Ig Nobels

[Joseph Tracy]

War and Peace Prizes
by Howard Zinn
I was dismayed when I heard Barack Obama was given the Nobel peace  
prize. A shock, really, to think that a president carrying on two  
wars would be given a peace prize. Until I recalled that Woodrow  
Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Henry Kissinger had all received  
Nobel peace prizes. The Nobel committee is famous for its superficial  
estimates, won over by rhetoric and by empty gestures, and ignoring  
blatant violations of world peace.

Yes, Wilson gets credit for the League of Nations – that ineffectual  
body which did nothing to prevent war. But he had bombarded the  
Mexican coast, sent troops to occupy Haiti and the Dominican Republic  
and brought the US into the slaughterhouse of Europe in the first  
World War, surely among stupid and deadly wars at the top of the list.

Sure, Theodore Roosevelt brokered a peace between Japan and Russia.  
But he was a lover of war, who participated in the US conquest of  
Cuba, pretending to liberate it from Spain while fastening US chains  
on that tiny island. And as president he presided over the bloody war  
to subjugate the Filipinos, even congratulating a US general who had  
just massacred 600 helpless villagers in the Phillipines. The  
Committee did not give the Nobel prize to Mark Twain, who denounced  
Roosevelt and criticised the war, nor to William James, leader of the  
anti-imperialist league.

Oh yes, the committee saw fit to give a peace prize to Henry  
Kissinger, because he signed the final peace agreement ending the war  
in Vietnam, of which he had been one of the architects. Kissinger,  
who obsequiously went along with Nixon's expansion of the war, with  
the bombing of peasant villages in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.  
Kissinger, who matches the definition of a war criminal very  
accurately, is given a peace prize!

People should be given a peace prize not on the basis of promises  
they have made – as with Obama, an eloquent maker of promises – but  
on the basis of actual accomplishments towards ending war, and Obama  
has continued deadly, inhuman military action in Iraq, Afghanistan  
and Pakistan.

The Nobel peace committee should retire, and turn over its huge funds  
to some international peace organization which is not awed by stardom  
and rhetoric, and which has some understanding of history.