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WILLIAM HARWOOD

(reprinted from American Rationalist July/Aug 2007)

The Nobel Prize is generally recognized as this planet’s most meritorious award for achievement in such diverse disciplines as physics, economics and literature. The Nobel Peace Prize, in contrast, has been practically from its inception an imitation gold brick that has honored persons whose contribution to peace would not have been worth a hill of beans if it had not been the rehabilitating act of a fanatic terrorist. And while most winners actually performed the acts for which they were rewarded, even if it was simply a hiccup in an otherwise reprehensible life, the award to an Albanian nun was rigged by political propaganda that was an unmitigated lie from start to finish.

Mother Teresa (1979) was fraudulently promoted as a peacemonger for feeding thousands of starving Indians in Calcutta. In fact she did nothing of the sort. From time to time, “Mother” peddled the lie that her order fed from 4,000 to 9,000 people in Calcutta every day. It was that Big Lie that the Nobel Prize judges swallowed hook, line and sinker. In reality her soup kitchens in Calcutta fed no more than 300 people daily, and Aroup Chatterjee declares even that figure “a generous over-estimate.” ¹

Mother Teresa collected millions of dollars for the purported purpose of feeding the destitute, and used it for her personal benefit, the benefit of her coconspirator nuns, and the benefit of the Roman Catholic Church. Less than ten percent of the money she amassed was ever used to feed the hungry. Rather more was used to finance her world tours, and to remove the stretcher rails from donated ambulances and convert them into chauffeur-driven taxis for her nuns. But the bulk of the millions she collected was allowed to sit in bank accounts gathering interest for the Catholic Church.

Mother Teresa was a liar, a thief, a swindler, a self-aggrandizing egomaniac who fell somewhere on the evolutionary scale between Imelda Marcos and Leona Helmsley, and an avaricious fraud. Even her Nobel Prize acceptance speech was riddled with lies. Her Prize was engineered by ultra-right-wing communist-under-every-bed Catholics whose discernible purpose was to embarrass the communist government of Albania. She accepted donations from swindler Charles Keating of not less than $1.25 million, and refused to return it even after it was made clear that it was stolen money that belonged to Keating’s victims. On the day of her death, two rival Calcutta newspapers ran front-page stories, “The World Mourns, but Calcutta Remains Indifferent.” Mother Teresa did for Calcutta’s starving masses what Ken Lay did for Enron’s investors. She is now a good missionary.

On the up side, the Peace Prize committee did learn from the “once bitten” example of the Mother Teresa swindle. Concerted efforts by the Catholic Church to secure the prize for Pope John Paul ll were thwarted by a few conscientious judges who recognized the Down syndrome pope’s ban on sane population control and sane disease control as the cause of sixty million deaths from starvation, malnutrition and AIDS, making him the most prolific mass murderer in human history.

Other Peace Prize winners were not as totally unworthy as the lying nun. Even the terrorist Laureates did something worthy of recognition. Yassar Arafat (1994) and Menakhem Begin (1978) interrupted their murders of civilians for belonging to the wrong mythology long enough to sign peace treaties with the persons they continued to view as hell-bound heretics. That Begin’s bombing of the King David Hotel made him a role model for Osama bin Laden does not change that reality. But rewarding the one sane moment in an insane life with a Nobel Prize surely brings the Prize itself into disrepute?

Other Peace Prize winners include conscious agents of one or another form of mind-slavery. Desmond Tutu (1984) encouraged black Africans to reject gods of their own color and adhere to gods created by their ancestors’ white conquerors in their own image. That must surely be the ultimate treason against 95 percent of the African population. And this betrayer of his own people was deemed worthy of a Peace Prize? Oh come now.

The Dalai Lama (1989) preached a moderate form of Buddhism, and that was the reason he won acceptance in a world being crippled by religious intolerance. But what he preached was very different from what he practiced. As Tibet’s absolute theocrat, he ruled over a tyranny that even the communists who annexed Tibet during his reign have not equaled. “The first foreign visitors to Tibet were downright appalled at the feudal domination, and hideous punishments, that kept the populace in permanent serfdom to a parasite monastic elite.” ²

Lach Walesa (1983) helped free Poland from King Log in Moscow, only to subject it to King Stork in Rome.

Albert Schweitzer (1952) founded a hospital in Africa—as part of his conspiracy to enslave the continent’s blacks to the white god created out of what he saw in the mirror. Schweitzer was a missionary, and missionaries are by definition the most antihuman perverters of sanity that have ever existed.

Martin Luther King (1964) is rightfully honored for his role in winning black Americans legal if not de facto equality. That he had feet of clay, preaching the sanctity of biblical taboos while habitually violating them himself, does not diminish his achievement. But he was a preacher of religion, and that in itself makes him a purveyor of an antihuman philosophy that if not strangled while there is still time will exterminate the human race.

Jimmy Carter (2002) was likewise a preacher, and his award was perhaps intended as a reminder, in the wake of 9/11, that not all enforcers of religion are raving lunatics.

The award to the Quakers (1947) is incomprehensible. Perhaps after the militarism of Adolf Hitler, pacifism seemed like a meritorious philosophy. Any theory that Quakers were bound to be admirable was permanently destroyed by Richard Nixon.

Theodore Roosevelt (1906) was the same kind of anti-rationalist bigot as the talking chimpanzee currently [2001-2008] polluting the White House. He described Thomas Paine, perhaps the world’s greatest fighter for the abolition of the superstition that is the root of all evil, as a “dirty little atheist.”

Those are only the Nobel Laureates whose down side is known to me (my field of history is somewhat earlier than the twentieth century). But the mere fact that the list is stacked with religion pushers is in itself sufficient reason for the Nobel Foundation to balance the books by honoring the real peace seekers, scientists and historians who have devoted their lives to freeing humankind from the mind-crippling tyranny of religion. Persons they should seriously consider include Richard Dawkins, ³ Sam Harris,* Victor Stenger, **Paul Kurtz, *** and Christopher Hitchens. And how about honorary lifetime achievement awards to Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, H. L. Mencken, and Clarence Darrow? Everyone qualified to make nominations is urged to do so. And since Mythology’s Last Gods and Gulliver’s Travels competing for the same prize makes little sense, the Nobel Foundation should consider adding a history category.

1 Factual information and quotations concerning Mother Teresa have been taken from Aroup Chatterjee, Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict; and Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice.

2 Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (p.200).

3 author of The God Delusion.

* author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason.

** author of God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist.

***editor of Science and Ethics: Can Science Help Us Make Wise Moral Judgments?

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