Dear Mr. President,
Few things have preoccupied you more than the Nobel Prize, a fixation so obvious that foreign crises and Venezuela’s suffering risk being reduced to stage props in your personal award campaign.
You should know the first to receive a Nobel Medal as a "gift" without earning it was Joseph Goebbels, who in 1943 received a Nobel Prize medal as a personal gift from the novelist Knut Hamsun. Hamsun so admired Adolf Hitler that he mistook fascism for greatness and propaganda for truth.
After the war, Hamsun was tried in Norway. He avoided prison only because he was ruled criminally insane. He was fined, disgraced, and forever remembered less for his talent than for his moral collapse.
Then there is you, like Goebbels, you weaponize grievance, substitute loyalty for truth, and treat reality as optional. Like Hamsun, you mistake applause for absolution and notoriety for legacy.
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The Nobel Committee may never call but history will.
Lawrence E. Mazin
SaddleBrooke
Disclaimer: As submitted to the Arizona Daily Star.
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