The Best and the Worst
While we wait for the Nobel Peace Prize, which will be awarded on Friday, I have been looking through the record of the Nobel committee in the past 100 years. Some awards were self-evident and uncontroversial, outside the ranks of despots, some highly controversial to this day, and some seems like a cop-out for a prize that Nobel wanted to award to
"the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."
The cop-out award from me goes to the decision to award Mother Teresa with the 1979 prize. Her humanitarian work nonwithstanding (and even that is controversial, to put it mildly), I don't see how she promoted peace.
The best in hindsight award goes to the 1936 decision to give the Prize to the German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky. Many critics, also outside Nazi Germany, chided the committee for awarding the prize to a "traitor." Von Ossietzky died from tuberculosis in 1938, after having been mistreated in prison and concentration camps.
 The most outragously counter-productive award must go to the decision to give Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho of North Vietnam the 1973 award for ending the Vietnam war. The Vietnamese at least had the sense to decline.
The prize that should have been award goes to every year Mahatma Gandhi did not receive the prize he had deserved.
The most embarrassing in hindsight award goes to the 1992 decision to award Rigoberta Menchú with the Peace Prize. It was later demonstrated that her 1983 autobiography was more or less fiction. For example, the oppression she claimed her family had suffered from the government was really due to family feuds.
2:22:27 PM 
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