Jeffrey Lord: The Reagan Prize
[Jeffrey Lord is a former Reagan White House political director and author.]
It's time for the Reagan Peace Prize.
Actually, it's past time.
The Nobel Peace Prize for President Obama -- for which he was nominated after barely two weeks in office -- merely illustrates once again what has been apparent for not just the last few years but at least ninety years. The Nobel, the legacy of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, has become essentially worthless, a charade for left-wing Norwegian politicians to award like-minded liberals and liberalism under the guise that the award in some objective fashion determines an individual's contributions to peace.
It's easy to cite the current story. Obama, today, Al Gore yesterday, Jimmy Carter the day before that and surely Bill Clinton and Hillary some day to come. Reagan? Thatcher? Pope John Paul II? George W. Bush? Of course not.
But there's more here, much more, which bespeaks the need for a Reagan Peace Prize.
The Nobel is not a fake -- although it risks the charge in the sense that it presents itself as something it is not. Which is to say, an objective "but of course!" selection of an individual or group that has actually secured peace or at least advanced the cause. The Nobel is quite genuine -- it is an award for leftists, for leftism and a leftist worldview of what peace is and how that peace is achieved. Not to be lost in the commotion here is that the decision to give the award to Obama was made by a group of Norwegian parliamentarians dominated by socialists.
The real question that needs to be asked is: Has the Nobel Peace Prize summoned forth those who have actually produced peace? Has the liberal-left wing view of how to achieve peace, as practically enacted by various Nobel Peace Prize winners, worked as advertised? The answer, overwhelmingly (they did manage a nod to Polish anti-Communist crusader Lech Walesa), is an embarrassingly emphatic no. Let's take a look at some of the more stellar if now conveniently forgotten examples.
On September 1, 1939, World War II exploded , with the Germans invading Poland. The entire story of this global horror than unfolds over the course of the next six murderous years, the conclusion of which in turn bequeathed the next six decades of the nuclear-tipped Cold War.
Where were the Nobel Peace Prize winners chosen by Norwegians in the run-up to all of this? How did the world ever find itself in this ghastly situation in the first place if the Prize winners were so effective at what they were doing? Who were these recipients, what did they do that won them the prize -- and most importantly, why didn't they succeed?
Here are some of them.
• 1919, Woodrow Wilson -- Wilson, the sitting President of the United States at the time he received his prize, is without doubt the most famous recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in the period that followed World War I and leading up to World War II. He won the prize, according to the Nobel Committee, for his work on the Treaty of Versailles, specifically including the League of Nations. What happened with all of this? The Treaty of Versailles failed, its signature accomplishment to blame World War I on the Germans (the so-called "War Guilt" clauses) and demand crippling financial reparations along with territorial concessions. The Treaty's real success was in laying the groundwork for the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Likewise the League of Nations proved an embarrassing failure, Wilson completely unable to negotiate America's role in the League with the U.S. Senate.
Nobel Winner Failure: Wilson won his prize for a series of liberal foreign policies that directly set the world on the path to World War II and the Holocaust. Wilson's peace strategy, rewarded by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, failed.
• 1925, Austen Chamberlain -- Chamberlain was the British Foreign Secretary and half-brother to Neville Chamberlain, who years later would become the British Prime Minister famously advocating appeasement with Hitler. Austen Chamberlain won his Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating what is known to history as the Locarno Pact in 1925. The Locarno Pact, said Austen Chamberlain, was "the beginning, and not the end, of the noble work of appeasement in Europe." The Nobel Prize Committee agreed, and awarded Chamberlain the Peace Prize for an agreement that opened the door
Nobel Winner Failure: The Locarno Pact, hailed by liberals of the day, caved in to the German demand to leave its eastern border open for revision, humiliating Poland and setting up an inevitable German invasion -- which finally came in 1939. As Austen Chamberlain noted, it was a deliberate act of appeasement. Sniffed he: "No British government would ever risk the bones of a single British grenadier for the Polish corridor." Chamberlain's appeasement pushed Europe and the world further down the path to war. Austen Chamberlain's worldview, rewarded enthusiastically by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, failed.
• 1929, Frank B. Kellogg -- American Secretary of State for President Calvin Coolidge. Kellogg won the award for the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Briand was Aristide Briand, the French Foreign minister who had already won his Nobel Peace Prize in 1926 for his role in negotiating the Locarno Pact, the treaty that won the 1925 award for Austen Chamberlain. Kellogg-Briand, signed in 1928, was perhaps the most fatuous example of liberal foreign policy concepts abroad in the world. It banned war as "an instrument of national policy." Sixty-three nations signed this treaty, including Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union along with the United States, Britain, and France.
Nobel Winner Failure: Kellogg-Briand was an utter failure, as was soon evidenced with the rise of Hitler and Germany's drive to re-arm. Japan, another signatory, invaded Manchuria in 1931, a mere two years after Kellogg got his prize.
• 1931, Nicholas Murray Butler -- Butler was the President of Columbia University and an ardent left-wing peace activist. He was given the award not only for his strong support of the Kellogg-Briand pact but his well-publicized work in the cause of outlawing war. Unable to travel to Oslo, Norway for the traditional ceremony to receive his prize, Butler was lauded by Halvdan Kocht, a member of the Nobel Committee who, tellingly, was a respected professor of history at the University of Oslo. Professor Kocht praised Murray for being a staunch supporter of the "solidly developed foundation" for international peace that was Wilson's League of Nations, Chamberlain's Locarno Pact, and Kellogg and Briand's disarmament treaty.
Nobel Winner Failure: Butler's theories of how to bring peace to the world, epitomized by Kocht's specifically citing what are now regarded as three of the worst foreign policy failures in 20th century history, were predictably cited as exactly what they proved not to be -- "a solidly developed foundation" for world peace. Once again the Nobel Peace Prize was handed out to a proponent of a left-wing worldview, now actual treaties, that wound up pushing the world closer to war.
• 1934, Arthur Henderson -- Henderson was a former British Foreign Secretary (succeeding Austen Chamberlain.) Like Chamberlain, Henderson was a strenuous proponent of disarmament, and as such was made president of the Geneva Disarmament Conference of 1932-1934. Now dealing with a Germany headed by Adolf Hitler, Henderson persisted in his belief that a disarmament strategy would bring peace. The Germans, of course, finally walked out and the conference collapsed.
Nobel Winner Failure: Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize anyway, with no one seeing anything amiss in the fact of Henderson's failed strategy, Henderson persisted as what the Nobel Committee today admiringly praises as the "embodiment" of disarmament. In his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Henderson stoutly insisted he could not "conceive" that his approach to peace had meant failure. It did. The Nobel Peace Prize was again given to someone whose actions aided Hitler in believing the rest of Europe was unable and unwilling to stop him. Within a matter of years Hitler was fully armed and ready to begin his attack.
By 1939 the Nobel Peace Prize Committee stopped handing out the award. The Nobel Peace Prize would have no winners for the next five years. With ironic good reason. The world was ablaze in destruction and death as a direct result of the repeated failures of Nobel Peace Prize winners. In one of the more ironic notes of the looming war, the future of Norway itself now teetered on the brink. Then, darkness descended.
On April 9, 1940, Norway was invaded by the Nazis. Political activity in Norway was banned. Members of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee fled. Vidkun Quisling, a Norwegian fascist ("the Hitler of Norway") whose name today is synonymous with traitor, took control of the country for Hitler as some 350,000 German troops settled in to occupy the country. The Nobel Peace Prize headquarters itself barely escaped a physical takeover of its property, a fate avoided only after much secret negotiation with Sweden. (Norway and Sweden were once linked politically, so the Nobel Foundation in Sweden owned the Nobel property in Oslo, a point that saved the building, after intense negotiations, from having the Nazis literally move in.) In the sixth year, operating through Sweden, the Nobel Committee managed to name the International Red Cross -- a certainly admirable group that had much work on its hands coping with the horror bequeathed by the work of previous Nobel Prize winners.
Perhaps no image is more vividly symbolic as to the end results of the philosophy guiding the Nobel Peace Prize than that of Nobel officials, their Committee members in hiding having fled Oslo, humiliated as a Nazi officer strolls through the Oslo headquarters of the Nobel Peace Prize, eyeballing it as a Nazi acquisition. This while Quisling threatens a Nazi takeover of the Prize Committee itself, run by Nazi approved members of Quisling's government.
The in-your-face, up-front and all too inevitable result of the policies honored by those Nobel Peace Prizes was quite dramatically at hand for the Nobel officials themselves.
The resumption of the regular process for awarding the Nobel Peace Prize did not resume until 1945 -- after the Allied invasion of Norway, the capitulation of the Germans, Quisling, and their Norwegian agents -- and the not coincidental arrival of 30,000 American and British troops.
WHICH BRINGS US BACK to the idea of a Reagan Peace Prize...
Read entire article at American Spectator
It's time for the Reagan Peace Prize.
Actually, it's past time.
The Nobel Peace Prize for President Obama -- for which he was nominated after barely two weeks in office -- merely illustrates once again what has been apparent for not just the last few years but at least ninety years. The Nobel, the legacy of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, has become essentially worthless, a charade for left-wing Norwegian politicians to award like-minded liberals and liberalism under the guise that the award in some objective fashion determines an individual's contributions to peace.
It's easy to cite the current story. Obama, today, Al Gore yesterday, Jimmy Carter the day before that and surely Bill Clinton and Hillary some day to come. Reagan? Thatcher? Pope John Paul II? George W. Bush? Of course not.
But there's more here, much more, which bespeaks the need for a Reagan Peace Prize.
The Nobel is not a fake -- although it risks the charge in the sense that it presents itself as something it is not. Which is to say, an objective "but of course!" selection of an individual or group that has actually secured peace or at least advanced the cause. The Nobel is quite genuine -- it is an award for leftists, for leftism and a leftist worldview of what peace is and how that peace is achieved. Not to be lost in the commotion here is that the decision to give the award to Obama was made by a group of Norwegian parliamentarians dominated by socialists.
The real question that needs to be asked is: Has the Nobel Peace Prize summoned forth those who have actually produced peace? Has the liberal-left wing view of how to achieve peace, as practically enacted by various Nobel Peace Prize winners, worked as advertised? The answer, overwhelmingly (they did manage a nod to Polish anti-Communist crusader Lech Walesa), is an embarrassingly emphatic no. Let's take a look at some of the more stellar if now conveniently forgotten examples.
On September 1, 1939, World War II exploded , with the Germans invading Poland. The entire story of this global horror than unfolds over the course of the next six murderous years, the conclusion of which in turn bequeathed the next six decades of the nuclear-tipped Cold War.
Where were the Nobel Peace Prize winners chosen by Norwegians in the run-up to all of this? How did the world ever find itself in this ghastly situation in the first place if the Prize winners were so effective at what they were doing? Who were these recipients, what did they do that won them the prize -- and most importantly, why didn't they succeed?
Here are some of them.
• 1919, Woodrow Wilson -- Wilson, the sitting President of the United States at the time he received his prize, is without doubt the most famous recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in the period that followed World War I and leading up to World War II. He won the prize, according to the Nobel Committee, for his work on the Treaty of Versailles, specifically including the League of Nations. What happened with all of this? The Treaty of Versailles failed, its signature accomplishment to blame World War I on the Germans (the so-called "War Guilt" clauses) and demand crippling financial reparations along with territorial concessions. The Treaty's real success was in laying the groundwork for the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Likewise the League of Nations proved an embarrassing failure, Wilson completely unable to negotiate America's role in the League with the U.S. Senate.
Nobel Winner Failure: Wilson won his prize for a series of liberal foreign policies that directly set the world on the path to World War II and the Holocaust. Wilson's peace strategy, rewarded by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, failed.
• 1925, Austen Chamberlain -- Chamberlain was the British Foreign Secretary and half-brother to Neville Chamberlain, who years later would become the British Prime Minister famously advocating appeasement with Hitler. Austen Chamberlain won his Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating what is known to history as the Locarno Pact in 1925. The Locarno Pact, said Austen Chamberlain, was "the beginning, and not the end, of the noble work of appeasement in Europe." The Nobel Prize Committee agreed, and awarded Chamberlain the Peace Prize for an agreement that opened the door
Nobel Winner Failure: The Locarno Pact, hailed by liberals of the day, caved in to the German demand to leave its eastern border open for revision, humiliating Poland and setting up an inevitable German invasion -- which finally came in 1939. As Austen Chamberlain noted, it was a deliberate act of appeasement. Sniffed he: "No British government would ever risk the bones of a single British grenadier for the Polish corridor." Chamberlain's appeasement pushed Europe and the world further down the path to war. Austen Chamberlain's worldview, rewarded enthusiastically by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, failed.
• 1929, Frank B. Kellogg -- American Secretary of State for President Calvin Coolidge. Kellogg won the award for the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Briand was Aristide Briand, the French Foreign minister who had already won his Nobel Peace Prize in 1926 for his role in negotiating the Locarno Pact, the treaty that won the 1925 award for Austen Chamberlain. Kellogg-Briand, signed in 1928, was perhaps the most fatuous example of liberal foreign policy concepts abroad in the world. It banned war as "an instrument of national policy." Sixty-three nations signed this treaty, including Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union along with the United States, Britain, and France.
Nobel Winner Failure: Kellogg-Briand was an utter failure, as was soon evidenced with the rise of Hitler and Germany's drive to re-arm. Japan, another signatory, invaded Manchuria in 1931, a mere two years after Kellogg got his prize.
• 1931, Nicholas Murray Butler -- Butler was the President of Columbia University and an ardent left-wing peace activist. He was given the award not only for his strong support of the Kellogg-Briand pact but his well-publicized work in the cause of outlawing war. Unable to travel to Oslo, Norway for the traditional ceremony to receive his prize, Butler was lauded by Halvdan Kocht, a member of the Nobel Committee who, tellingly, was a respected professor of history at the University of Oslo. Professor Kocht praised Murray for being a staunch supporter of the "solidly developed foundation" for international peace that was Wilson's League of Nations, Chamberlain's Locarno Pact, and Kellogg and Briand's disarmament treaty.
Nobel Winner Failure: Butler's theories of how to bring peace to the world, epitomized by Kocht's specifically citing what are now regarded as three of the worst foreign policy failures in 20th century history, were predictably cited as exactly what they proved not to be -- "a solidly developed foundation" for world peace. Once again the Nobel Peace Prize was handed out to a proponent of a left-wing worldview, now actual treaties, that wound up pushing the world closer to war.
• 1934, Arthur Henderson -- Henderson was a former British Foreign Secretary (succeeding Austen Chamberlain.) Like Chamberlain, Henderson was a strenuous proponent of disarmament, and as such was made president of the Geneva Disarmament Conference of 1932-1934. Now dealing with a Germany headed by Adolf Hitler, Henderson persisted in his belief that a disarmament strategy would bring peace. The Germans, of course, finally walked out and the conference collapsed.
Nobel Winner Failure: Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize anyway, with no one seeing anything amiss in the fact of Henderson's failed strategy, Henderson persisted as what the Nobel Committee today admiringly praises as the "embodiment" of disarmament. In his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Henderson stoutly insisted he could not "conceive" that his approach to peace had meant failure. It did. The Nobel Peace Prize was again given to someone whose actions aided Hitler in believing the rest of Europe was unable and unwilling to stop him. Within a matter of years Hitler was fully armed and ready to begin his attack.
By 1939 the Nobel Peace Prize Committee stopped handing out the award. The Nobel Peace Prize would have no winners for the next five years. With ironic good reason. The world was ablaze in destruction and death as a direct result of the repeated failures of Nobel Peace Prize winners. In one of the more ironic notes of the looming war, the future of Norway itself now teetered on the brink. Then, darkness descended.
On April 9, 1940, Norway was invaded by the Nazis. Political activity in Norway was banned. Members of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee fled. Vidkun Quisling, a Norwegian fascist ("the Hitler of Norway") whose name today is synonymous with traitor, took control of the country for Hitler as some 350,000 German troops settled in to occupy the country. The Nobel Peace Prize headquarters itself barely escaped a physical takeover of its property, a fate avoided only after much secret negotiation with Sweden. (Norway and Sweden were once linked politically, so the Nobel Foundation in Sweden owned the Nobel property in Oslo, a point that saved the building, after intense negotiations, from having the Nazis literally move in.) In the sixth year, operating through Sweden, the Nobel Committee managed to name the International Red Cross -- a certainly admirable group that had much work on its hands coping with the horror bequeathed by the work of previous Nobel Prize winners.
Perhaps no image is more vividly symbolic as to the end results of the philosophy guiding the Nobel Peace Prize than that of Nobel officials, their Committee members in hiding having fled Oslo, humiliated as a Nazi officer strolls through the Oslo headquarters of the Nobel Peace Prize, eyeballing it as a Nazi acquisition. This while Quisling threatens a Nazi takeover of the Prize Committee itself, run by Nazi approved members of Quisling's government.
The in-your-face, up-front and all too inevitable result of the policies honored by those Nobel Peace Prizes was quite dramatically at hand for the Nobel officials themselves.
The resumption of the regular process for awarding the Nobel Peace Prize did not resume until 1945 -- after the Allied invasion of Norway, the capitulation of the Germans, Quisling, and their Norwegian agents -- and the not coincidental arrival of 30,000 American and British troops.
WHICH BRINGS US BACK to the idea of a Reagan Peace Prize...