The Nobel Not-Nearly-As-Militant Prize
Hurts writing this, but I have to agree with so many progressives who have reservations about Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize. Greenwald says it best:
Through no fault of his own, Obama presides over a massive war-making state that spends on its military close to what the rest of the world spends combined. The U.S. accounts for almost 70% of worldwide arms sales. We’re currently occupying and waging wars in two separate Muslim countries and making clear we reserve the “right” to attack a third. Someone who made meaningful changes to those realities would truly be a man of peace. It’s unreasonable to expect that Obama would magically transform all of this in nine months, and he certainly hasn’t. Instead, he presides over it and is continuing much of it. One can reasonably debate how much blame he merits for all of that, but there are simply no meaningful “peace” accomplishment in his record — at least not yet — and there’s plenty of the opposite. That’s what makes this Prize so painfully and self-evidently ludicrous. —Glenn Greenwald | Salon
While there is much about Obama to applaud, as Glenn says, he has done little for the cause of peace. Quite likely, nobody could, given the immense power of the military-industrial-complex.
I have come to doubt that the American war machine will ever be peacefully dismantled. The people with the guns have too much to lose. So, we’re left with waiting for catastrophic economic collapse to force a real revolution and, we can only hope, an evolution to something better.
Maybe the Nobel committee thinks that that’s what Obama was planning when he put the economic recovery in the hands of the fools who caused the trouble — our economy collapses, our weapons factories all close, and the American empire shuts down.
Good plan, give the man a prize.
Michael Sky | Thinking Peace
