Whether tis Nobeler....

Seriously? Obama won the Peace prize this year.

"for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."

Politics aside, he has not kept his promises about pulling troops out of Iraq. Situation in Afghanistan has not improved. The Russians are MORE entrenched now over their nuke policies than before, AND he did not close Guantanimo. When did the Nobel Peace Prize become a kindergarten Gold Star program for "trying really hard"?

Confusing to say the least. I can only assume it's a kind of mix of timing and intent that he's being rewarded for.

The first black American president, and the hope that still resides on his shoulders.

Having said that, let's all shout out together:

'THE NOBELS ARE NOT POLITICAL!'

and

'MY BACON DOES NOT LAND ITSELF ON MY PLATE!

There. Now let's all relax and quietly hum Beethoven's 9th.

I'm not gonna pass these thoughts off as my own:
http://alterdestiny.blogspot.com/2009/10/s...amas-nobel.html

Phil said it best "The Nobels are not political." Well, they are not supposed to be. Let's not a few things here.

1. Deadline for nominations was February 1. This was 12 days after he took office. First question here, should people be able to be nominated and taken seriously for stuff that might happen in the months following nomination but preceding the award? Furthermore, the submissions are not exactly short ones - so this had to have been started PRIOR to him taking office. Granted, the committee does not control the submissions, nor do the people submitting control the committee, but come on here.

2. Since when did the award become a "We hope you do real good" prize? Many award winners in all categories have had to wait YEARS to win an award for work. Others are nominated year after year for REAL substantial accomplishments and do not win. I believe one of the other nominees is the guy that did a lot of work with grain breeds so as to prolong growing seasons and increase the food supply for arid and poor countries. Such work has reduced world hunger and strife in those regions. His work started in the 60's or 70's. I guess he can just wait until next year. Maybe IF Obama does something great by then, it will all seem OK I guess.

3. This award is essentially the Nobel committee saying "Hey, USA - we want you to be like this, here's a carrot." Regardless of my opinion of that direction, where does the Nobel committee get off doing this? Furthermore, as the world community embraces this, how is it any different than the US or Britain or China directing the policy of smaller nations?

The Nobel prize USED to mean something. I think it does a dis-service to the award to award someone symbolically or based on potential. They certainly won't take it back if he doesn't follow through. I credit Obama for thinking the award a bit odd, but the damage is done. Perhaps the US should just open voter registration to citizens of other nations if we want our policy guided by them. Oh wait - maybe if everyone ELSE is willing to let me vote and guide their policy - I would sign on to it.

I think basically everyone apart from the committee (including Obama) is surprised and doesn't really think he deserves it over and above everyone else.



However, I think there are three things that can be said on the other side of it.
1) The achievements are not inconsiderable. He isn't George Bush. This is actually a pretty huge deal. Bush was a warmonger who steadfastly refused to engage with the rest of the world in any meaningful way. On his watch the US started a war of aggression, ignored the UN, outsourced torture to Gitmo and Abu Grahib (and so on and so on). Diplomatically turning the only remaining superpower around on a dime into an entity that respects the sovereignty of other nations and is willing to talk to them IS a big step for peace. Seriously.

2) Your deadline argument doesn't work because, while he may have been nominated almost prior to having been in office, the reason they call them nominations is because its not a final decision.

3) The Nobel Peace prize, unlike the Nobel prizes for chemistry and physics and such, does not wait for the dust to settle before awarding the prize. It was given out to Desmond Tutu, a decade before Apartheid ended. Aung San Suu Kyi got it, but 18 years later Myanmar is as repressive as ever. So both the idea that the prize is given out only for concrete results, rather than "a gold star for trying hard", and that it shouldn't be given "too early" or that the effects should be seen before it is awarded is simply contrary to the history of the award. That is not how the Nobel Peace Prize works. The reason is because the prize itself is supposed to be an instrument in the fight for peace. Its a carrot that attempts to encourage the people who try, it demonstrates support for them, shames those who oppose them. I am not saying that Obama was the best pick. However, I do think that his achievements rank favourably compared to past winners, and that the rationale was consistent, they didn't just change the rules for him.

The Nobel committee does have a stated agenda. It promotes peace. They do it by saying "we want you to be like this [peaceful], here's a carrot". And they didn't award it cos of his accomplishments on a domestic issue like health care, they awarded it because they approved of his conduct vis-a-vis the world community.

Peace and war are political. There is no way that a PEACE prize can be non-political.

The Nobel Prize committee consistently meddles in the affairs of other countries. Like South Africa, or Myanmar. That's what it does. The US is not special in that regard.

1. By this logic, I am not Hitler - give me my Nobel Prize!

2. Other than "not being someone else" which was the case PRIOR to the nomination - what has he done to improve any of those things?

3. Once again - how is this any different from the US imposing its influence on ANY other country to do things - peaceful or otherwise? I am sure you complain that the US does that, so why should I as an American be happy with this facet of the award?

You also fail to note that MANY of the award winners HAVE won well after they did the work. And most of them at least STARTED the struggle before getting a Nobel. Plenty of other US politicians were against the war before Obama got into the Senate, much less the White House.

Also amusing - the Nobel committee seals the records of who was nominated for 50 years for some reason. Hmmmm....

1) If you beat Hitler in an election, thus ending the 2nd world war and the holocaust, then I think you would be a candidate for the peace prize, yes. However as I said before, I don't necessarily think that he is the most worthy possible candidate, I only want to disagree that awarding it to him is somehow counter to the Nobel Peace Prize's mission statement or its history.

2) The link I gave talked about some of Obama's international diplomacy effects and efforts. I'm not an expert myself, and I don't just want to summarise the article here.

3) Well, I'm not opposed to the US exerting influence around the world. Occasionally I may be opposed to what they are trying to get to happen, but not always (and indeed not generally), and I'm not against influence per se. I'm pro globalisation, pro western values, pro capitalism (up to a point), in favour of peace, justice, the rule of law, having a sense of humour and being a democracy. I don't think that America is very good AT exporting its values or ensuring good outcomes when it exerts its influence, but I do think that if the rest of the world was more like America it would be a better place (of course if it was more like the Netherlands it would be an even better place, but there's not much of a chance of that happening).

Right, but the point is, achieving results is NOT the standard by which the peace prize is awarded. You said that the prize "used to mean something", implying that this awarding was out of character. I'm saying that this is not the case.

People get it for recent work, and for political reasons, for things where we don't yet know the outcome. They also get it despite being distinctly dubious characters (Yasser Arafat, Henry Kissenger). Compared to other people working away this year, I wouldn't say Obama is the most deserving of it. But compared to other winners, I do not think that he is especially anomalous.

Well, let's see. How about anyone who won it for their work on the League of Nations? That's the earliest "tried hard but didn't work" I see right off the bat.

What I'm about to say has been more or less gone over here, I'm just giving my tuppence.

As I understand it, the prize has no 'time limit'. IE; it has been used as a reward for work that has promoted peace (the type we most think of) and as a recognition of an organisation or person that shows real promise, and more importantly, real potential for such work.

Obama deserves the prize (though I'm sure there were many other worthies) yes, in a way, because he's not George Bush. He has signaled loudly to the world that the US, under his presidency, will virtually reverse 'Bushian' policies and tactics. Most notably in the field of diplomacy.

America is saying to the world; 'we're not coming to bash anyone any more, we wanna talk, and we'll talk to anyone who's serious. We're still carrying a big stick but we'll talk softly and with trust.

As the world's strongest economic (for now) and military nation, the change in tone, style and increasingly, action, is a big thing. A very big thing.

The trigger-happy gunslinger has gone (may he rot in hell), there's a new sheriff in town.

Having said all that................


War Is Peace. Ignorance Is Strength

By John Pilger

October 16, 2009

Barack Obama, winner of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, is planning another war to add to his impressive record.

In Afghanistan, his agents routinely extinguish wedding parties, farmers and construction workers with weapons such as the innovative Hellfire missile, which sucks the air out of your lungs.

According to the UN, 338,000 Afghan infants are dying under the Obama-led alliance, which permits only $29 per head annually to be spent on medical care.

Within weeks of his inauguration, Obama started a new war in Pakistan, causing more than a million people to flee their homes.

In threatening Iran – which his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said she was prepared to “obliterate” – Obama lied that the Iranians were covering up a “secret nuclear facility”, knowing that it had already been reported to the International Atomic Energy Authority.

In colluding with the only nuclear-armed power in the Middle East, he bribed the Palestinian Authority to suppress a UN judgment that Israel had committed crimes against humanity in its assault on Gaza – crimes made possible with US weapons whose shipment Obama secretly approved before his inauguration.

At home, the man of peace has approved a military budget exceeding that of any year since the end of the Second World War while presiding over a new kind of domestic repression.

During the recent G20 meeting in Pittsburgh, hosted by Obama, militarised police attacked peaceful protesters with something called the Long-Range Acoustic Device, not seen before on US streets.

Mounted in the turret of a small tank, it blasted a piercing noise as tear gas and pepper gas were fired indiscriminately.

It is part of a new arsenal of “crowd-control munitions” supplied by military contractors such as Raytheon.

In Obama’s Pentagon-controlled “national security state”, the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, which he promised to close, remains open, and “rendition”, secret assassinations and torture continue.

The Nobel Peace Prize-winner’s latest war is largely secret.

On 15 July, Washington finalised a deal with Colombia that gives the US seven giant military bases.

“The idea,” reported the Associated Press, “is to make Colombia a regional hub for Pentagon operations . . . nearly half the continent can be covered by a C-17 [military transport] without refuelling”, which “helps achieve the regional engagement strategy”.

Translated, this means Obama is planning a “rollback” of the independence and democracy that the people of Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Paraguay have achieved against the odds, along with a historic regional co-operation that rejects the notion of a US “sphere of influence”.

The Colombian regime, which backs death squads and has the continent’s worst human rights record, has received US military support second in scale only to Israel.

Britain provides military training.

Guided by US military satellites, Colombian paramilitaries now infiltrate Venezuela with the goal of overthrowing the democratic government of Hugo Chávez, which George W Bush failed to do in 2002.

Obama’s war on peace and democracy in Latin America follows a style he has demonstrated since the coup against the democratic president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, in June.

Zelaya had increased the minimum wage, granted subsidies to small farmers, cut back interest rates and reduced poverty.

He planned to break a US pharmaceutical monopoly and manufacture cheap generic drugs.

Although Obama has called for Zelaya’s reinstatement, he refuses to condemn the coup-makers and to recall the US ambassador or the US troops who train the Honduran forces determined to crush a popular resistance.

Zelaya has been repeatedly refused a meeting with Obama, who has approved an IMF loan of $164m to the illegal regime.

The message is clear and familiar: thugs can act with impunity on behalf of the US.

Obama, the smooth operator from Chicago via Harvard, was enlisted to restore what he calls “leadership” throughout the world.

The Nobel Prize committee’s decision is the kind of cloying reverse racism that has beatified the man for no reason other than he is a member of a minority and attractive to liberal sensibilities, if not to the Afghan children he kills.

This is the Call of Obama.

It is not unlike a dog whistle: inaudible to most, irresistible to the besotted and boneheaded.

“When Obama walks into a room,” gushed George Clooney, “you want to follow him somewhere, anywhere.”

The great voice of black liberation Frantz Fanon understood this.

In The Wretched of the Earth, he described the “intermediary [whose] mission has nothing to do with transforming the nation: it consists, prosaically, of being the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camouflaged”.

Because political debate has become so debased in our media monoculture – Blair or Brown; Brown or Cameron – race, gender and class can be used as seductive tools of propaganda and diversion. I

n Obama’s case, what matters, as Fanon pointed out in an earlier era, is not the intermediary’s “historic” elevation, but the class he serves.

After all, Bush’s inner circle was probably the most multiracial in presidential history.

There was Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas, all dutifully serving an extreme and dangerous power.

Britain has seen its own Obama-like mysticism.

The day after Blair was elected in 1997, the Observer predicted that he would create “new worldwide rules on human rights” while the Guardian rejoiced at the “breathless pace [as] the floodgates of change burst open”.

When Obama was elected last November, Denis MacShane MP, a devotee of Blair’s bloodbaths, unwittingly warned us: “I shut my eyes when I listen to this guy and it could be Tony.

He is doing the same thing that we did in 1997.”

www.johnpilger.com

Sorry, I just couldn't read any more after that. Is the author referring to the reader? Or to the individuals targeted by it? And it's not, as implied, a newly designed weapon system, it's pushing 30 if I recall.

And sucking the air out of your lungs? That's just.... It's something like a 20lb warhead, the rocket would probably have to HIT you to need air close to you, and if it hits you then the least you're going to worry about is shortness of breath. You'd be dead from the blast or the shrapnel.

Sorry, I just couldn't read any more after that. Is the author referring to the reader? Or to the individuals targeted by it? And it's not, as implied, a newly designed weapon system, it's pushing 30 if I recall.

And sucking the air out of your lungs? That's just.... It's something like a 20lb warhead, the rocket would probably have to HIT you to need air close to you, and if it hits you then the least you're going to worry about is shortness of breath. You'd be dead from the blast or the shrapnel.

Oi! Careful! You're in danger of robbing Spoof of his title; King of Pedants.

*ahem* I call bullshit.