Those
who own the wealth of nations take care to downplay the
immensity of their holdings while emphasizing the supposedly
benign features of the socio-economic order over which they
preside.
With its regiments of lawmakers and opinion-makers, the
ruling hierarchs produce a never-ending cavalcade of symbols,
images, and narratives to disguise and legitimate the system of
exploitative social relations existing between the 1% and the
99%.
The Nobel
Peace Prize would seem to play an incidental role in all this.
Given the avalanche of system-sustaining class propaganda and
ideological scenarios dished out to us, the Nobel Peace Prize
remains just a prize. But a most prestigious one it is, enjoying
a celebrated status in its anointment of already notable
personages.
In October
2012, in all apparent seriousness, the Norwegian Nobel Committee
(appointed by the Norwegian Parliament) bestowed the Nobel Peace
Prize upon the European Union (EU).
Let me say that again: the
European Union with its 28 member states and 500 million
inhabitants was awarded for having "contributed to the
advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy, and human
rights in Europe." (Norway itself is not a member of the EU. The
Norwegians had the good sense to vote against joining.)
Alfred
Nobel's will (1895) explicitly states that the peace prize
should go "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 and promotion
of peace congresses."
The EU is not a person and has not worked
for the abolition or reduction of standing armies or promotion
of any kind of peace agenda.
If the EU award looked a bit
awkward, the BBC and other mainstream news media came to the
rescue, referring to the "six decades of peace" and "sixty years
without war" that the EU supposedly has achieved. The following
day, somebody at the BBC did the numbers and started proclaiming
that the EU had brought "seventy years of peace on the European
continent."
What could these wise pundits possibly be thinking?
Originally called the European Economic Community and formed in
1958, the European Union was established under its current name
in 1993, about twenty years ago.
The Nobel
Committee, the EU recipients, and the western media all
overlooked the 1999 full-scale air war launched on the European
continent against Yugoslavia, a socialist democracy that for the
most part had offered a good life to people of various Slavic
nationalities---as many of them still testify today.
The EU did
not oppose that aggression. In fact, a number of EU member
states, including Germany and France, joined in the 1999 war on
European soil led largely by the United States.
For 78 days,
U.S. and other NATO forces bombed Yugoslavian factories,
utilities, power stations, rail systems, bridges, hotels,
apartment buildings, schools and hospitals, killing thousands of
civilians, all in the name of a humanitarian rescue operation,
all fueled by unsubstantiated stories of Serbian "genocide." All
this warfare took place on European soil.
Yugoslavia
was shattered, along with its uniquely designed participatory
democracy with its self-management and social ownership system.
In its place emerged a cluster of right-wing mini-republics
wherein everything has been privatized and deregulated, and
poverty has replaced amplitude. Meanwhile rich western
corporations are doing quite well in what was once Yugoslavia.
Europe
aside, EU member states have sent troops to Afghanistan, Iraq,
Libya, and additional locales in Africa, the Middle East, and
Central Asia, usually under the tutorship of the U.S. war
machine.
But what was I to expect?
For years I ironically
asserted that the best way to win a Nobel Peace Prize was to
wage war or support those who wage war instead of peace. An
overstatement perhaps, but take a look.
Let's
start back in 1931 with an improbable Nobel winner: Nicholas
Murray Butler, president of Columbia University.
During World
War I, Butler explicitly forbade all faculty from criticizing
the Allied war against the Central Powers. He equated anti-war
sentiments with sedition and treason. He also claimed that "an
educated proletariat is a constant source of disturbance and
danger to any nation."
In the 1920s Butler became an outspoken
supporter of Italy's fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. Some
years later he became an admirer of a heavily militarized Nazi
Germany. In 1933, two years after receiving the Nobel prize,
Butler invited the German ambassador to the U.S. to speak at
Columbia in defense of Hitler. He rejected student appeals to
cancel the invitation, claiming it would violate academic
freedom.
Jump ahead
to 1973, the year one of the most notorious of war criminals,
Henry Kissinger, received the Nobel Peace Prize.
For the better
part of a decade, Kissinger served as Assistant to the President
for National Security Affairs and as U.S. Secretary of State,
presiding over the seemingly endless blood-letting in Indochina
and ruthless U.S. interventions in Central America and
elsewhere.
From carpet bombing to death squads, Kissinger was
there beating down on those who dared resist U.S. power. In his
writings and pronouncements Kissinger continually talked about
maintaining U.S. military and political influence throughout the
world. If anyone fails to fit Alfred Nobel's description of a
prize winner, it would be Henry Kissinger.
In 1975 we
come to Nobel winner Andrei Sakharov, a darling of the U.S.
press, a Soviet dissident who regularly sang praises to
corporate capitalism.
Sakharov lambasted the U.S. peace movement
for its opposition to the Vietnam War. He accused the Soviets of
being the sole culprits behind the arms race and he supported
every U.S. armed intervention abroad as a defense of democracy.
Hailed in the west as a "human rights advocate," Sakharov never
had an unkind word for the horrific human rights violations
perpetrated by the fascist regimes of faithful U.S. client
states, including Pinochet's Chile and Suharto's Indonesia, and
he aimed snide remarks at the "peaceniks" who did. He regularly
attacked those in the West who opposed U.S. repressive military
interventions abroad.
Let us not
overlook Mother Teresa. All the western world's media hailed
that crabby lady as a self-sacrificing saint. In fact she was a
mean spirited reactionary who gladly welcomed the destruction of
liberation theology and other progressive developments in the
world. Her "hospitals" and "clinics" were little more than
warehouses for the dying and for those who suffered from curable
diseases that went untreated---eventually leading to death.
She
waged campaigns against birth control, divorce, and abortion.
She readily hobnobbed with the rich and reactionary but she was
so heavily hyped as a heavenly heroine that the folks in Oslo
just had to give her the big medal in 1979.
Then there
was the Dalai Lama who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in
1989.
For years the Dalai Lama was on the payroll of the CIA, an
agency that has perpetrated killings against rebellious workers,
peasants, students, and others in countries around the world.
His eldest brother played an active role in a CIA-front group.
Another brother established an intelligence operation with the
CIA, which included a CIA-trained guerrilla unit whose recruits
parachuted back into Tibet to foment insurgency.
The Dalai Lama
was no pacifist. He supported the U.S./NATO military
intervention into Afghanistan, also the 78 days' bombing of
Yugoslavia and the destruction of that country. As for the years
of carnage and destruction wrought by U.S. forces in Iraq, the
Dalai Lama was undecided: "it's too early to say, right or
wrong," said he in 2005.
Regarding
the violence that members of his sect perpetrated against a
rival sect, he concluded that "if the goal is good then the
method, even if apparently of the violent kind, is permissible."
Spoken like a true Nobel recipient.
In 2009,
in a fit of self parody, the folks in Oslo gave the Nobel Peace
Prize to President Barack Obama while he produced record
military budgets and presided over three or four wars and a
number of other attack operations, followed a couple of years
later by additional wars in Yemen, West Pakistan, Libya, and
Syria (with Iran pending).
Nobel winner Obama also [allegedly!] proudly
hunted down and murdered Osama Bin Laden, having accused
him---without a shred of evidence---of masterminding the 9/11
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
You could
see that Obama was somewhat surprised---and maybe even
embarrassed---by the award. Here was this young drone commander
trying to show what a tough-guy warrior he was, saluting the
flag-draped coffins one day and attacking other places and
peoples the next---acts of violence in support of the New World
Order, certainly every bit worthy of a Nobel peace medal.
There are
probably other Nobel war hawks and reactionaries to inspect. I
don't pretend to be informed about every prize winner. And there
are a few worthy recipients who come to mind, such as Martin
Luther King, Jr., Linus Pauling, Nelson Mandela, and Dag
Hammarskjöld.
Let us
return to the opening point: does the European Union actually
qualify for the prize? Vancouver artist Jennifer Brouse gave me
the last (and best) word:
"A Nobel Prize for the EU? That seems
like a rather convenient and resounding endorsement for current
cutthroat austerity measures. First, corporations are people,
then money is free speech, now an organization of nation states
designed to thwart national sovereignty on behalf of ruling
class interests receives a prize for peace.
On the other hand,
if the EU is a person then it should be prosecuted for imposing
policies leading directly to the violent repression of peaceful
protests, and to the misery and death of its suffering
citizens."
In sum,
the Nobel Peace Prize often has nothing to do with peace and too
much to do with war. It frequently sees "peace" through the eyes
of the western plutocracy. For that reason alone, we should not
join in the applause.
