Were I the most based and influential individual on the Nobel Committee, there are a few things I would do immediately. The first would be to take a flamethrower to the rest of the committee. Then I would insist that “death” be included as a new prize category – something relative to Nobel’s origins. For the Peace Prize candidates, I would seek out only individuals or groups exposing welfare grift and corruption across Western nations. Finally, as the first candidate for the new category (dirt napping), I would submit the inventor of the tethered bottle cap – Europe’s answer to Elon Musk catching a rocket with chopsticks – for expedited consideration.

The world is no longer divided right or left, but by civilisation or destruction. This year the Nobel committee thought it clever or funny to honour both forces.

Civilisation took the form of Professor Michael E Hall, the American economist who was recognised for developing models designed to assist central banks weathering financial crises. Hall is a brilliant man and friend to limited government and free markets. What the award didn’t recognise is a position Professor Hall has long maintained: a uniform rate of tax.

This is an agreeably civilised, intelligent (even inspired) choice of winner. Unlike today’s progressive systems of taxation, a flat rate for rich and poor alike is morally justifiable and more effective. Progressive taxation, applied to countries such as the United Kingdom (UK), continues to erode trust between the individual and the state. The individual gets poorer and more taxed – all the while witnessing institutions decay. The individual then begins to suspect that tax no longer funds public service: it is simply confiscation without destination or purpose. Personally, I would have awarded the economics prize to the genius who came up with the saying “all taxation is theft”, but will settle for a brilliant man adjacent to that maxim.

Destruction

Navi Pillay is the destruction, and snuffs out Hall’s award. Last week all the wrong people were celebrating, from crooked statesmen to terrorist organisations, the DEI industrial complex, academics and of course, the worst South African journalists schooled in the demonic Associated Press stylebook. But they speak of a woman impossible to distinguish from any of the women serving on the executives of the innumerable UK quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations (NGOs), mostly of Ugandan-Indian or subcontinental lineage, who sneer things like “I am passionate about upholding standards in public life,” or “I am here to enforce compliance with international law” at impressionable British Broadcasting Corporation cameramen.

Perhaps because it was such a catastrophe, those celebrating do not remember the World Conference on Racism in Durban in 2001, a United Nations (UN) event, the country’s most embarrassing gathering ever, an unwashable skidmark that still shames the decent and just. Merely six years post a bloodless transition, South Africa positioned itself host to spastic Jew hatred, drawing performances from thugs who, thanks to a supporting cast of academics and activists, managed to convince an audience that despite their accumulated wealth, despite the poverty they had thrust upon their miserable subjects, they were the world’s true "resistance". Nearby at Kingsmead Stadium, international NGOs circulated cartoons featuring Jewish men with hooked noses counting money.

In 2008 Navi Pillay was appointed the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights. The following year she was appointed Commissioner for the Durban Review and to the horror of humanity, began trying to rehabilitate the events of 2001. On the very first day of the review in Geneva, the ghost of Durban returned in the form of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who denied the Holocaust. Many delegates walked out. Pillay, with advanced knowledge of the speech’s contents, just sat there.

Cartoon Crisis

But if that’s a bit raw or ambiguous, there’s the incident involving Denmark’s Muhammad cartoon crisis at the newspaper Jyllands-Posten. The offending cartoonist who drew the prophet, Kurt Westergaard, was intimidated to the point where the country’s foreign minister sought out Pillay, then a judge at the International Criminal Court, for support. Her advice? Legislate censorship. Submit before psychotic Islamists. Kneel. That’ll do it.

The decision to award Pillay the Nobel Peace Prize is so illogical that the conspiracy guys are making sense. They have diagnosed it as a European Union (EU)-initiated attack on the United States (US); mere hours after Pillay was announced, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced sanctions on Pillay’s old employers, the International Criminal Court, freezing its assets and preventing its access to US companies.

Where are the descendants of Norsemen in this? As tempting as conspiracies are, Norway isn’t the EU’s helpful bozo; any suggestion that the EU boss Ursula von der Leyen cajoled the country is surely off the mark. What most likely happened here is that a committee has tried to placate the two angriest groups in the world: give a prize to a brilliant economist, and one to a divisive agitator. The libertarians of the world will be chuffed, and pro-Palestine activists can get another weekend of desecrating WWII memorials, because mummy did a thing.

Perhaps by this time next year they’ll have learned that you actually can’t appease destruction. I wouldn’t bet on it.