THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE, THE WAR CRIMES TRIAL, AND HOW TO KEEP THEM SEPARATE

I’m not about to research this, but I’m guessing that this week’s International Court of Justice trial of Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi is the first time in history that a Nobel Peace Prize laureate has been tried for war crimes. I do remember that there was an international campaign to strip her of her Nobel when the Burmese outrages against their Rohingya minority began to emerge. I’m not sure that she ever was so stripped, but does it really matter? The deeper problem here is one which stretches well beyond the Peace Prize, and it’s that all too often such prizes are awarded to people on the basis of their potential to help along the cause of peace (or whatever) rather than what they’ve already done. Although I don’t really expect him to be in front of a war crimes trial, the prize awarded to American president Barack H. Obama is an even better example of giving somebody a prestigious award because of what the world hoped they would do, or the potential for righteous rhetoric combined with a position of authority.

So here we had a woman who was a brave and outspoken advocate for the democratization of Myanmar, was given an award because said steps would be a Good Thing®, indeed a Very Good Thing®, and who, when she attained a seat at the table in the Burmese government was, for whatever reason, apparently unable to keep her military cohorts in the government from conducting their security measures and military operations in the way they wanted to, and which the world now finds objectionable.

And then yesterday, Time bestowed its Celebrity of the Year award, which seems to be the one and only thing which the world persists in caring about from the now-forlorn magazine, on Swedish teen Greta Thunberg, the supercilious, mentally ill Swedish teenager who has dominated the headlines this year, such as they are, about climate change. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think Thunberg is on the side of the angels on this, and it also must be said that nice guys from Albert Gore to Bill Nye have had their turn to try and interest the common man in keeping plant and animal life alive on this planet and have failed miserably, so why not forget the stats and the logic and let a shouty, rude, smartest-kid-in-the-room sort give it a try by throwing a tantrum?

But let’s keep in mind that I wouldn’t bet the mortgage on my being able to go down to the mall and get a majority of the first fifty people I ran into demonstrate that they knew who Thunberg was (or Suu Kyi, come to that). Naming her the Celebrity of the Year won’t change that very much. Time went off the rails with its award for quite a while around the turn of the century and gave its award far too often to individuals of whom I would doubt if one person in a thousand now remembers, because they were doing extremely esoteric research, or spearheading entrepreneurship with companies into cutting-edge fields, soi-dissant, which it’s now difficult to make out what these fields were supposed to be opening doors to (besides, presumably, profit).

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with giving these sorts of awards to people who aren’t very prominent in the workaday world; indeed, that the Nobel for Literature almost always goes to somebody who operates pretty much under the radar strikes me as a virtue, as it seems to get them a little bit more readership. And I hadn’t heard of the Ethiopian gent who won this year’s Peace Prize, either, but at least he had already stopped a war. Why don’t we think about being able to cite an actual accomplishment the next time we give out an award, and not just because we like the individual’s rhetoric or wish that we could make them Monarch of the World instead of just Celebrity of the Year?