Henry Kissinger stood on that stage in Oslo in 1973, receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in bringing about a historic accord that had ended the Vietnam war. However the reality was, as the chair of the prize committee acknowledged, the war hadn't ended. In neighbouring Kampuchea, Kissinger was presiding over another war - carpet bombing that claimed over half a million lives, and perhaps as many through starvation and disease.
Kissinger's bombing campaign inexorably led, historians Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan have written, to a Maoist sunrise which in turn bred a genocide that claimed over 1.7 million lives.
“It was in that moment", the satirist Tom Lehrer wrote of the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize, "that satire died".
For all the prestige surrounding the Nobel Peace Prize, the sad truth is this: like Miss Universe pageants, it's ephemeral, arbitrary and, ultimately, banal. The reasons for this aren't hard to seek.
Unlike the real Nobel prizes, which are given out for the sciences, there are no rigorous criteria to guide us to a reliable appreciation of what human actions engender peace and which ones generate conflict. Political action, which is what all peacemaking is, can't even be judged by the aesthetic canons that guide literary taste. This problem is rendered all the more difficult by the fact that geopolitics rarely involves saints. It's just impossible, moreover, to tell close up to history where the chips of war and peace will finally fall. Full story...
Related posts:
Kissinger's bombing campaign inexorably led, historians Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan have written, to a Maoist sunrise which in turn bred a genocide that claimed over 1.7 million lives.
“It was in that moment", the satirist Tom Lehrer wrote of the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize, "that satire died".
For all the prestige surrounding the Nobel Peace Prize, the sad truth is this: like Miss Universe pageants, it's ephemeral, arbitrary and, ultimately, banal. The reasons for this aren't hard to seek.
Unlike the real Nobel prizes, which are given out for the sciences, there are no rigorous criteria to guide us to a reliable appreciation of what human actions engender peace and which ones generate conflict. Political action, which is what all peacemaking is, can't even be judged by the aesthetic canons that guide literary taste. This problem is rendered all the more difficult by the fact that geopolitics rarely involves saints. It's just impossible, moreover, to tell close up to history where the chips of war and peace will finally fall. Full story...
Related posts:
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- 'Peace' President? How Obama came to bomb seven countries in six years...
- Obama choice makes a mockery of the Nobel peace prize...
- Nobel Peace Prize part of West’s propaganda fog...
- Nobel Peace Prize: A tale of ignoble peace laureates...
- Obama accepts Nobel Peace prize and makes a speech justifying war...
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