I get the intent of the Pinter
[quote=“Mr He”]I know a few guys here who would be thrilled at the following nominations:
Nobel Peace Price: Shared between former buddies George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein. Through their actions, together, they have given eternal peace to a large number of Iraqis.[/quote]
Considering that Saddam killed over a million people, including some 300,000 Iraqis, George would only get a small percentage of the prize.
I take some categories of the Nobel prize, literature and peace especially, about as seriously as I take Time magazine’s Man of the Year: that is, not very seriously. However, the physics prize has had at least one American co-recipient for the last ten years, probably longer. Check it out: almaz.com/nobel/
It’s no joke, CS. Some of the most important work in science is being done in American universities: I think it’s something to be proud of.
Cum to think of it. I’ve never tried to tell a joke while in the act. Let alone a joke about Mr. Prize.
John Updike, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Mario Vargas Llosa, Milan Kundera, Doris Lessing, just to name a few heavyweights.
I’ve read at least a little bit of all of these writers. The last American to win the title didn’t deserve it; she got it out of politically correct tokenism, I suspect.
2001: VS Naipaul, Trinidad-born Briton
1999: Gunter Grass, Germany
1993: Toni Morrison, United States
1991: Nadine Gordimer, South Africa
1990: Octavio Paz, Mexico
1988: Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt
1987: Joseph Brodsky, Russian-born American
1986: Wole Soyinka, Nigeria
1983: William Golding, Britain
1982: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombia
1980: Czeslaw Milosz, Polish-born American
1978: Isaac Bashevis Singer, Polish-born American
1976: Saul Bellow, Canadian-born American
1971: Pablo Neruda, Chile
1970: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russia
1969: Samuel Beckett, Ireland
1964: Jean-Paul Sartre, France (declined award)
1962: John Steinbeck, United States
Well…One does wonder…doesn’t one?
[quote]Pinter wonders if anti-Iraq war cry helped him to Nobel glory
By AFP, London, Fri, 14 Oct 2005, 11:15:00
Harold Pinter, Britain’s greatest living playwright, is unsure whether the Nobel committee gave him its esteemed prize for literature in part because of his fierce opposition to the US-led war in Iraq.
The Times newspaper also speculated Friday on whether the Swedish Academy had seen Pinter, who wrote his signature works almost half a century ago, as the sharpest stick with which to “poke America in the eye” this year.
Other newspapers merely celebrated the news that the 75-year-old master of the heavy pause had received the 2005 Nobel Prize for literature.
Pinter, who is also well known as an outspoken political campaigner, revealed he only found out he had won the 1.3-million-dollar award about 20 minutes before the official announcement on Thursday.
“They called me and said you’re going to receive a call from the chairman of the Nobel committee and I think I said ‘why’,” he told the Guardian newspaper.
Explaining its decision, the jury said Pinter’s work “uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms.”
The playwright, who is recovering from a fall a couple of days ago and has a bandage on his forehead, told the BBC that he found this remark interesting. “It implies that they have not only given me this award for my work but for my political engagement, which of course is in my work, I think, anyway to a great extent. You can’t divorce one from the other,” he said on Thursday night.
The laureate has actively campaigned against the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, notably calling British Prime Minister Tony Blair a “deluded idiot” and US President George W. Bush a “mass murderer”.
He agreed that the timing of his award was curious against the backdrop of the daily chaos in Iraq.
Maybe a better name for the Nobel prize would be the “Nazi prize.”
[i]I received a lengthy e-mail from a reader in Oslo, Norway, about the Nobel Peace Prize.
Several committee members of the Nobel Peace Prize have a vitriolic Anti-Israel agenda. Some of the committee members who had fought to maintain political neutrality resigned in protest and are no longer in the committee.
There was even a Nazi in the Nobel Peace Prize. One of the most famous Anti-Israel members of the Norwegian Nobel (Peace Prize) Committee was Hanna Kvanmo, who died recently in June 2005. Kvanmo was actually a Nazi. She was a card-carrying member of the Nazi party during World War II. As a young woman, she was still in Nazi Germany at the end of the war. Later on she publicly ‘repented’ of her youthful Nazi ‘indiscretions’ in order to enter into Norwegian politics. Norwegians despise the Nazis and the Nazi Quisling traitors. It is not possible for Nazis to be public in Norway. Unfortunately, Norwegian Nazi families do still exist, in numbers larger than most Norwegians previously thought, according to recently declassified information about Nazi party members.
Kvanmo remained a Nazi sympathizer, and her ‘repentance’ was superficial. She implemented as much of her Nazi ideals as she could get away with. Her hatred of Israel was tireless and pathological. For example, after Peres and Arafat received their Nobel Peace Prizes simultaneously, it became evident that Arafat continued his strategy of terrorism. Rather than rescind Arafat
Got any sources other than the ‘Gay and Right’ blog?
Well…isn’t Harold Pinter a true champion of Human Rights ™! He defends both Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic. This is why I love “intellectuals”.
[quote]Pinter backs call to free Milosevic
HAROLD PINTER has given his support to a campaign to free Slobodan Milosevic, facing trial for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia.
The playwright is one of 1,143 signatories to an international campaign calling for the release of Milosevic, the deposed Serb leader, who was handed over to an official of the Hague tribunal in June.
The writer is quoted in yesterday’s Guardian as saying that the arrest of the former Yugoslav president was against both international law and that of Milosevic’s own country. In May 1999, writing in the Telegraph, he denied that Milosevic was an “all powerful tyrant” in an article condemning the Nato bombardment of Yugoslavia.[/quote]
telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jh … pint27.xml
And here…for you Pinter fans. If you want to help Harold Pinter and others of his ilk in the campaign to free Slobodan Milosevic…go here and join. Be sure and send LOTS of money. 
Interesting point. I’d never thought about whether the patterns of Nobel prize awards matched in with political or racial views.
Despite being from the Netherlands, Jacobus Henricus van’t Hoff was at Berlin University when he won his chemistry award in 1901, but he died in 1911. However, it’s hard to say whether had he lived to see World War I he might have been inspired to be interested in the Nazis in all the post-war chaos.
Hermann Emil Fischer, van’t Hoff’s colleague at Berlin University, won his chemistry award in 1902. Although he died in 1919, it’s possible that in the midst of his dying breaths he could have met and approved of the ideas of a failed postcard painter from Austria. Furthermore, considering that the Nobel committee has made Berlin University 2-for-2 at this point, it could be thought that they were trying to give unfair advantages to German science departments so that someday in the future the Nazis would be able to rise.
Albert Einstein’s physics award in 1921 was just as the Nazis were starting to take to the streets of Germany. However, Einstein being Jewish probably cuts against there being a pro-Nazi bias in the Nobel committee. Chewycorns, can you perhaps explain how on earth Einstein was able to collect a prize given the sort of antisemitism you allude to?
Although I’ve not yet seen any evidence of Nazism, it would be interesting if Chewycorns has something he can offer up on Hideki Shirakawa, one of the 2000 chemistry winners, for his work in conductive polymers. I’d really like to know.
Chewycorns probably is out of his league, however, regarding the 1994 peace prize awards to Simon Peres and Yitzahk Rabin or the 1978 award to Menachem Begin. The award to Wangari Muta Maathai of Kenya in 2004 would probably not have been given by “Nazis” either, given that she’s black.
To save some time, perhaps one can check out this list of Jewish Nobel prize winners or follow the news of the recently announced economics prize going to Robert Aumann of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
[quote=“mofangongren”]
Interesting point. I’d never thought about whether the patterns of Nobel prize awards matched in with political or racial views. [/quote]
Duh! :loco:
Nazis didn’t seem to like the Nobels much: “And in 1935, anti-Nazi journalist Carl von Ossietzky’s prize prompted Hitler to ban Germans from accepting Nobels.”
I tried to check out the sites from the Google search indicated by Chewycorns, and it seems Kvanmo was apparently a 16-year-old Norwegian Red Cross volunteer nurse (and in occupied Norway, they were under the German Red Cross). Most of the sites provided in the Google search seem to blame her for treating German wounded that could have included some SS troops.
The claim that Kvanmo was a “member” of the Nazi Party does not seem to be correct in that she was too young. Born in 1926, she would have been 14 when Norway was occupied, 16 by the time she signed up to be a nurse, and 18 (nearly 19) when the war in Europe ended. Rules as posted on a CUNY site.
I’m trying to figure out how a teenage girl who spent the war working as a nurse with the wounded (which could also include wounded from our side as well as civilians) is somehow such a “Nazi” that it tars the entire Nobel organization. Apparently the nurses were treated in a cookie-cutter fashion as “collaborators” when Norway handed out jail sentences, regardless of the individual circumstances, age or nature of their acts, taking the view that their government in exile had not capitulated. While it’s fully Norway’s right to hand down tough treatment to collaborators after a war, if anybody’s going to try to attack the Nobel folks the individual situation does count for a bit more, plus it would be nice if they could stick to the facts.
[quote=“mofangongren”]
The claim that Kvanmo was a “member” of the Nazi Party does not seem to be correct in that she was too young. Born in 1926, she would have been 14 when Norway was occupied, 16 by the time she signed up to be a nurse, and 18 (nearly 19) when the war in Europe ended. [/quote]
But that doesn’t seem to have stopped the Left from claiming Pope Benedict XVI is a Nazi.
[quote]At age, 14 membership in Germany’s “Hitler Youth” became mandatory. So Joseph Ratzinger enrolled
He managed to get out early so he could study for the priesthood.
Two years later, when he was 16, Ratzinger was drafted again by the German Army.
Ratzinger worked as a helper in an anti-aircraft briagde.
In 1945, he was put through basic training and stationed near his hometown in Bavaria.
When Allied forces advanced, he deserted the German army
Nearly all Germans above a certain age level fought in world war 2, or was forced into hitlerjugend - thus becoming card-carrying members of the nazi movement.
Helmut Kohl fought US troops during the dying hours of WWII - was not blamed for anything later.
A nurse and a young kid - only the fringe of the US left would claim them as “credible” nazis.
CS – That seems like an explanation of the timeline for that period of Ratzinger’s past, a chronology that (if anything) helps people to understand that he was required to join the Hitler Youth and drafted into the AA battery. Do you have a credible claim from anybody representing the “left” that Ratzinger was anything other than a draftee or that he even fired a shot in anger at anyone? More importantly, any explanation for how anything about Ratzinger somehow makes Chewycorn’s poorly reasoned post concerning Kvanmo and the Nobel committee any more credible?
Mr. He – By “card carrying” I suppose you mean that they had some sort of military ID, not that they were all members of the Nazi Party. While many people were required to join the Hitler Youth and many were drafted into the military, not many troops were actually members of the Nazi Party.
No need to be nitpicky.
any member of any nazi party afiliated "movement, be it BDM, Hitlerjugend, or the party inself was a card-carrying member of that movement, often, but not always, against their will.
MFGR,
There are numerous instances of open anti-Semitism within international organizations that are supposedly dedicated to human rights. Let
Some more info on her activities during WW2. She has been profiled favorably on a lot of neo Nazi websites. You would think with her checkered past, that she would have been a lot more careful and balanced with her political opinions on Rabin and Peres. I guess old Nazis just don’t like to criticize Palestine. It goes back to the Mufti, right? 
Hanna Kvanmo was born in Harstad, a small town some 1,460 km north of Oslo. Mrs Kvanmo always wanted to join the RC, but due to the cost of becoming a ward she could not, neither could she afford to go to school. As the Germans had occupied Norway Mrs Kvanmo started to work for them at the age of 16. She waited until she was 18 before she joined the German RC as a RC-nurse at the eastern front. She stayed at this front until the end of the war - was brought to Norway by allied soldiers handcuffed. In Norway she was thrown in jail with a lot of other young girls. She was sentenced to 5 years imprisonment.
Apparently she did so, or was at least sentenced to that much time. One of the websites from your search result indicated she only served a few months. Again, it’s fine for the Norwegians to define “collaboration” as they wish and to make a decision as a society that they’re going to hammer anybody who volunteered to do anything. However, I just don’t buy into saying a teenage nurse’s wartime work with wounded people means that the Nobel Prize is tainted. If she wanted to be a nurse, do you think she really had the option of joining the British Red Cross from where she was living at that time?
She’s been dead for a few years. Do you think she can stop anybody from doing so?
Precisely express what you think this is evidence of? Peres, Rabin and Arafat all got Nobel Peace Prizes at the same time. She’s within her rights not to be too crazy about Peres. Note that she didn’t express remorse about having given the prize to Rabin and Arafat. Don’t you think it’s unfair that she apparently likes Rabin better than Peres?? Is that what you’re trying to say?
[quote=“Chewycorns”]Consider the case of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which has since 1948 refused to recognize the Red Star of David as an official symbol for an ambulance, in spite of the fact that it recognizes the Red Crescent and used to recognize the Iranian pre-revolutionary Red Lion and Sun. In fact, former committee president Cornelio Sommaruga, the same man that is supposed to be going to Jenin as Kofi Annan