By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
October 9, 2009
It took 25 years longer than George Orwell thought for the slogans of 1984 to become reality.
“War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” “Ignorance is Strength.”
I would add, “Lie is Truth.”
The Nobel Committee has awarded the 2009 Peace Prize to President Obama, the person who started a new war in Pakistan, upped the war in Afghanistan, and continues to threaten Iran with attack unless Iran does what the US government demands and relinquishes its rights as a signatory to the non-proliferation treaty.
The Nobel committee chairman, Thorbjoern Jagland said, “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future.”
Obama, the committee gushed, has created “a new climate in international politics.”
Tell that to the 2 million displaced Pakistanis and the unknown numbers of dead ones that Obama has racked up in his few months in office. Tell that to the Afghans where civilian deaths continue to mount as Obama’s “war of necessity” drones on indeterminably.
No Bush policy has changed. Iraq is still occupied. The Guantanamo torture prison is still functioning. Rendition and assassinations are still occurring. Spying on Americans without warrants is still the order of the day. Civil liberties are continuing to be violated in the name of Oceania’s “war on terror.”
Apparently, the Nobel committee is suffering from the delusion that, being a minority, Obama is going to put a stop to Western hegemony over darker-skinned peoples.
The non-cynical can say that the Nobel committee is seizing on Obama’s rhetoric to lock him into the pursuit of peace instead of war. We can all hope that it works. But the more likely result is that the award has made “War is Peace” the reality.
Obama has done nothing to hold the criminal Bush regime to account, and the Obama administration has bribed and threatened the Palestinian Authority to go along with the US/Israeli plan to deep-six the UN’s Goldstone Report on Israeli war crimes committed during Israel’s inhuman military attack on the defenseless civilian population in the Gaza Ghetto.
The US Ministry of Truth is delivering the Obama administration’s propaganda that Iran only notified the IAEA of its “secret” new nuclear facility because Iran discovered that US intelligence had discovered the “secret” facility. This propaganda is designed to undercut the fact of Iran’s compliance with the Safeguards Agreement and to continue the momentum for a military attack on Iran.
The Nobel committee has placed all its hopes on a bit of skin color.
“War is Peace” is now the position of the formerly antiwar organization, Code Pink. Code Pink has decided that women’s rights are worth a war in Afghanistan.
When justifications for war become almost endless--oil, hegemony, women’s rights, democracy, revenge for 9/11, denying bases to al Qaeda and protecting against terrorists--war becomes the path to peace.
The Nobel committee has bestowed the prestige of its Peace Prize on Newspeak and Doublethink.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
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How dose escalating the war in Afghanistan to
ReplyDeleteinclude the Pakistan border and continuing to threaten Iran on behalh of isreal get someone
the nobel peace prize? We live in an insane
world. "Hope for the future" what a lot of B/S
we need action and we need it now. Starting with
an America with the back bone to stand up to
zionist isreal and force them to honor all the
UN resolutions passed against them an also
internatonal law, something they violate every day.
Why I'm not surprised!
ReplyDeleteNorwegian politician Harald Tom Nesvik proposed Bush and Blair back in February 2002 for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/feb/05/politics.labour
One criticism to the lead in on this piece. 1984 was right on target with its timing. That was during the reagan regime where we were being told high unemployment, high inflation, high interest was prosperity. We were being told that selling drugs to finance the Contras was patriotism. bushjunior was the branch and spawn of reganoidism which Mr. Paul Craig Roberts facilitated. He does not like where the movement he started has lead. He has not yet apologized or admitted the problem. Obama's sunny optism and sell out to the banksters is simply reagan in blackface.
ReplyDeleteOne thing this proves is that most European opposition to the war was shallow elitist hypocrisy. The Europeans only protested Bush because he was fighting the war in a way that did not allow them to form permanent inroads into the Middle-Eastern, East Asian and African Markets. Now that Obama is killing people with a more globally inclusive, multilateral strategy, the Europeans don't mind murder at all.
ReplyDeleteI guess Europeans can be as dumb as Americans after all.
The deadline for proposals for the Nobel Prize was in Februar. So Obama was proposed not even 2 weeks after his inauguration.
ReplyDeleteHe gets the prize for "hope"! But remember the old saying "to hope and to wait makes a fool out of everybody"...
April Fools?
ReplyDeleteI'll bet American soldiers are laughing their asses of right about now.