Via Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi explains Obama's Nobel Peace Prize by providing some very insightful commentary about who is - and isn't - eligible for Nobel Peace Prizes and why:
The unifying thread for all these prizewinners is that they were all important political figures who at one time or another embraced violence as a just and appropriate policy, and got the peace crown once the political weather changed and it was time to put the tanks back in the garage. Even Gore, during the Kosovo war, boned up on his war cred before he got a prize for losing an election, growing a beard, and making a freaking movie. And hey, maybe in the real world, you can’t punish politicians for embracing force — maybe there’s just no way around the use of violence, when you’re running a country the size of the U.S. I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been President or Vice President of anything.
But it’s hard not to notice that those onetime war-favoring pols are the Westerners who win these awards, when there is still a significant minority of people living right here among us who believe that nonviolence can work as a permanent policy, and who have consistently rejected and opposed the obvious militaristic values of the society we actually happen to live in.
Those people win the Nobel Prize when they live in “other” countries, when they’re penniless priests in Timor or Soweto or activists in Guatemala. But when they’re Americans or Western Europeans or Japanese who think we should reduce military spending or defund catastrophic weapons programs, no dice, because those people don’t represent “us” — us being a society that doesn’t seriously think about disarming.
Instead they use the award to give political backrubs to the inexperienced commanders of deployed armies, people like Barack Obama. I have no idea what his award means, but I do know one thing; it doesn’t have a lot to do with peace.
The whole thing is worth a read.
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It's Dead Jim
The link is dead, broken, it is an ex-link.
On the Nobel issue in general, I like how people forget that Nobel's will specifies it is to be more past accomplishments and it is a large monetary prize is to help the winner by freeing them from financial concerns while doing good works.
Giving it to another mutli-millionaire kind of goes against that as well.
Link fixed, thanks! n/t
!
"Do what you feel in your heart to be right -- for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't. " - Eleanor Roosevelt
This link is *no* *more*
It has ceased to be..
Putting aside whether a peace
Putting aside whether a peace prize for pacifists wouldn't be redundant...
>when there is still a significant minority of people living right here among us who believe that nonviolence can work as a permanent policy,
Well it can work if you have the military defenses to ward off those who don't agree, and if you don't mind standing by and watching various slaughters from a safe distance even if you happen to have the power to intervene and call a halt.
Happily Churchill was running Britain in 1940 and not Gandhi, whose helpful suggestion at the time was that the UK surrender to the Nazis, a suggestion which I find sufficient evidence of the limits of "nonviolence as a permanent policy." But then I'm glad we took military action in Bosnia and Kosovo (and only wish we had done it sooner) and sorry we failed take military action in Rwanda, so I'm clearly not part of that "significant minority."
Tdraicer
Spock's Green Blood
is strong, link works for me.
prizes mostly make me go "meh." either all prizes should be awarded you think they should, or they don't really mean that much. they say stuff about the people receiving and awarding the prizes, but rarely about the act itself which supposedly motivates the awarding of the prize. this is true from elementary school awards to major political and media awards. i'm glad this essay got written tho, which relentless writing. dissa what? alterna who? indeed, some of us have been invisible our whole lives.
Of 795 Nobel laureates only 11 were black, 8 of them pacificists
Heads of state and their bloodstained henchmen on the other hand from Menachem Begin to Henry Kissinger to Woodrow Wilson and others abound.
You can't make this stuff up.
Bruce Dixon
www.blackagendareport.com
I encourage all to go click on Bruce's linky
And, reading that info, which had to do with all Nobel Prizes, and not just the Peace Prize, got me thinking. I hope Bruce will forgive me for also mentioning how women have fared in the Nobel lottery. The percentages for women are not nearly as dire as for blacks, but I'd have to say that some measure of discrimination, starting from the get go as to "opportunity to even participate in the community" has also been present.
I did a quick bit of research, and although my total number is slightly different (total 780 vs 795) I just went with what a got quickly.
Data are based on info from two links:
http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html...
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists...
And the first link brought back painful memories:
As a female scientist who has struggled against this perception for decades, I was really done in by Summers' attitudes and comments. It was a totally destructive moment (as opposed to a "teachable moment").
Forgive me for going OT in addressing the general issue of Nobels rather than the Peace Prize in particular, but Bruce's comment brought back memories. Hey Bruce! Luvs ya! Always good to read your comments here.