[Peace-discuss] Zinn on Nobel silliness

[C. G. Estabrook]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/10/10-3
Saturday, October 10, 2009 by The Guardian/UK

     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.

Howard Zinn is the author of “A People’s History of the United States,” 
“Voices of a People’s History” (with Anthony Arnove), and “A Power 
Governments Cannot Suppress.”