blatham wrote:Ticomaya wrote:Vietnamnurse wrote:Ahem...Mohammed El Baradai...IAEA Inspector of Nuclear Arms in Iraq that tried to prevent the Iraq War...
Exactly ... that was his primary qualification for the award, wasn't it? That and his frequent criticisms of the US?
Unless you count his successes with N. Korea and Iran, of course.
You know, tico, I think your take on the Nobel is exactly the way to go in this modern guns n roses american world. Let's just drop the whole idea of a
peace prize. Peace is passe, it's boring, it's just nowhere for zesty corporate profits, and even worse, it's effeminate - hardly a reflection of the deepest american values. Peace is a weird nuts-chopped-off yanqui bastard child, like liberalism. Let's take it down to the river and bash it into a bloody pulp. You can use a chevy bumper.
What we need nowadays is a prize for war. Those wonderful folks in the petro-chemical scam have extra money presently and I'll hit them up to sponsor. The Mobil War Prize. I'm nominating you as first recipient. Prepare your acceptance speech.
Geez, aren't I in the running?
The Nobel War Prize. I like that.
The problem is that the same people who have awarded the Peace Prize would probably be in charge of deciding who gets the War Prize.
So we could have a very interesting situation where the winner of both prizes is the same person:
Yassir Arafat
Menachim Begin
Anwar Sadat
Henry Kissenger
Le Duc Tho
Mikhail Gorbachev
Woodrow Wilson
Teddy Roosevelt
And the UN a half dozen or so times
The Peace Prize is a noble (no pun intended) notion but it usually is awarded to the very people who began or extended wars in the first place for finally getting sick of fighting and coming to terms on peace, just about anyone who is in opposition to a Republican administration in Washington, and purveyors of causes (e.g The Environment) which trigger the pleasure response of Liberals.
Sure, they gotten it right a number of times, but should it really be so hard to get it right far more often than wrong?
Unfortunately, war is sometimes necessary, and someone who tries to stop a necessary war is not quite deserving of praise. Should Charles Lindburgh who urged that the US not involve itself in WWII have received the Peace Prize?
There have been, are, and will continue to be ugly brutes in the world who wish to dominate people by force of arms. There is rarely a peaceful way to stop such folks, as they tend to interpret overtures of peace as signs of weakness.
Without a doubt, no war is prosecuted with out heinous waste, shameful indulgences, and scandalous incompetence, but then the same can generally be said about peace efforts. The difference is there isn't quite as much immediate pooling of blood in the latter.
Peace is good; War is bad. If we could just get people like Tico and myself to understand this, what a wonderful world it would be!
