At Least Trump Didn’t Get the Nobel Peace Prize, But…
I was quite relieved to see that Donald Trump wasn’t rewarded with the Nobel Peace Prize for, basically, being antithesis to what the prize should represent, declaring war on humanity and the entire planet, cultivating ties with the warmongering strongman leaders of the world, and emboldening aggressors only to then make a publicity stunt out of the attempt to mediate the conflicts that were worsened, if not even generated, by his own earlier actions. Considering the unrelenting pressure he generated, the decision required a fair amount of courage, though it is also possible that this very pressure was just what led to it, making picking him all but impossible. If that is the case, the danger of him being picked in the future still remains, but at least for now the matter was dealt with.
On the other hand, I have serious doubts about the actual choice. There were worthy options among those listed as potential favorites a day before the decision, the UNRWA and the ICC likely also sending a pretty strong message if they’d have been picked, and if a specific person was desired then I wouldn’t say that Yulia Navalnaya would have been a bad choice. Yet the choice was a name that seems to have come from nowhere, who is connected and, quite obviously, indebted to Trump, and whose actions and stances, while largely justified under the current circumstances, may be questionable from the point of view of promoting peace. While the actual list of nominees is confidential, my admittedly personal and not in the least professional opinion is that there’d have been dozens of more suitable choices… Possibly even including Melania Trump, obviously mainly as a slap in the face and for shock value, but perhaps not entirely without some merits, some known, some probably less so, since it is likely that she played a part in reining in some of Donald Trump’s worst excesses and planned abuses.
I guess one possible justification for the pick is that it’s meant to encourage efforts aimed at preventing another war, or at least a serious military intervention, since at the moment there is a very real threat of it in Venezuela. But, even so, it doesn’t seem right for this to take precedence over the efforts truly meant to end, or in many cases at least mitigate the effects of, the actual wars, massacres and violent oppression currently taking place in what seem to be ever more ways in many parts of the world, or those aimed at bringing those responsible for them to justice. But, again, that’s just my personal opinion… And I may be reading too much into it and it’s possible that the choice was just a way to shrug off Trump’s pressure and give people something else to talk about while avoiding what are currently seen as the particularly hot topics from this point of view. That’d obviously go completely against what the prize should represent, but since it’s people who make the choice, it’s an entirely plausible scenario.