The Confucius Peace Prize, like genital herpes, will never go away. The 2012 winners of the prize, which has even less integrity than the Nobel Peace Prize but considerably more than the borderline fraudulent ‘Nobel’ Prize in Economics, have been announced. Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and Chinese scientist Yuan Longping will share the prize, according to the China International Peace Studies Centre.
Annan was given the prize for “his enormous contribution to the reform and revival of the United Nations and bringing a new spark of vitality to the organisation during his time as its secretary general and as the UN and Arab League special envoy to Syria”.
Yuan, known as the father of hybrid rice in China, was cited for “achieving a historic breakthrough in hybrid rice breeding and solving the problem of food safety for people today”.
Annan and Yuan are, admittedly, far more deserving recipients of an award for peace than 2011 Confucius Peace Prize winner Vladimir Putin (aka ‘the butcher of Chechnya‘). It might seem like a waste of time to award a prize like this to two individuals working in completely different fields, but then again the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the European Union so apparently we’re not even pretending these things matter anymore.
