Saturday, October 10, 2009

A provocation against the peoples of the world: NObama, NObel, NOway!

English – Articles / Skrevet av Redaksjonen

Friday, October 9 2009 23:17

Scandal and provocation. Illustration credits: Carlos LatuffBy awarding the Nobel Prize to the Supreme Allied Commander of the bloody occupation army in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Norwegian Nobel committee yet again has contributed to the denigration of this medal.
Giving this year's peace prize to President Barack Obama made a whole world speechless, even the Americans shake their heads. The President himself agrees that he feels unworthy, but that has not prevented him from accepting.

Even the most enthusiastic USA-supporters, who have no objection whatsoever on the United States' "war on terror", ask what Obama indeed has done to promote peace. After only nine months in office, there has been much visionary rhetoric, but little action apart from the modification of the missile shield plans in Europe as well as airy wishful thinking about a world without nuclear weapons. Drive and forcefulness will, by contrast, be very obvious when the president shortly signs the order to send an additional 40,000 occupation troops to Afghanistan, as required by his military commander Stanley McChrystal. When Barack Obama ceremoniously receives the award in the heavily guarded city of Oslo, the United States consequently will have 113 000 solidiers on Afghan soil on assignment from the US president. In addition to these come 35 000 soldiers from other states, including Norway. Everything is set for a bizarre performance in Oslo City Hall.
Obama is in fact continuing the occupation politics of his predecessor Bush. Any President of the United States is under the thumb of the monopolies and the military-industrial complex. Giving an American President a peace prize is like spitting every single Iraqi, every Palestinian and every single Afghan in the face. No, it is even worse. It is as though the Nobel committee has engraved their death message on every bullet intended to penetrate the head or chest of any Afghan child, woman or man, who might come within firing range of the imperialists.

A less tail-wagging USA-poodle than the parliamentary Norwegian Nobel committee would at least have awaited what Obama actually might have achieved when his period expires in 2012. But in its eagerness to abuse the will of Nobel in order to underpin American foreign policy, this clique of cleared MPs have no inhibitions. Among the scandals on its record we could mention when the committee handed the prize to mass murderer Henry Kissinger in 1973, while the bombs still were falling over Viet Nam – only weeks after the same Kissinger had orchestrated the fascist putsch in Chile, or when the killer of Palestinians and terrorist Menachem Begin was awarded the prize in 1978. […]

[The Swedish industrialist] Alfred Nobel wanted the Parliament in Norway – which at the time was a young and progressive democracy preparing to liberate itself from union with Sweden – to handle the awardment of the peace prize, because he considered that this would mean less danger of political corruption. At the time of his death, in 1896, he probably was right in thinking so. But since then, Norway has grown to become a greedy imperialist power willing to bargain with and jeopardize its own sovereignty as well as that of other nations, a warmongering state and the world's largest exporter of arms, measured by population. Today, Mr. Nobel would probably rather have chosen for example the Faroe Islands or Åland, with the same justification. If the prize shall avoid complete defaming, it from now on ought to be handed out in Torshavn or Mariehamn.
Barack Obama is an intelligent man who perceives the way of thinking of his Norwegian bootlickers. As he put it in his first press statement: «I do not view it (the Peace Prize) as a recognition of my own accomplishments but rather an affirmation of American leadership».
Our remark would be: You've got it right, Mr. President. In the least as far as the Norwegian bourgeois class is concerned.
But significant portions of the Norwegian people are prepared to defy barbed wires and police repression as well as US leadership and «supremacy» when you arrive in Oslo on 10 December.

Slightly abbreviated. First published in Norwegian on Nettmagasinet Revolusjon on October 9th 2009.

Creative Commons License
NObama, NObel, NOway! av Nettmagasinet Revolusjon, Jan R. Steinholt er lisensiert under en Creative Commons Navngivelse-Ikkekommersiell-Ingen Bearbeidelse 3.0 Norge Lisens.
Based on original article on www.revolusjon.no.

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