Today's Nobel Prize day reminded me of a letter I wrote to the Nobel committee in 1988 after headlines screamed that Ronald Reagan was favored to win it.

I would have shared it with you then had this board existed and had I been a member.

The committee responded by sending me a small booklet describing the Alfred Nobel foundation and his concerns for world peace.

They get thousand of letters, I'm sure.

I wrote this message last night, but forgot to hit "Send". lol

The young journalist student I cite is my son. And the road to peace keeps having the ashes of war heaped onto it.

September 23, 1988

Egil Aarvik, Chairman Norwegian Nobel Committee, Nobel Peace Prize Norwegian Nobel Institute Drammensveien 19 Oslo, Norway

Dear Chairman Aarvik,

Please do not award the Nobel Peace Prize to President Ronald Reagan. In spite of his last minute efforts to seduce the members of your committee, he is not a man of peace nor a champion of human rights. He is, instead, a believer in”the ends justify the means”, including getting the peace prize.

When I learned that he had been nominated for the prize, I was determined to find out about Alfred Nobel, the prize, the committee, and the criteria used to select the recipient.

I read several newspaper and magazine articles, and two books titled: Alfred Nobel, Dynamite King-Architect of Peace by Herta E. Pauli; and Nobel, The Man and His Prizes, edited by the Nobel Foundation, especially the section on the Peace Prize by August Schou.

In this day of political image makers, I have every confidence that President Reagan’s people read the same material I did. And they learned, just as I did, that essential in the make-up of the person who is to be given the award must be a genuine respect for human rights, with its ultimate concern for human life.

Thus it came as no surprise to me when to most of the world’s attention, and I might add, embarrassment, President Reagan, using a platform extended to him by his Soviet hosts, rudely upbraided Soviet leader Gorbachev for his apparent lack of concern for human rights. He knew Oslo was listening, and wanted to make sure you members of the Peace Prize committee knew which leader of them was on record as being the true human rights advocate.

Clearly I would like to see an American win the Peace Prize. If I thought President Reagan’s meeting with Secretary Gorbachev heralded “an undeniable tendency towards a relaxation of international tension” I should not be quite so critical of him. But in the same breath he speaks of reducing our stockpile of atomic weapons, he reminds us that we must build up our store of conventional forces.

There is always for him an Orwellian “evil empire.” Consequently, most of the international tension, the relaxation of which he might be given credit, has been of his own making.

President Reagan was elected to office partly because he convinced the American people that the United States had become militarily weaker than the Soviet Union. His argument ran that the Soviets would not come to the bargaining table until the U.S. had become the dominant power. Notwithstanding the logical fallacy, I find it hard to believe that the Soviets would be intimidated to the bargaining table any more easily than we were when we perceived ourselves to be in the weaker position.

I rather believe that recent Soviet movement towards peace has come about not because they have been frightened into it, but because they’ve finally realized that pockets lined with profits from an arms race provide for little else but money used to keep healthy their military establishment, and for the sake of their own citizen’s well being, it is time to seek an end to this insanity.

Since his trip to Moscow, our American President continues to campaign for the Peace Prize. He recently released $188 million in overdue U.S. payments to the United Nations. “The President reiterated the commitment of the U.S. to assist the United Nations in its new peace-keeping efforts.”

A large contingent of President Reagan’s supporters long have sought the dissolution of the United Nations, and the tardiness of these payments echo his personal luke-warm enthusiasm for the World Organization’s activities, but are calculated to circulate press releases which include such statements as: “Reagan’s actions breathe new life in our hopes for world peace.”

In a report in last Sunday’s newspapers, the American White House said that “President Reagan is sending a team headed by his daughter, Maureen, on a mission to gain a better understanding of the effects of the refugee and humanitarian crisis in Malawi and Mozambique and to follow up on the August 22nd through 24th Oslo conference on Southern Africa Refugees, Returnees, and Displaced Persons.”

Coincidence or not, this report would, of course, come to the attention of persons living in Oslo.

Effective as his press people are in putting his best foot forward, the truth of President Reagan’s claim to be a worthy candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize is belied by his invasion of Grenada, his bombing of Libya, his mining of the harbors of Nicaragua—after which he ignored the findings of the World Court, which in reality was a slap in the face of the world peace movement that needs for its success recognition of international law—and his belligerent policies in Central America and the Middle East.

He vehemently opposes President Oscar Arias’ Central American peace plan, appearing to do everything possible to lose that very confidence of the Latin American States that Elihu Root, in 1912, “realized more clearly than most people that the U.S. must enjoy.”

Worse, his condoning of drug trafficking and of the selling of arms to Iran, using the proceeds of both to support a questionable band of so-called “freedom fighters” in Nicaragua, underscores his willingness to use any means whatsoever to achieve his ends, and reveals a philosophy of his world view that is frighteningly unbecoming as the leader of a world power nation.

Responsible power will not permit such actions to be taken. To justify them when they are taken, however, irresponsible power will contrive to make excuses, the invention of which not only sheds doubt on its wielder, but light on the slow corruption of the democracy he hides behind yet professes to spread.

President Reagan represents a fading generation of world leaders by whom massive supplies of the ashes of war have been too quickly and too carelessly scattered upon the road to peace. The efforts of your committee, have, over the years, managed to keep that road from being covered, and thanks to you, an evolutionary path has been kept open just as Bertha Von Suttner probably hoped it would be when she convinced Alfred Nobel that moral values were just as susceptible to improvement as were the “scientific or technical advances that make men not only more knowing or comfortable, but more perfect, and that peace, a main feature of perfection, must in some inscrutable way be brought nearer by every inch of progress.”

When she made the observation that “the actual war mentality is rooted in the official attitude of hostility to life which permeates the community” her words and her belief that peace would be achieved through an evolutionary process, anticipated the thoughts of a young journalism student more than a half century later.

He writes: “It seems logical that some grave error in thinking leads man to such destructive acts…One way to examine man’s perception of life is through…his conceptual metaphors, i.e., LIFE IS A POSSESSION.

"God breathed life into the soul. Life was created out of the dust. He had life sucked out of him. The life slowly drained from his body. My lifeblood spills over. A person shouldn’t take another man’s life. The parents gave their child life. She gave her life for society. He offered his life to God. I hope I do with my life what he did with his. He lost his life to cancer. The event destroyed his life. It’s my life to do with what I want.

“Here life is something to be given, had, and lost. It is a package or a piece of property…It gives me the right to damage my life in the same way I may damage my property: Just as I can kick in my television set when I’m angry, smoke a cigarette when I’m nervous, ingest unhealthful food and drugs. It’s my life and I’ll do with it what I want.

“This brings a delusion of power”, he continues “in which we can justify destroying life because such actions serve our interest. In wartime we destroy both lives and property as one and the same thing, another factor to consider in the fulfillment of national interest.”

Rather than as a piece of property, he suggests that perhaps there is a better way of viewing life itself—as a process in which each life is considered not only sacred but essential to fulfill its place in its “natural evolutionary niche.”

Every Bishop Tutu or Sister Theresa you honor echoes Alfred Nobel’s belief that “every new discovery modifies the human brain and makes the new generation capable of grasping new ideas.” Perhaps even in the way we structure our language, as our young student has mused.

There will be a time when peace is in our guts, part of the DNA we call on to resolve our differences. It falls to be your task to find those individuals in whom it already resides.

President Ronald Reagan is not one of them.

Respectfully,

cc: Mrs.Gidske Andersen Mr. Odvar Nordli Mr. Gunnar Staalsett Mr. Francis Sejerstad