Once a year five unknown white Norwegians, one male and four female, elected by the Storting, Norway's parliament, humiliate all 6 billion+ humans except for one (or maybe two) on whom they confer the "Nobel Peace Prize."
The only year that this exclusive group of super judges living in Scandinavia recognized that peace maybe was a result of law and that therefore world peace could only result from world law representing humankind was in 1904 when they awarded the coveted prize-to which was attached a handsome monetary bounty-to the Institut du Droit International, not quite a world law group but close enough for that pre-electronic, pre-computer, pre-space world. From then on no self-claimed world citizens were anointed unless you counted Fridtjof Nansen in 1922 who-authorized by the League of Nations- came close by issuing the first "world" passports to refugeed white Russians who fled the 1917 Communist revolution and found themselves in Europe in trouble without IDs.
From then on it was national presidents, national and international leaders and peaceniks, (Jane Adams, Lord Boyd Orr, Schweitzer, Mandela, Gorbachev, Aung San Sui Kyi, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, etc.), international organizations such as the Red Cross, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, UNICEF, spiritual leaders such as Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King, Bishop Tutu, and so on.
Tagged with the title "Nobel Peace Laureate" for the rest of their lives, these men and women were guaranteed an audience among their peers wherever and whenever they deemed to speak out.
For what?
World peace?
Well, not exactly. Because to justify that supreme goal, they would have had to first acknowledge their own world citizenship, then the entire world citizenry of their fellow humans, then putting both "the one and the many", the 21st century version of "E Pluribus Unum" into a viable political framework such as a, (OK, I'll say it!) a world government of, by, and for all the humans of the world community, peace would then prevail on our home planet.
Otherwise the Nobel Peace Prize show is only an elaborate but ominous and tragic warning of humanity's impending doom.
Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite who thereby became a multi-millionaire, salved his conscience for having invented such a destructive product which he claimed would "eliminate war" (bypassed, however, in 1945 by nuclear WMDs in magnitudes of "indiscriminate" power) by instituting a sort of global competition so long as world peace itself was not achieved. Once humanity had a peaceful world, there would obviously be no need for a "peace prize." So the Nobel "Peace Prize" is awarded only when and because the world is not at peace.
When the latest recipient is the leader of the most powerful nation on the planet with a 2009 military budget
of over $650 billion*, almost as much as the rest of the world's defense spending combined, a total of 3376 domestic and foreign military bases, who, as the "Commander-in-chief", is in constitutional command of the U.S. Navy's 12 deployed nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs), and over 6,000 nuclear weapons at his fingertips enough to wipe out humankind and every species on the planet hundreds of times over, yet with a policy of nuclear deterrence astoundingly "on the table," whatever his personal and public hopes and dreams of a peaceful world, his Nobel "peace prize" is stunningly revealed as a grotesque and humiliating travesty.
Bottom (world) line: Every human who registers as a World Citizen merits a noble (read: sovereign) "peace prize" for making peace with his/her fellow humans.
Critical to all present "Nobel Peace Laureates": In order to validate your world peace credentials, register asap with the World Government of World Citizens (See www.worldservice.org).
Personal note to "Peace Laureate" Obama: My declaration of world citizenship predates yours (Berlin, July 24, 2008) by 61 years. Isn't it time to activate yours?
Final note to Nobel Prize Committee: Don't give up your day job.
(Memorial to our brother Bud who died in the invasion of Salerno, September 9, 1943).
*The U.S. Department of Defense budget accounted in fiscal year 2009 for about 21% of the United States federal budgeted expenditures and 24% of estimated tax revenues. Including non-DOD expenditures, defense spending was approximately 31-37% of budgeted expenditures and 35-42% of estimated tax revenues. According to the Congressional Budget Office, defense spending grew 9% annually on average from fiscal year 2000-2009. the Department of Defense budget is slated to be $651 billion in 2009 (including the cost of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan previously funded through supplementary budget legislation, higher than at any other point in American history.. This calculation does not take into account some other defense-related non-DOD spending, such as Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security, and interest paid on debt incurred in past wars, which has increased even as a percentage of the national GDP. (Wikipedia)
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