Christopher Hitchens‘ latest Newsweek column sets out five categories for which people have collected past Nobel Peace Prize awards, including “service to cynicism, opportunism, and hypocrisy,” and “service to random but vague feelings of goodwill.” Even those categories do not explain, Hitchens tells us, the decision to give the award to our first-year president:
We thus find ourselves in a rather peculiar universe where good intentions are rewarded before they have undergone the strenuous metamorphosis of being translated into good deeds, or hard facts. And it becomes increasingly difficult to avoid entertaining the suspicion that there is something explicitly political in the underlying process of Nobelista decision making. I do not think that I am shying at shadows here, either. Especially of late, the literature awards, on which I am more qualified to pronounce, have reflected the same or a similar mentality. The choices of an Italian anarchist, an Austrian Stalinist, a Portuguese Stalinist, and the hysterical anti–American Harold Pinter are or should be fresh in our minds, and we might remember that this is a Nobel committee that let Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges go to their graves -unrecognized.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the choice of ex-president Jimmy Carter for the peace prize in 2002 was accompanied by statements from Oslo that said outright that he was being rewarded for his opposition to the foreign policy of an elected sitting president of the United States.
