By Juan Cole Informed Comment
I was listening to National Public Radio on the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama, and they brought on some nonentity from one of Rupert Murdoch’s faux "magazines," who delivered himself of the remark that when he heard the news, he broke out laughing. He laughed at Obama. He is being paid by the Aussie media monopolist, the billionaire bully, to laugh at Obama.
The Right in the US objected to Obama getting the peace prize on the alleged grounds that he had not yet done anything to deserve it. But the Right in the United States is to peace as velociraptors were to vegetarianism. They don’t believe in the ideal for which the award stands in the first place. And they find President Obama laughable, so they can’t imagine him getting any awards. They have underestimated him badly and will probably pay a price for that.
They misunderstand the Nobel Peace Prize and its history, and the Rupert Murdoch Right (he pays for a lot of this pollution of our airwaves) would not have agreed with any of the past awards.
Alfred Nobel outlined in his will the grounds on which the Peace Prize was to be given, saying it should go annually to the person who "shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding of peace congresses." The modern committee considers work toward the reduction of nuclear arsenals in the same light as the reduction of standing armies, hence its award to Linus Pauling.
The American Rightwing would not have approved of Woodrow Wilson getting the prize for helping found the League of Nations. They do not believe in international cooperation or multilateralism in the first place. They think America should cowboy it. They are the tribe of ‘bring’em on’ and ‘wanted dead or alive.’ They are about trapping the country in quagmires so as to throw cash to their cronies in the military-industrial complex. They like wars, not peace. They don’t care how many people they kill in the global south. A million Iraqis dead? They deny it or justify it or blame it on someone else. They are bottom feeders.
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