Humble servant of the Nation

Aung San Suu Kyi in good company with appalling Nobel prize winners

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Forget the lotteries or a long shot quadrella. The easiest way to make a million dollars and earn the respect of your peers to boot is to win a Nobel Peace Prize.

The rules are invariably flexible. A winner has to do something ‘good’ within fairly broad confines of what good is but then can do a lot of stuff that is extremely bad. Or you can do many bad things early on and then do a little bit of good and next thing you know you’re standing on the stage at the Stockholm Concert Hall, smiling for the cameras with the presentation cheque in hand.

The 26th President of the United States, Teddy Roosevelt was a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Before becoming president, the redoubtable Teddy was both Secretary of the Navy and the leader of the Rough Riders, a US volunteer cavalry outfit that saw action in the Cuban theatre of the Spanish-American War of 1898.

Teddy frequently charged ahead of his men and blasted away at anything that moved. He wrote a rather chilling piece of reportage where he spoke of his euphoria after killing his first man at the Battle of San Juan. Even his admirers, of which I am one, would acknowledge Teddy liked war a little bit too much.

Full column here.

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