Thibbers

I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, and I would like to report that the President of the United States finally has a Nobel Peace Prize medal. Not the prize. The medal. There is a difference, and the difference is the entire story. Allow me to tell it properly.  It is October again. The rain is hanging in the air over Henrik Ibsens gate the way it does, not quite falling, just waiting for you to commit to an umbrella. My shoes are wet. Someone has brought kanelboller. Kissinger is still on the wall. You will remember that last year we gave the prize to María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader, a woman who spent months in hiding and escaped her own country in disguise to collect it. You will also remember that the gentleman in Washington had wanted it very badly, and had told the world so, and had other heads of state tell the world so on his behalf. We gave it to her anyway. She dedicated it to him. That was her right. Laureates may dedicate their prizes to whomever they like, including their mothers, their movements and, as it turned out, the man who wanted it more than anyone alive. Then, in January, she offered to give it to him. We issued a statement. I would like you to read it slowly, because it is the most Norwegian paragraph this committee has ever published. “Once a Nobel Prize is announced, it cannot be revoked, shared or transferred to others. The decision is final and stands for all time.” We added that we do not comment on what laureates do afterwards. Kristin read the draft aloud at the table, and when she reached “stands for all time,” she paused, and said “well,” and we all knew exactly what “well” meant, and we sent it. The day before our statement, the President told an American television host that accepting the prize “would be a great honor,” and that it was “a major embarrassment to Norway” that he hadn’t won it. A week later Ms Machado went to the White House and handed him the medal, “as a recognition for his unique commitment with our freedom.” He posted that she had presented him with her Nobel Peace Prize “for the work I have done.” He told reporters she had said nobody “in history” deserved it more. The press asked us what we thought. We said nothing, because we had already said it: “stands for all time.” The medal is a disc of gold. The prize is a sentence in our records, and the sentence still has her name in it, and will when every person at this table is a portrait. So here is what he has. He has a gold medal with Alfred Nobel’s face on one side and three naked men embracing on the other, which is the design of the Peace medal, and which I would give a great deal to see on the Resolute Desk. He does not have the prize. He has, if you will forgive the Norwegian bluntness, the packaging. I said in an earlier season that the medal finds those people, and flees the ones who chase it. I would like to issue a correction. The medal can be carried. Someone can pick it up and walk it across a room. What it cannot carry is the reason it was given. You might think that holding a peace medal would make a man think about peace, even a little, even out of politeness. Within days of receiving it, he sent our Prime Minister a message. “Dear Jonas,” it began, and I would like it engraved somewhere. “Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace.” He went on to explain why the United States must have “Complete and Total Control of Greenland,” noting that Denmark’s claim rested on a boat that had landed there hundreds of years ago, but that America had boats too. Most laureates take years to disappoint us. This one did it in a long weekend, with someone else’s medal. Our Prime Minister replied, not for the first time, that the prize is awarded by an independent Nobel Committee, and not by the Norwegian government. He has explained this so often that I believe it is now his most-repeated sentence in English. It is also, I am told, the one sentence in this entire affair that nobody in Washington has read. This October we gave the prize to Navi Pillay, a South African judge who has spent half a century deciding what the law requires when nations do terrible things. The President described her at a campaign rally as “a mystery person.” “I never heard of the person,” he said. “Nobody did.” I find this lovely. It may be the most accurate thing anyone has said about our laureates. Most of them were mysteries to the powerful. That is usually why they qualified. He called our decision “an indelible stain on the country of Norway.” He said, “We will not forget, Norway.” He said he should have received eight Nobel Peace Prizes, one for each war. I did the arithmetic on the tram. At one medal a year, he would have to live to roughly 2034 to collect them all, and we would have to agree, eight times, which we have never once done about anything, including the buns. Then came this week. Ms Machado has gone home to Venezuela, where the government that replaced the dictator she fought is one Washington has decided to work with. Asked about her return on Sunday, the President told reporters: “I don’t know anything about it, but I think she’s a very nice woman. She gave me her Nobel Prize, so how can I say anything else? And I hope she’s safe.” I have read that sentence perhaps thirty times. “She gave me her Nobel Prize, so how can I say anything else?” In one breath it tells you what the medal bought. Not her country’s election. Not her safety. A sentence of politeness, and the admission that politeness was purchased. I keep a note on my desk about another medal. In 2022 the Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov auctioned his Nobel Peace Prize medal. It sold for $103.5 million, the highest price ever paid for one, and every dollar went to UNICEF for Ukrainian refugee children. That is what a peace medal can buy, if you sell it to the right people for the right reasons. Ms Machado’s medal bought one sentence. I don’t blame her. She paid full price, with the only currency a dissident has, which is hope. The man who accepted it was the one who set the exchange rate. Medals have had strange lives before. In 1940, when the Nazis occupied Copenhagen, the chemist George de Hevesy dissolved two Nobel medals in a jar of acid so the soldiers would not find them. The jar sat on a shelf through the war, a brown liquid nobody looked at twice, and afterwards he recovered the gold and the Nobel Foundation recast them. When we gave the prize to Carl von Ossietzky in 1935, while he sat in a concentration camp, Hitler responded by forbidding Germans to accept any Nobel Prize at all. In 1973 Le Duc Tho refused the prize we gave him jointly with Kissinger, because there was no peace yet in Vietnam. So the record includes a man who refused a prize he had won, a dictator who banned his citizens from accepting one, and a chemist who dissolved two to keep them from tyrants. It did not, until this year, include a man who accepted a prize he had not won, and then used it as a receipt. And this week, according to the headlines, the President added Norway to a list of countries he does not think highly of, citing the Nobel. I will not repeat the word. We are a small country of five million people who mostly want to be left alone with our coffee. To be put on a list by the most powerful man on earth because a committee of five pensioners declined to give him a medal he already owns is, I confess, the greatest honor this country has received since the Winter Olympics. People ask me whether we will ever give it to him. I answer as we always do. We do not discuss candidates, and anyone can be nominated, and the will of a dead Swedish arms dealer says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. I will only add that fraternity between nations is a difficult case to make for a man who has just put a nation on a list. It is dark now. Four o’clock dark. Kristin said “well” an hour ago, about something else entirely, and we went home. Somewhere in Washington there is a gold medal in a drawer or a frame, with Nobel’s profile and the three men embracing, catching the light in a room where a man is explaining to a camera that he no longer feels obliged to think purely of peace. In Caracas, a woman who gave him that medal is back in her own country, hoping, and her name is still in our records, exactly where we wrote it. It stands for all time. We said so in January, in our most Norwegian paragraph, and we meant it. The medal can travel. The prize cannot. He has the gold. She has the honor. Norway has the list. Takk for i dag. My tram is late. It is the only thing in Norway that ever is.