Barack Hussein Obama Deserves the Nobel Peace Prize
14 October, 2009 (wth an amplification on the name HUSSEIN found here.)
Alfred Bernhard Nobel was a Swedish industrialist who,
according to About.com, started experimenting
with nitroglycerine in 1860 while investigating new ways to blast apart
rock. He patented a blasting cap in 1863 and, in 1866, he
mixed nitroglycerine with silica to produce dynamite. Mixing
the nitroglycerine with absorbent material (sawdust can also be used, for
example) makes the product more stable, which is obviously an advantage
when dealing with chemicals that can blow you to pieces.
Granted a patent for his chemical explosive in 1867, Nobel’s
contributions to destruction followed in the footsteps of his father,
Immanuel. The elder Nobel constructed, for the Russian Czar,
the world’s first functional naval mines. Named as
“the father of mine warfare” in Norman Youngblood’s The Development of Mine Warfare:
A Most Murderous and Barbarous Conduct, Nobel
tried unsuccessfully to sell to the Swedish military both land and sea
versions of the contact mines he developed. When he
subsequently demonstrated his mines to Czar Nicholas in 1841, he was
awarded 3,000 silver rubles and used the money to finance his research
into this method of warfare. By 1842 he was blowing up ships
with the things, earning a 25,000 ruble prize from Grand Duke Michael
for the feat. By 1854, Immanuel Nobel’s zinc-bodied, two-foot
seagoing mines were used to success in the Crimean War.
The younger Nobel apparently believed that his dynamite (which
was used in the Franco-Prussian War by both the Prussians and the
French) would prove to be so powerful a weapon of destruction that
horrified nations would no longer engage in the practice of war, which
would presumably have become impossible to wage without risking total
annihilation. “Perhaps my factories will put an end to war
sooner than your congresses,” he wrote to the Austrian countess Bertha
von Suttner, “on the day that two army corps can mutually annihilate
each other in a second, all civilised nations will surely recoil with
horror and disband their troops.” Alfred Nobel died in 1896.
Almost two decades later, the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria
was assassinated by a Serbian nationalist — and World War I visited
the blights of genocide, chemical weapons, and trench warfare on a
then-modern world.
The irony of his historical legacy was of course not
something Alfred Nobel could have conceived. In his will, he
directed his wealth be used for the establishment of the Peace
Prize, and several other prizes, that bear his name even today.
In
the last century, the Peace Prize has been awarded to the likes of
Theodore Roosevelt (for drawing up the 1905 peace treaty between Russia
and Japan), Dr. Albert Schweitzer (the famous missionary surgeon), then
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (in conjunction with Le Duc Tho of
the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam, who declined), Menachem Begin and
Anwar Al-Sadat (for negotiating peace between Egypt and Israel), Mother
Teresa, Lech Walesa, Bishop Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama (Tenzin
Gyatso), Nelson Mandela (and South African President Frederik Willem De
Klerk), Yasser Arafat (with Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin), the
Doctors without Borders program, and United Nations Secretary General
Kofi Annan. In more recent years, the Peace Prize was awarded
to barely coherent and possibly deranged anti-Semite Jimmy Carter,
the thickly sincere Al Gore (in conjunction with the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), and, this year, American
President Barack Hussein Obama.
As should be obvious, the Nobel peace prize is no stranger to
politicking. Arguably deserving recipients such as Mother
Teresa and the Dalai Lama keep company with terrorists like Yasser
Arafat and bloated propagandists like Al Gore. Perhaps more
substantively, much has been made of Henry Kissinger’s award — an
event that prompted Tom Lehrer to proclaim that satire was dead
(presumably because awarding Kissinger the Peace Prize was, for the committee, an act of
self-parody). Kissinger was at one time Nixon’s National Security Advisor;
his name figures prominently whenever anyone utters the phrase “secret
bombings in Vietnam.” Awarded the Peace Prize
for negotiating the ceasefire that led to the end of America’s
role in the Vietnam War, he has been the subject of at least one
campaign to revoke the award.
The more recent recipients of the Peace Prize may perhaps
strike us as more purely political than those past, but I think at
least part of this is because we’ve forgotten the attendant politics of
the day.
Certainly Theodore Roosevelt has much more to recommend him
than does barking Jew-hater Jimmy Carter (who has repeatedly
condemned Israel while cozying up to the Palestineans), and
it’s hard to imagine that Al Gore’s factually flawed slideshow
propagandizing Global Warming is a greater achievement than Hospitals
without Borders. What we forget, however, is that the Nobel
Peace Prize is awarded by a committee. That committee
presides over the distribution of an award that does not have the force
of any government sanction behind it, an award that represents only the
opinions of those individuals who sit on the committee. It
does not represent public opinion (except insofar as the committee
members are influenced by this), is not at all insulated from political
concerns or the influence of political trends, and is only as
objective in its assignment as are those people who award it.
The obvious criticism is that Obama, who held a seat in the US
Senate for less than a year (charitably counted) before running for
President, hasn’t
accomplished anything. Certainly he has done nothing,
built nothing, established nothing, and attained nothing that rivals
the accomplishments of those figures who received the Peace Prize
before him (excluding the most recent recipients, like Carter and Gore,
who have done equally little to deserve their awards but who at least
had significant political careers over their lifetimes). It
would seem, based on the explicit language of the Peace Prize itself,
that Obama was granted the award based on his intentions — based on
the nebulous “hope” and undefined “change” he claimed to offer in his
political campaign. In office, Obama has done nothing but watch his
poll numbers plummet in reaction to his attempts to enact sweeping
socialist “reforms” to change the face of the United States.
There has been nothing and, barring a miracle, will be
nothing that in any way deserves a 1.4 million dollar monetary prize
for the promotion of
peace.
The award, officially, was granted to Barack Hussein Obama “for
his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and
cooperation between peoples. ” Reacting to widespread
incredulity over Obama’s honor, Thorbjoem Jagland (say that five times
fast), head of the Nobel Peace Prize committee, said, rather
defensively, “Can somewone tell me who did more than him this year?
It is difficult to name a winner of the peace prize who is
more in line with Alfred Nobel’s will.”
In that, I would have to agree with Mr. Jagland. The
Nobel Peace prize is a testament to hypocrisy and to unintended
consequences, a monument to saying one thing and accomplishing — if
anything — exactly the opposite. Among the ranks of its
winners are a notorious terrorist, a failed US President who hates the
only democracy in the Middle East, a fat and corrupt political
operative who refuses to address the lies in his famous movie, and the
thoroughly corrupt former head of the United Nations. To this
motley crew of ne’er-do-wells and scoundrels, and to the embarassment
of those noble individuals who are forced to rub shoulders wtih them,
we now add President Barack Hussein Obama. An award devoted
to peace by a man whose greatest legacy is chemical explosives, whose
sibling is remembered not as a brother or sister but as the use of
impersonal and ruthlessly destructive mines in modern warfare, can be
no more appropriately given than to President Obama. Such an
individual surely epitomizes hoping for improvement and accomplishing
ruin.
He has, in one year in office, come to symbolize promising
riches and achieving only further despair. In alienating the
American people and diminishing American power while petulantly
denouncing his critics, Barack Hussein Obama’s spirit could be no more
true to that of Alfred Nobel’s real legacy.
In that, Obama deserves the Peace Prize, and it deserves him.
>>