IN POLAND IT’S NOBEL, SHMOBEL

Posted By on October 10th, 2009

Lech Walesa On Obama Peace Prize: “Who, What? So Fast?” – New Europe – WSJ

http://blogs.wsj.com/new-europe/2009/10/09/lech-walesa-on-obama-peace-prize-who-what-so-fast/

Lech Walesa On Obama Peace Prize: “Who, What? So Fast?”
Marcin Sobczyk, New Europe WSJ.com

Poland is stunned to see the Nobel Peace Prize given to U.S. President Barack Obama. You can always count on Poland’s outspoken ex-president and its best-known Nobel Prize laureate Lech Walesa to be undiplomatic:

“Who? What? So fast?” a shocked Walesa said when reporters told him about the latest Obama win.

“Well, there’s hasn’t been any contribution to peace yet. He’s proposing things, he’s initiating things, but he is yet to deliver,” he said.

Walesa went on to say that we should see this as encouragement for Obama.

Others in Poland are also amazed, so much so that they began questioning the value of the prize.

“Nobel Shnobel,” said Bartosz Weglarczyk, commentator for daily Gazeta Wyborcza. “Obama has great potential, great possibilities, but the peace prize for plans to do something? Chinese dissidents lost as usual because they can no longer plan anything. It’s absurd.”

“Maybe an award like that would be more justifiable in a year from now,” said Tadeusz Iwinski, a Member of Parliament representing the post-communist camp that is traditionally pro-Democrat.

In one of the rarest moments when he agrees with Lech Walesa, Polish president’s identical twin brother Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who also is the country’s opposition leader, said the prize is to encourage Obama and give the U.S. president a boost.

“This is a Nobel Prize for hope,” Kaczynski said. “I think this prize is supposed to encourage him, put an obligation on him, and to boost his weakening position.”

Political scientist Zbigniew Lewicki, professor at Warsaw University, thinks the committee’s decision “is absurd.”

“It’s as if the Nobel Prize in literature went to someone who published a book of poetry – a very interesting one, but just a debut,” he said. “For the first time the prize was given to someone who has plans, but no achievements. This is a purely political decision that could also be called a perverse verdict.”

Envy? Not really. It’s just a matter of comparison.

When Lech Walesa received the honor in 1983, he had been an anticommunist dissident for more than a decade, kept in custody by the communist regime in 1981 and 1982, fired from his job, with his name banned by communist censors.

It was given to him in the darkest period of Poland’s 20th century history, at the height of the Cold War that could at any time transform into a very hot and nuclear conflict.

In 1983, the prize went to someone who was a global symbol of anticommunism with an impressive record, a complicated present and an uncertain future in a country oppressed by the Soviet tyrant.

And now? Poland feels the prize goes to a big question mark.

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