It’s time once again for The Future American’s FAIL OF THE WEEK! Every Saturday, I name a person or group who has spent the past seven days behaving in a particularly idiotic way. Since it’s my belief that idiocy knows no politics, nobody is safe.
This week’s fail was brought to you by the Nobel Committee. Actually, in a lot of ways, I feel sorry for them because the pickings for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize were clearly very slim. But pity doesn’t excuse their decision to award the prize to the European Union (EU). Commentators are out in full force, theorizing why they receive it; the general consensus is that they’ve been so busy trying to stay afloat (or return to afloat status at best) economically that they haven’t bothered getting into any wars, least of all with each other.
Seriously? That’s the threshold these days? Avoid going to war for a year and you’re the world’s champion of peace? Despite the fact that non-relief military intervention around the world might have been on the table if you could afford it? That’s even sadder than President Obama winning because, essentially, he wasn’t threatening to invade anyone in his first year as president. (I remember struggling to justify that and giving up because justifying that is nigh impossible.) But I guess they were still coming off their “Bush low” that year.
Here’s Nobel chairman Thorbjørn Jagland with more on this:
The EU is currently undergoing grave economic difficulties and considerable social unrest. The Norwegian Nobel Committee wishes to focus on what it sees as the EU’s most important result: the successful struggle for peace and reconciliation and for democracy and human rights.
When? Efforts at peace and reconciliation within the EU had largely been completed long before this year:
Jagland praised the EU for rebuilding Europe from the devastation of World War Two and for its role in spreading stability after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
New wars between any two or more countries within the bloc would cripple the entire thing, and it’s already crippled enough. The EU maintains regional stability because they literally have no choice, not because they’re trying to say “Look how peaceful we are!” They are not a beacon of hope for the world. They are a laughingstock. And now the Nobel Committee has unwittingly brought itself along for the awful, awful ride.
You know who deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, and would have deserved it even if many of us hadn’t just found out about her this week? This girl. She has more guts than the entire EU put together.
