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. >>