source: http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/node/10012
The 1973 Peace Prize, awarded to then-Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger and Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho for their role in the
Paris Peace Accords, remains a head-scratcher. Kissinger played a
major role in expanding the U.S. bombing campaign across Vietnam,
Cambodia and Laos, while Tho=92s government would soon violate the
Accords by launching a military invasion of South Vietnam that
culminated in the 1975 fall of Saigon.
The Nobel Prize in Literature also has been guilty of sins of
omission. Many of the last century=92s most celebrated writers, such as
Leo Tolstoy, Graham Greene, Vladimir Nabokov, Mario Vargas Llosa and
Philip Roth, have been ignored by the Committee. Greene and Nabokov
were considered in 1974, but eventually lost out to Swedes Eyvind
Johnson and Harry Martinson -- who just happened to be Nobel judges
themselves.
The Literature Prize is awarded by a committee selected by the
Academy, founded by the Swedish King Gustav III in 1786, while the
Peace Prize is awarded by a committee appointed by the Norwegian
parliament. In any other context, the idiosyncratic tastes and
political beliefs of these elite Scandinavians don't exactly make
headlines. Why the entire world pauses to honor the selections of an
otherwise unknown group of people remains a mystery.
In the end, the Nobel Prize reveals more about society's collective
obsession with honorifics than it does about the world's great leaders
and writers.
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