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(IG)Nobel Peace Prize Farce
by Gaurang Bhatt, MD 

The last date for accepting nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize occurred ten days after Obama assumed his presidency. He had done nothing at that time to merit the nomination, nor has he done anything since. Some sycophant nominated him and the Norwegian committee which decides the winner should have thrown out his nomination as undeserving. I don’t know their policy and procedures, but until the present, he has talked a great deal about peace in the Middle East, eliminating nuclear weapons, withdrawing from Iraq, praising Islam, but his actions belie his words and are diametrically opposite.

He backed down and allowed Netanyahu to continue with new settlements, stopped any condemnation of Israel by the Goldstone report (Judge Goldstone is a South African Jew and cannot be tarred with anti-semitism), has not closed Guantanamo. continued the Iraq War, escalated the Afghan War, allowed illegal wiretaps, bailed out the big banks while doing little for troubled homeowners and jobless, capitulated on the public option in healthcare, surrendered to big pharma and insurance lobbies. Some optimistic adulating fools fantasize that the peace prize will compel him to take a more decent path. These same fans are capable of whining that he should also have gotten the Nobel prize in literature and fiction for his “Audacity Of Hope”.

It is a good thing we don’t have a Nobel Prize in Ethics, otherwise the Obama fans would be lobbying to give that to Charlie Rangel or Dan Rostenkowski, if not Abramoff. Hey, why not give the Medal of Freedom to Monica Lewinsky for going below and beyond the call of duty and biting the Billette. This is not a fluke mistake. The Peace prize has been given to Henry Kissinger whose bombing policies caused millions of Vietnamese deaths. Other ignoble winners include Yasser Arafat, a terrorist and hijacker, Theodore Roosevelt, a warmonger who actively promoted and participated in the Spanish American War and during his presidency, was responsible for the death and torture of thousands of Filipinos. He was given the prize for mediating in the Russo-Japanese War.

Another undeserving recipient was the bigoted racist Woodrow Wilson. He attacked and started a war in Mexico. He was given the prize for the Versailles conference and setting up the League of Nations which America under his administration refused to join and torpedoed to death. He refused to use the US power to impose a just peace and gave his stamp to the Versailles Treaty and crushing reparations which led to the Weimar Republic hyperinflation, Nazism, Hitler and WW2. The Norwegian Peace Prize Committee thinks that it can use the prize to influence the behavior of pre-emptive war loving American presidents and attenuate their virulence. This is a foolish hope and a flagrant misuse of the prize which is meant to reward concrete actions and good results and not prayers, hopes and bombastic platitudes.

The disgraceful behavior of the Peace Prize Committee reveals the hypocrisy of the prize and the mutual back scratching cabal of the West. Another proof of the above is refusal to give the prize to Mohandas Gandhi and more recently using the prize for political manipulation or correctness as in the case of Shireen Abadi and Kofi Anan. There is an ancient Sanskrit verse which sums it up beautifully.

“Ushtranam vivaheshu gito gayante gardhabhani
Parasparam prasanshayante aho rupam, aho dhvani”

Translation:
At the wedding ceremonies of the camels,
the donkeys are the vocalists.
How good looking the bride and groom, sing the donkeys,
how sonorous your braying, reply the bride, groom and attendees.

Even more importantly, in continuation of my last week’s article on power’s effects on a variety of fools, Obama knows he doesn’t deserve the prize and has acknowledged it publicly and promised to donate the entire sum of the prize money, but lacks the integrity to refuse to accept it. Such are the intoxicating and self-deluding effects of power, for it makes fools of even those who were apparently wise before they imbibed the destructive and corrosive brew of power.

October 11, 2009

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