Friday, October 9, 2009
The Joke on the Nobel Peace Prize
Nominated with just 2 weeks of his Presidency, the Nobel Peace Prize confirmed the Joke it is with the Selection of Obama. He joins others that show just the aspiration of the committee, like Al Gore, International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, Jimmy Carter, Kofi Annan, and Yassar Arafat. What was one considered a meaningful prize is now just a farce.
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3 comments:
Though Obama may be working towards world peace he's certainly not prize material, I think Denis Mukwege should have got the prize, he could use the million dollars and put it to good use, I hope Obama will give the prize to him. Of course you don't know who he is, since you don't watch Democracy Now, so I will give you some info on him:
Denis Mukwege (born 1 March 1955) is a Congolese gynecologist. Working in Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, where he specializes in the treatment of women who have been gang-raped by Congolese militia, Mukwege has probably become the world's leading expert on how to repair the internal physical damage caused by gang rape.[1] He has treated 21,000 women during the Congo's 12-year war, some of them more than once, performing up to 10 surgeries a day during his 18-hour working days. He has described how his patients arrive at the hospital sometimes naked, usually bleeding and leaking urine and faeces from torn vaginas.[1]
Sounds like a much better choice.
I think Oslo gave Obama the prize because (a) influence him to get out of Afghanistan (b) because they wont be able to give it to him after he increases troops in Afghanistan and/or (c) it was just another dig at G. W. Bush.
or d) they were trying to make up for mistakes of the past
War and Peace Prizes
by Howard Zinn
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.
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