The Peace Prize As The Special Olympics Nobel

If you look at the people picking up the Nobel Peace Prize, they're frequently "indigenous" people like the mendacious Rigoberta Menchu [1] or Third World "wise men" like Mohammed Yunus. [2] , Wangari Maathai [3], or Shirin Ebadi [4]. (All together now--"Who?")But if someone is going to discover something new in physics, chemistry, or medicine...not so much. John Derbyshire [5]posted this at SecularRight--Ice People Club [6]:

Scanning back through the last ten years, I get the following headcounts.

I have used the Ice People / Sun People schema of We Are Doomed [7], with Europeans and East Asians as Ice People, Africans and Amerindians as Sun People. Subcontinental Asians I have cut crudely, with Moslems as honorary Sun People and non-Muslims as honorary Ice People. It’s a fair balance, I think, and doesn’t actually make much difference to the numbers.

Here we go. For each year I list the six Nobel categories in order:  Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature, Peace, and Economics. The score in each box is Ice People / Sun People, so “2-0″ means two Ice People and no Sun People.

Year	Phys	Chem	Med	Lit	Peace	Econ
2009	3-0	3-0	3-0	1-0	0-1	TBA
2008	3-0	3-0	3-0	1-0	1-0	1-0
2007	2-0	1-0	3-0	1-0	1-0	3-0
2006	2-0	1-0	2-0	1-0	0-1	1-0
2005	3-0	3-0	3-0	1-0	0-1	2-0
2004	3-0	3-0	2-0	1-0	0-1	2-0
2003	3-0	2-0	2-0	1-0	0-1	2-0
2002	3-0	3-0	3-0	1-0	1-0	1-0
2001	3-0	3-0	3-0	1-0	0-1	3-0
2000	3-0	3-0	3-0	1-0	1-0	2-0

That gives us totals of 28-0 for Physics, 25-0 for Chemistry, 27-0 for Medicine, 10-0 for Literature, 4-6 for Peace, 17-0 for Economics.

This provoked a lot of point-and-splutter, plus personal attacks in the 51 (so far) comments. Even before the age of affirmative action, [8] the Nobel Peace Prize has always been the Special Olympics of the Nobel World. You don't have to achieve peace, you just have to mean well.

• 1910 - Permanent International Peace Bureau [9]
• 1913 - Henri La Fontaine [10]

Both prizes awarded for, basically, preventing the First World War, which went ahead and happened anyhow

• 1925 - Sir Austen Chamberlain, Charles G. Dawes [11]
• 1926 - Aristide Briand, Gustav Stresemann [12]
• 1929 - Frank B. Kellogg [13]
• 1931 - Jane Addams, Nicholas Murray Butler [14]
• 1933 - Sir Norman Angell [15]
• 1935 - Carl von Ossietzky [16]
• 1937 - Robert Cecil [17]

All those prizes were for actions tending to prevent the Second World War, which went ahead and happened anyhow.

Closer to our own time, we read that

• 1973 - Henry Kissinger, Le Duc Tho [18]

Shared a prize for making peace in Vietnam. Two years later, North Vietnam, deploying Soviet arms and Democratic congressmen, invaded and conquered South Vietnam.

• 1976 - Betty Williams, Mairead Corrigan [19]

Shared a prize for bringing peace to Northern Ireland, which peace was brought again in the Good Friday Agreement [20]of 1998, (basically a surrender) after some more violence [21] George Bush brought peace to Northern Ireland once more in 2007 [22] and if you're interested, Hillary Clinton is in Belfast [23] right now, bringing it yet again.

• 1993 - [21] [21]Nelson Mandela, F.W. de Klerk [24]

Shared a prize for bringing  peace [25]to South Africa--which is [26]not [27]notably [28]peaceful.

• 1994 - Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin [29]

Solved the problems of the Middle East. No comment. So if Obama doesn't deserve the Nobel, and he doesn't, he's not the first.