John Kerry: Desperate For A Nobel Peace Prize?

With the Iran Nuclear Deal almost becoming his personal crusade, is US Secretary of State John Kerry really desperate to win the Nobel Peace Prize?

By: Ringo Bones 

Ever since being appointed as the 68^th State Secretary of the United States, it seems that John Kerry’s failed bid for the US presidency back in 2004 no longer registers on the consciousness of the general public. But as of late, the Iran Nuclear Deal seems to become John Kerry’s cause célèbre / stepping stone to winning the Nobel Peace Prize by setting it into overdrive during the last few months. With the US Republican Party’s foreign policy forever based on that Orson Wells Nostradamus documentary only saw the current Iran Nuclear Deal as “disastrous” for the future of the United States. 

Three deadlines have already passed yet Kerry is not giving up given that the sanctions issues are what is primarily holding up the deal. Despite the state of Israel’s (or is it the Netanyahu administration’s?) assessment that Iran is only 3 months away from building its own nuclear device, it seems that the rest of the world is on John Kerry’s side when it comes to formulating the latest Iran Nuclear Deal. 

Is a potential nuclear deal a bitter pill for Iran’s supreme leader or should Iran’s mullahs maintain separation of their religious ideology with the pragmatic nature of the deal? Well, if the latest deal comes to pass – which it just recently did a few days ago – Iran will gain access to billions of dollars worth of trade deals which it was currently denied due to sanctions. Hours after the approval of the deal, global crude oil prices dropped in anticipation of a greater access to Iranian crude. According to US President Barack Obama, the recently approved deal has already cut-off Iran’s pathway to acquire a nuclear device for military use. As a safeguard, sanctions will automatically be reinstated whenever proofs of violations are found by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Maybe John Kerry will win his Nobel Peace Prize after all.     

Zbigniew Brzezinski: Overlooked Nobel Peace Prize Laureate?

Even though he his past achievements made him a worthy nominee – even a laureate – why is it that Zbigniew Brzezinski was never considered for the Nobel Peace Prize? 

By: Ringo Bones 

For as long as I lived, I’ve yet to hear on a major news program “Zbigniew Brzezinski” and “Nobel Peace Prize” uttered on the same sentence. And this day and age, it seems like former US President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor can’t get ahead of the line of both Malala Yousafzai and Rebiya Kadeer for the Nobel Peace Prize. Sadly, it seems that no one of very powerful political influence these days have ever raised the idea of giving Brzezinski the Nobel Peace Prize even though he genuinely deserves it based on his accomplishments during the last 40 years. 

The highlight of Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinski’s statesmanship was when he served as the 10^th US National Security Adviser under then US President Jimmy Carter from January 20, 1977 to January 20, 1981. If you ask me, the 1978 Camp David Accords between the then Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat and then Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin (that eventually made Sadat and Begin Nobel Peace Prize Laureates back in 1978) would not have happened without the “guidance” of Brzezinski. 

Now one of President Barack Obama’s main advisors on foreign politics and currently the Robert E. Osgood Professor of American Foreign Policy at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. A scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a member of various boards and councils, Brzezinski also appears frequently as an expert on the PBS program The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, ABC News’ This Week with Christiane Amanpour, MSNBC’s Morning Joe where his daughter Mika Brzezinski is co anchor and on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS. 

Born in Warsaw, Poland back in March 28, 1928, Zbigniew Brzezinski mainly grew up traveling wherever his father’s job, Tadeusz Brzezinski a Polish diplomat who was posted in Germany from 1931 to 1935, takes him. Zbigniew Brzezinski thus spent some of his earliest years witnessing the rise of the NAZIs. From 1936 to 1938 Tadeusz Brzezinski was posted to the then Soviet Union during Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge. In 1938, Tadeusz Brzezinski was posted to Canada. World War II had a profound effect on the young, impressionable Zbigniew Brzezinski who stated in an interview: “The extraordinary violence that was perpetrated against Poland did affect my perception of the world, and made me much more sensitive to the fact that a great ideal of world politics is a fundamental struggle.” 

As a statesman and political critic during his service as a National Security Advisor with the then US President Jimmy Carter and even on an advisory capacity during the Reagan years, Zbigniew Brzezinski’s “hawkish” East-West focus is tempered by his pragmatism to work with the preexisting geopolitical situation at the time by using the preexisting geopolitical climate to his advantage in establishing peace treaties.  Zbigniew Brzezinski also has a knack for “peacefully” defeating an enemy by providing much needed human rights to an oppressed and marginalized citizenry of a typical despotic nation-state of the time. Even though Sadat and Begin won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978 and Jimmy Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 “for his decades of uniting efforts to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights and to promote economic and social development”. It seems that Zbigniew Brzezinski got left out of the Nobel Peace Prize that his colleagues who worked hard to make the 1980s relatively peaceful geopolitically eventually won. 

Nobel Peace Prize: No Nobel Laureate Left Behind?

As heroic Burmese human rights campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi finally been able to accept in person the Nobel Peace prize that was awarded to her back in 1991, does this mean that the Nobel Peace Prize doesn’t leave any laureates behind? 

By: Ringo Bones

Its now official – in June 16, 2012 – Burmese human rights campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi has finally been able to formally accept the Nobel Peace Prize that was awarded to her back in 1991 in Oslo, Norway. It took 21 years for Aung San Suu Kyi to accept her Nobel Peace Prize in person because she was subjected under house arrest by the Burmese junta for the same length of time. And she was just recently been freed and allowed travel outside Burma. According to the Nobel Peace prize Committee in Oslo, Norway – Ang San Suu Kyi was proven to be a good moral leader, then and now. Does this spell good hope to those Nobel Peace Laureates who were unable to formally accept theirs? 

The 2010 Mainland Chinese Nobel Peace Laureate Liu Xiaobo was still unable to formally accept his own Nobel because he is currently serving a lengthy prison term in a Mainland Chinese maximum security prison for his work calling for more freedom for the average Mainland Chinese citizen. Sadly, the Beijing government doesn’t approve of this, denying Liu Xiaobo to formally accept his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. But like Aung San Suu Kyi, his Nobel awaits that glorious day when he will be able to accept in person his Nobel – whether it takes 20 years or more. 

Should Rebiya Kadeer Be Awarded The 2012 Nobel Peace Prize?

Though many had been clamoring for a number of years now that she truly deserve to be a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, but is it high-time for Rebiya Kadeer to be awarded one for her Uyghur human rights campaign?

By: Ringo Bones

Even though three women shared the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize – i.e. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Leymah Gbowee of Liberia and Tawakkol Karman of Yemen – is it high-time yet again for another woman to be deserving of the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize for her tireless campaign for rights to a people that most people don’t even know about? Although if she wins this year, it could anger yet again the Beijing government like it did when Liu Xiaobo became the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

Uyghur rights campaigner Rebiya Kadeer, who used to be an MP in the Beijing “monolithic” communist party has been campaigning for Uyghur cultural self-determination years before the mainstream press got attention back in 2007. Even though some Uyghur majority province in the outlying People’s Republic of China’s “Wild West” had been granted a semblance of autonomy by Beijing, Uyghurs are still denied cultural self-determination because public / state schools in these provinces are still forbidden by Beijing to teach the Uyghur language and alphabet to kids. And poorer Uyghurs who are not paying exorbitant taxes to Beijing are often subjected to persecution. Largely Muslim and quite distinct in appearance and culture in comparison to the Han Chinese majority that ran Beijing’s rather “monolithic” communist party, is it now high time for Uyghurs to get cultural self-determination that they deserve and Rebiya Kadeer be awarded the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize?

Muhammad Yunus: The Nobel Peace Laureate That Never Was?

Strange as it seems, but could a pre-existing employment law could have made Muhammad Yunus not eligible for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize?


By: Ringo Bones


Unknown to a very large majority of folks, Grameen Bank’s concept of lending money for the non-credit-worthy poor that was started by Muhammad Yunus was already more than 30-years old when he was awarded the 2006 Nobel peace Prize. Nonetheless, by 2007, lending money to the not so credit worthy poor modeled after the Grameen Bank scheme of “Banking for the Poor” had suddenly sprang up like spring mushrooms not only in South-East Asia, but also in other parts of the world where extreme poverty – people earning less than a dollar a day – are the norm rather than the exception. But could a pre-existing employment law in Bangladesh have prevented Muhammad Yunus from winning the 2006 Nobel Peace prize?

Back in March 2011, the 71-yer-old Muhammad Yunus was sacked as the managing director of Grameen Bank due to violation of Bangladesh’s mandatory retirement laws which sets the mandatory retirement age at 60. By virtue of this law, Yunus would have had to retire his management post at Grameen Bank back in 2001, and could have made the case of awarding him the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize that much harder, but is it really?

“Unconventional” reasons and cases for awarding the Nobel peace prize might have seen to be in vogue in the 21st Century – like poverty alleviation as a way to prevent armed conflicts – became the raison d’être for awarding the Nobel Peace Prizes to Muhammad Yunus in 2006 and to Al Gore in 2007, but it is not the first. Agronomist Norman Borlaug got awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his efforts to breed a new strain of wheat that saved more than a billion people from starvation. Maybe Muhammad Yunus held his position just long enough to be eligible for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. Does luck really have something to do with it?

The Nobel Peace Prize: Most Controversial Nobel Prize?

From the 1935 awarding of Carl von Ossietzky to the 2010 awarding of Liu Xiaobo, does the Nobel Peace Prize truly deserve being described as the most controversial of the six Nobel Prizes ever?


By: Ringo Bones


Once upon a time, the Nobel Peace prize was used to be awarded to anyone who had done the most or the best work for fostering fraternity among nations, for the abolition of standing armies, and for holding and promotion of peace congresses. Unfortunately, the relentless march of history and dynamically evolving geopolitical events had forever redefined – over the years – what used to pass as the textbook definition of peace.

What used to be defined as the absence of war and/or conflict, peace is now often defined as the absence of extreme disparity of food and wealth distribution and the ensuing conflict thereof. Which means anyone trying to eliminate extreme poverty, hunger, and even as of late – climate change / global warming – can now be eligible to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. But is there any reason why the Nobel Peace Prize has to be so controversial?

For most of the 20th Century, those that had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize that fulfils the criteria of conflict mitigation had often been the thorn of the side of a great dictator or some uncompromising powers-that-be hell bent on maintaining the status quo. From my point of view the top 3 most controversial Nobel Peace Prize laureates are Carl von Ossietzky, incumbent US President Barack Obama, and the 2010 Nobel Peace Laureate Liu Xiaobo.

As of late, I’ve started to view the German journalist and pacifist Carl von Ossietzky as the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of his time due to his whistle-blowing revealing that the Nazi government under the chancellorship of Adolf Hitler had been secretly violating the Treaty of Versailles under the nose of the international community. Even the now unified Germany – at least the official German government stance - still treats Carl von Ossietzky as a traitor.

While the 2009 awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the then newly-elected US President Barack Obama was widely seen by his detractors as premature given that he only offered a proposal to reduce the number of nuclear weapons around the world close to zero and has only done tentative steps to initiate a plan that has been mired in global bureaucracy since the 1970s. Even though president Obama probably deserves the Nobel Prize just for not kicking the asses of Republicans blocking his plans to better the American society at large, or maybe the Nobel Peace Prize Committee in Norway probably got sick and tired of not issuing Nobel Peace Prizes on some years during the 20th Century whenever they can’t find a worthy recipient.

And as of late, many – probably those who believe that the September 11, 2001 terror attacks are nothing more than a Zionist plot - had considered the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Mainland Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo as nothing more than proof of the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency’s stranglehold on the Norwegian Nobel peace Prize Committee, which from my point of view, probably as ridiculous as that Moon Landing Hoax story. Some even considered the awarding of Liu Xiaobo the Nobel Peace Prize a “clerical error” since his actions will only foster peace in the Chinese Mainland and not a group of nations. Well, given that Alfred Nobel probably started this Nobel Prize business – especially the Nobel Peace Prize – as a way to pay his guilty conscience to go away after inventing a way to make nitro-glycerine stable enough for everyday use, doesn’t this make the whole Nobel Peace Prize business a controversy in itself?