My Take | Another silly season for Nobel Peace Prize nominations
- The prize’s selection process has many flaws, but it still usually manages to pick a worthy winner and is worth preserving
Every year, it’s silly season when it comes to nominating candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize. Given the nature of the honour, it cannot but be political in its selection process.
Genuinely universal peacemakers are hard to come by. One person’s hero is another’s villain. And given the complexity of contemporary politics, even real peacemakers take a long time before their efforts bear fruits. Unless of course, you are Barack Obama, who got the prize just for being elected US president!
So, every year, we have to put up with people who grandstand – those with an obvious agenda, scores to settle, an axe to grind. Nine American lawmakers of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, the most hawkish anti-China wing of the US Congress, have nominated Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement. No surprise there.
Among the nine is Republican Senator Marco Rubio, who previously nominated Joshua Wong Chi-fung, the movement’s international poster boy, for the prize. The man is at least consistent.
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China decries US’ nomination of Hong Kong activists for Nobel Prize
However, does the movement include those who carried out wholesale vandalism, arson and mayhem across the city for more than six months; the ones who set a man on fire, stoned another to death and beat up countless innocent bystanders? Or is it only the peaceful element of the movement?