War And Peace Prizes
I was dismayed when I heard Barack Obama was given the Nobel peace prize. A shock, really, to think that a president carrying on two wars would be given a peace prize. Until I recalled that Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Henry Kissinger had all received Nobel peace prizes. The Nobel committee is famous for its superficial estimates, won over by rhetoric and by empty gestures, and ignoring blatant violations of world peace.
Yes, Wilson gets credit for the League of Nations – that ineffectual body which did nothing to prevent war. But he had bombarded the Mexican coast, sent troops to occupy Haiti and the Dominican Republic and brought the US into the slaughterhouse of Europe in the first World War, surely among stupid and deadly wars at the top of the list.
Sure, Theodore Roosevelt brokered a peace between Japan and Russia. But he was a lover of war, who participated in the US conquest of Cuba, pretending to liberate it from Spain while fastening US chains on that tiny island. And as president he presided over the bloody war to subjugate the Filipinos, even congratulating a US general who had just massacred 600 helpless villagers in the Phillipines. The Committee did not give the Nobel prize to Mark Twain, who denounced Roosevelt and criticised the war, nor to William James, leader of the anti-imperialist league.
Oh yes, the committee saw fit to give a peace prize to Henry Kissinger, because he signed the final peace agreement ending the war in Vietnam, of which he had been one of the architects. Kissinger, who obsequiously went along with Nixon's expansion of the war, with the bombing of peasant villages in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Kissinger, who matches the definition of a war criminal very accurately, is given a peace prize!
People should be given a peace prize not on the basis of promises they have made – as with Obama, an eloquent maker of promises – but on the basis of actual accomplishments towards ending war, and Obama has continued deadly, inhuman military action in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The Nobel peace committee should retire, and turn over its huge funds to some international peace organization which is not awed by stardom and rhetoric, and which has some understanding of history.
Howard Zinn is the author of “A People’s History of the United States,” “Voices of a People’s History” (with Anthony Arnove), and “A Power Governments Cannot Suppress.”
Source: The Guardian
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Re: Nobel Judges
By Khan, Nasir at Oct 11, 2009 13:56 PM
There has been a lot of criticism here in Norway of the Norwegian Nobel Committee's decision to award this year's peace prize to President Obama. Mr Jagalnd, the chairperson, gets the much of the blame, but I will not not go into such matters.
The present Committee conists of the following members. (The ultra-rightist party in Norway is called Progress Party! But where can one place the 'progressive' parties is always a big headache for a non-Norwegian.)
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Nobel Judges.
By Dodds, Jim at Oct 11, 2009 12:03 PM
Who are these judges? Who are the people chosen by politicians of the Norwegian Parliament to award Nobel prizes? What is their background? What are their interests, business, political and/or academic? I doubt that it could not be possible for rational people to judge the present and some of the past recipients of this award without having an axe to grind. Is their identity kept secret? I have searched for their names without result but perhaps those names are available. Without them these awards can have no value other than the money that accompanies them.
Jim Dodds,
Nanaimo BC.
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The Nobel Peace Prize Or A War Prize to Obama?
By Khan, Nasir at Oct 11, 2009 08:50 AM
According to the normal practice the Nobel Peace Prize is to be awarded to someone who has contributed to the cause of peace. In
President Obama’s case, we see no such evidence. On the contrary, since taking office he has escalated and extended the war of
aggression in Afghanistan which his predecessor Bush had started.
American pilotless drones target Pakistani territory and kill people there with impunity. The ever-increasing death-toll of Afghans and Pakistanis) at the hands of US-led occupation forces shows the reality of this president’s policies. Obama is following the criminal war policies of his immediate predecessor. From Gitmo to Iraq and to the Occupied Territories of the Palestinians his promises have been futile; he has backed down on each of his policy statements he had tossed around. But we are also aware that his hands are tied because the neoconsevative policy-makers and miltarists have taken over his administration.
Except for his empty rhetoric , Obama has produced no concrete results; neither has he shown any consistent and steadfast line of action to pursue the goals for which people around the world had hoped for. His statement of intent regarding nuclear disarmament is praiseworthy, but his warmongering does not entitle him to the peace prize. I suggest that this award should be called War Prize to President Obama. Those in the Nobel Committee who have chosen him for the award have made a joke of the term ‘peace’ once again.
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Re: The Nobel Peace Prize Or A War Prize to Obama?
By Alevizos, Ioannis at Oct 11, 2009 09:20 AM
The serious aspects of this issue having already been commented by Justin, Zinn, Street, Nikonov, Khan,…let’s comment otherwise too: The only level of excuse (or rather the only other such joke that Norway can appeal to as a precedent if they really meant it as joke) was the award of the Lenin prize in literature to Brezhnev (in 1979*) which, at least, was commented by Divine Justice through the coincidence that it was announced on April fool’s day and for a whole day everybody thought it was a practical joke made by the newsman whom he had heard it from, e.g. I had taken it as personal humor of Walter Cronkite; but even sovietophiles didn’t want to believe it and next day they admitted that it badly exposed them. /John Alevizos
*For the factual part google e.g. with the words In 1979 Brezhnev received the Lenin prize for literature (the prize was later recalled)…By the mid-1980s Brezhnev's legacy was in disrepute, attacked by historians and journalists, and more effectively perhaps, by popular jokes (this particular googling leads to the source “Seventeen moments of Soviet History”)
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Re: Re: The Nobel Peace Prize Or A War Prize to Obama?
By Nikonov, Alla at Oct 11, 2009 11:16 AM
I cannot see ANY reason to remember this case, unless someone feels too ashamed by imperialism naked emperor and wants to bring some anti-Sovietims to cover it.
1) Breznev was not the author of books which recieved the prize, but the story was an inner matter of USSR. The was NOTHING like naming the war criminal as a reciever.of supposed worldwide peace prize
2) If one looks at Nobel literature prize, VERY often it went to people who could hardly write better than the author or "Brezhnev" books. VERY often the ONLY merit of "Nobeled" books was the same anti-Sovietism and anti-communism.
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Re: Re: Re: The Nobel Peace Prize Or A War Prize to Obama?
By Alevizos, Ioannis at Oct 11, 2009 12:36 PM
To Alla Nikonov
That too, Alla , you stated very well, and I’m glad you brought it up, to both see deeper into the differences and similarities of the two cases and to see why there is some reason to remember it: to get an undeserved peace prize is reason to be ashamed (e.g. “why do you give me a peace prize to give me incentives to peace as if I did not have any? Am I a crook to say I do want peace? You could have waited until I make clear cut the difference between a war criminal and a peace maker IF I ever do. What common element you saw between the spirituality of Martin Luther King and my PR and , at most, wishful thinking? What are you doing? Ads and TV clips on account of mere color?”). To get an undeserved literature prize is just reason for embarrassment (“thank you for including my autobiography among the books of, or about, anonymous people who, as the expression goes, “write world history in first names” but there are other kinds of praise for books about such people to whom I’m proud to belong. You didn’t have to make me look vain. Reserve this prize for people whose writing talent and life course has the spirituality of Solzhenitsyns who made equally sharp criticism of both US andUSSR
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Nobel Peace Prize Or A War Prize to Obama?
By Khan, Nasir at Oct 11, 2009 07:35 AM
Nasir Khan,
According to the normal practice the Nobel Peace Prize is to be
awarded to someone who has contributed to the cause of peace. In
President Obama’s case, we see no such evidence. On the contrary,
since taking office he has escalated and extended the war of
aggression in Afghanistan which his predecessor Bush had started.
American pilotless drones target Pakistani territory and kill people
there with impunity. The ever-increasing death-toll of Afghans and
Pakistanis) at the hands of US-led occupation forces shows the reality of this president’s policies. Obama is following the criminal war policies of his immediate predecessor. From Gitmo to Iraq and to the Occupied Territories of the Palestinians his promises have been futile; he has backed down on each of his policy statements he had tossed around.
Except for his empty rhetoric, Obama has produced no concrete results; neither has he shown any consistent and steadfast line of action to pursue the goals for which people around the world had hoped for. His nuclear disarmament policy statrement, more of a wish than a goal of US foreign policy, commendable, but his warmongering does not entitle him to the peace prize. I suggest that this award should be called War Prize to President Obama. Those in the Nobel Committee who have chosen him for the award have made a joke of the term ‘peace’ once again.
initiative is praiseworthy, but his warmongering does not entitle him to the peace prize. I suggest that this award should be called War Prize to President Obama. Those in the Nobel Committee who have chosen him for the award have made a joke of the term ‘peace’ once again.
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the League of Nations - that ineffectual body
By Nikonov, Alla at Oct 10, 2009 23:58 PM
it WAS effectilal granting lands of non-whites to imperialist states.
the first World War was NOT "stupid" - it was an imperialist war for new colonies or for preservation of old ones. USA - the rising imperialist predator -had all reasons to participate.
When one is analysing the history of 20th with alomost nothing but emotions (even noble ones) the result could not be very helpful
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Re: the League of Nations - that ineffectual body
By Bostrom, Jay at Oct 11, 2009 10:25 AM
Well stated Alla,
The League of Nations was very effective in carving up more of the world for its own imperial designs. Also, "stupid" is the wrong word choice. All wars are essentially "stupid," but there consequences are anything but!
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