The farce of watching the Nobel Peace Prize get handed to someone who wants the US to strike her own country is getting the Assange treatment. Right, so there’s a comforting fiction we’re encouraged to believe about the Nobel Peace Prize, which is that whatever else is happening in the world, this one institution floats serenely above it all, dispensing moral approval untouched by power, pressure or consequence. Wars rage, sanctions bite, economies are strangled, governments plot regime change, but the peace prize, we’re told, is just a candle in the darkness. Pure. Symbolic. Harmless. And then Julian Assange comes along and does the one thing you’re not supposed to do to a moral ornament like that. He treats it as real. As something that acts, that intervenes, that takes sides, and therefore might have responsibilities. Not a metaphor. Not a ser ...