[Reader-list] Fwd: FW: ZNet Daily Commentary: War And Peace Prizes by Howard Zinn

[Nagraj Adve]

Piece on the peace prize to Obama by Zinn, the historian and activist who
wrote that remarkable book A People's History of the United States.
Naga


 War And Peace Prizes
Oct 10, 2009 By *Howard Zinn*
Howard Zinn's ZSpace Page <http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/howardzinn>
 / ZSpace <http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace>

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."

Source: The Guardian
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