[...]
Michael White, a political columnist at the Guardian newspaper who has written widely on American politics, said he suspected Gore was more popular abroad than at home. In his view, the former vice president doesn't appeal to a minority of Britons who are "pathologically hostile to the United States." But he said Gore is popular among the much larger number "who want to think well of America.""
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/12/AR2007101201763_pf.html