Coincidentally, just a few miles down the coast, there is the vast, post-industrial, toxic wasteland of Ardeer, where Mr. Nobel established what became the largest explosives factory in the world, by which he amassed the financial wherewithal to pump out posthumous prizes on an annual basis.
The right of a bunch of ex-Vikings with the fortune of a dead explosives maker to dispense peace prizes has always struck me as a little odd, but now I know it's just another manifestation of the great White urge to be overly important.
The Scandinavian countries are demographically small and of limited economic importance. They realized long ago that they didn’t have the manpower or money to compete on the wider geopolitical stage and after the adventures of Charles XII retreated into their natural status as European backwaters. But they were cursed with the curse of all White men: they wanted to be more important than they are, even if it worked to their ultimate detriment. Their natural insignificance rankled within their lilywhite breasts. Unfortunately the legacy of a dead explosives maker came along and gave them the chance to puff up their chest again.
Since its inception in 1901, when Mr. Nobel's ignoble armaments were being used to blast the plucky little Boers into surrender, the Nobel Peace Prize has slowly gained status by its association with the science prizes, which tapped directly into the glory of the great secular religion of the 20th century. But such passive importance was not enough. The Norwegians wanted more; they wanted active importance to offset the centuries of political and cultural sidelining. Increasingly and inevitably the kudos won from the science prizes was channeled into, then through, the Peace Prize.
The importance-greedy elites of
Unable to send task forces or gunboats around the world, or to impose economic sanctions that mattered, they nevertheless managed to get a toehold on the world stage. At first they did this cautiously by chiming in with the peace efforts of countries actually influential enough to make peace.
Almost all the pre-WWII prize winners fit into this pattern, mainly diplomats from the internationally significant nations. But in the post-WII years, the Prize has slowly mutated into the moral equivalent of US multi-theatre military power projection, able to descend without warning on any country in any continent. For all we know, the committee's Oslo HQ probably has maps of the world with pins in it!
The Prize has also evolved from being something like a lifetime achievement award that was given to hard-working peacemongers into something that is in lock-step with Twitter and rolling news. In recent years the Prize has largely been given to people who are still smouldering under the media spotlight: Mohamed El Baradei just after he had been at the forefront of criticism of the US invasion of Iraq; Muhammad Yunus for his 'microcredit' to people some might describe as "subprime" not long before the Lehman Shock; Al Gore while his green propaganda film An Inconvenient Truth was getting a kicking from critics.
But staying mixed in with the news is not enough. To max up their power the committee of self-important Nords in
While such cognitive dissonance helps place the Nobel Peace Prize at the center of debate and can raise its profile, it is a risky strategy. The year following Obama’s award, they went conservative, opting for Liu Xiaobo, a rather run-of-the-mill, meat-and-potatoes human rights campaigner.
No doubt irked that their dull but worthy choice was only given token space by the media, the significance junkies in Oslo have decided to raise the bar this year with three cloth-headed women: a Yemeni with Arab Spring kudos and two turbaned Liberians. If military powers like
There is nothing intrinsically prize-worthy about the winners, so the reason for the choice has to be sought elsewhere in the evolving nature of the Peace Prize as an institution and the importance-seeking Whiteys on the Committee. Probably the key factor in this year's choice is the fact that all are ethnic women with what the rude, ignorant, or dismissive among us would call "towels" on their heads.
These may seem trivial points, but they are vital. The "towels" denote exoticism and therefore Imperium, which is what the egoists in
For the Committee to believe in its own potency, its members have to believe that societies like Yemen and Liberia—and all the other liberal-deficient societies that they hope to morally lord it over—are malleable and tractable through the gentle pressure exerted by Norwegian approval and the pomp of the prize-giving ceremony. In this scenario, a towel-headed woman with a Nobel Peace Prize under her voluminous ethnic dress is the Trojan horse of those world-ranging moralists set on remaking the globe in their own ego-amplifying image.
But the real problem for Norway is that this unfortunate tendency to morally project also makes it liable to demographically inject. A country that gets its sense of global importance from being a liberal beacon to the world finds it extremely difficult to turn away those attracted to its shores by that light.
