When Peace Prize Winners Actually Helped People
Instapundit has several links to biographies of Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel Peace prize for starting the green revolution and perhaps single-handedly saving hundreds of millions from starvation. This is a particularly interesting one.
Borlaug won his prize, of course, back when the Nobel Peace prize was actually given to people who made the world a better place. Today the prize is typically given to whatever person did the most to appease a major dictatorship or terrorist or to whoever was most vocal worldwide in their socialism or anti-Americanism. This description of the Nobel committee's criteria may sound flippant, but it is clear to me that the committee is dominated by those who favor peace ahead of anything else. Which, in real life, means that you have to be ready to live with ... anything else, including murder, rape, genocide, totalitarianism, etc.
Just look at the list of recent winners. In 1985 they gave the peace prize to the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, who as a group systematically opposed everything the US was doing at the time which in 5 years would result in a true reduction in the risk of nuclear war. In 1988 they gave the award to the serial rapists in the UN peacekeeping forces. For God sakes in 1994 Yasser Arafat won, perhaps the single person most responsible for chaos in the Middle East. In 2001 Kofi Anan won, at the very time he was out-Enroning Ken Lay by helping Saddam Hussein steal $20 billion while enriching his own son with contractor kickbacks. And of course in 2002 Jimmy Carter won for appeasing just about every dictator in the world, but North Korea in particular (interestingly, Jimmy Carter is the only US president since Woodrow Wilson to win the award. Can you think of any president in the last 60 years who has done less than Jimmy Carter to create a free and peaceful world?)
As a footnote, it would be impossible for Norman Borlaug to win the Peace prize today. Greens and environmentalists have never liked him, and the politically correct Nobel Committee would never make a choice today that would irritate these groups. People like Wangari Maathai who fit into the progressive-green sustainable development camp are preferred, even if they don't have nearly the same impact in actually saving or improving lives.
