 "Why Nobel Peace Prize to Donald Trump wouldn’t be surprising")
Donald Trump has been officially nominated by Pakistan for the Nobel Peace Prize. Many people have mocked Islamabad for the choice. (A large number of Pakistanis themselves are up in arms against the decision, especially in the wake of the US joining the Israel-Iran war.) Trump has not been spared either. But the US President is convinced about his eligibility for the top honours. He, in fact, thinks he is overqualified for the award. “I should have gotten it four or five times,” he says as he explains: “They should give me the Nobel Prize for Rwanda, and if you look at Congo, or you could say Serbia, Kosovo, you could say a lot of them. I mean, the big one is India and Pakistan.”
Of all people Pakistan Field Marshal Asim Munir—the man who actually nominated Trump for the Nobel—must be a satisfied man today. After all, the man he thought would be Pakistan’s biggest nightmare has turned out to be its guardian angel. And for this, all he had to come up with was a profitable business proposition for the Trump family, howsoever dubious it might be. Field Marshal Munir’s sycophantic approach—which the Pakistani generals have perfected over the last seven decades—too must have helped break the ice, but it would be a simplistic assessment despite Trump’s narcissistic tendencies. Iran seems to hold the key to the sudden US-Pakistan bonhomie. Maybe the Pakistanis have sacrificed the cause of ummah and decided to secretly support the US for American dollars—just like the good, old days in the 1980s.
The outright delivery of such promises may be tough for a normal nation, but not Pakistan. For, while every country in the world has an army, Field Marshal Munir’s army has a country in Pakistan. This gave him enough elbow room to deliver a commercial proposition that Trump just couldn’t refuse. The American elites, in fact, have always loved this Pakistani attribute. Trump is no exception.
Coming back to the Nobel Peace Prize for Trump, he seems to be a perfect candidate for this. Not because he has done so much, but because over the decades this award has become a joke in itself. If you were wondering if this would meet protests from the Nobel committee, then you are grossly mistaken. This has been the second nature of the committee. Remember, how, a few years after World War II, Winston Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (1953) just because the establishment of the ever-grateful Western world realised that the British war hero couldn’t be given a Nobel for peace. Churchill’s writings came handy there.
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More ShortsChurchill, however, wasn’t alone. Actually, if one looks at the Nobel Prize across all verticals, he would appear to be a norm rather than an exception. In the not so distant past, the Swedish Academy didn’t think twice in giving a Nobel for peace to Barack Obama (2009). His presidency wasn’t a peaceful one by any stretch of imagination. If a study is to be believed, Obama carried out ten times more assassination drone strikes than the previous George W Bush regime, killing many more civilians in the process.
If the move to award Obama was ludicrous, then the decision to give a ‘peacemaker’ makeover to Henry Kissinger (1973) was preposterous. For, Kissinger, in tandem with his President, Richard Nixon, presided over the death and destruction of several democracies worldwide. His role in the Bangladeshi bloodbath is a case in study. Nixon’s pathological hatred for India and Indians, when combined with Kissinger’s sinister Cold War calculations, caused a genocide in what was then East Pakistan. Gary J Bass, a Princeton professor, in his monumental book The Blood Telegram, reveals that Nixon and Kissinger were as much responsible for the crimes in East Pakistan, as Gen Yahya Khan was.
The list of such errors, deliberate or otherwise, is long and almost never ending—from Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat (1994), whose role in carrying out deadly strikes on civilian targets is well documented, to Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, who never pretended to be apostles of peace. In fact, in 2019, Ethiopia’s controversial Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed was given the peace award. Often accused of violence and mass murder in the past, Ahmed himself admitted last year that atrocities were committed during the military offensive in the northern Tigray region.
Coming back to the field of literature, the story of novelist Graham Greene is a reminder of how ignoble the Nobel can get. A foremost novelist worldwide, Greene has failed to win the Nobel. According to one theory, he has been denied the award because he is too rich and popular. The other theory is even more disconcerting: It says that Greene could not win because he had been opposed by Artur Lundkuist, a powerful member of the Swedish Academy. Lundquist, we are told, resented Greene for having an affair with Swedish actor Anita Bjork. Anita’s husband was Lundquist’s friend. Maybe Lundkuist couldn’t forgive Greene for getting there first after his friend’s death.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one of the greats in the world of literature and himself a Nobel Prize for Literature winner (1982), wrote an essay, ‘The Spectre of the Nobel Prize’, in 1980, highlighting how this award had been a haunting experience for “great writers”. He began the essay with the story of Jorge Luis Borges, who was “the writer of the highest artistic merit in the Spanish language”—someone who just couldn’t be excluded from the annual Nobel predictions. Yet, Borges had to go through “the two months of anxiety to which the fates subject him every year”. The reason being, “the final result does not depend on the candidate’s intrinsic merit, nor on divine justice, but on the inscrutable will of the members of the Swedish Academy” which, Marquez found, was “unpredictable, contradictory, and impervious to all omens”.
In this backdrop, one wonders why so much brouhaha over Trump’s Nobel nomination. If anything, he seems to be the right candidate for it: An “unpredictable, contradictory” person for the “unpredictable, contradictory” award! And the timing will suit the American Deep State: Giving the US President the Nobel would complete the Trumpian loop: From him being a Deep State challenger to a Deep State player. Hasn’t that been the ultimate objective of the members of the Swedish Academy? Remember, Churchill, Kissinger, Obama…
Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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